Pentecost 14
September 17, 2000 Pentecost 14
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, ‘‘Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, ‘‘This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.” From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. ‘‘You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, ‘‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” John 6:60-69
Hard Teachings Cause Hard Results
“Hard-nosed.” “Hard-core.” Those aren’t the most complimentary adjectives in the world, are they? They imply being rigid or insisting on your point of view. But there are situations in which they would be good things. A fire safety inspector might want to be “hard-nosed,” even if it didn’t win him any friends in the local business community. There are units in the army that make being “hard-core” into a virtue, because it means they’re tough and unyielding in the face of the enemy. But I think we could probably agree that the situations in which it’s a virtue to be unyielding are those which have a concrete responsibility for public safety or which require a person to stand up for what is right under a great deal of pressure. It would be interesting this morning to take a poll and find out how many people here think that being “hard-nosed” or “hard-core” are good things in a church. I won’t ask you to raise your hands. But I will ask you to think for a moment if you would want to be called a “hard-nosed Christian” or a “hard-core Lutheran?” In the setting of the church, those things would imply an unwillingness to yield and an insistence on certain set points of view. I’m sure you’ve already figured out that our church body would be viewed that way by most people. God’s Word this morning tells us that Jesus was hard-nosed, too. He insisted on certain points of view, on teachings that simply could not be compromised. It was almost as unpopular to take that stand then as it is today. If we are going to stand where Jesus stood, we need to recognize a simple truth: hard teachings cause hard results.
I. They drive some people away.
II. They force others to confess.
I.
We live in an ecumenical age. The basic formula of the ecumenical movement is: don’t say too much! Some churches have had a great deal of success with that approach. Don’t say too much, because it just causes divisions and hurt feelings. Don’t define your doctrine too carefully, because it only causes arguments and keeps churches apart. That approach does recognize a truth that God’s Word for today illustrates very clearly: hard teachings cause hard results. They drive some people away.
But you know what? Jesus didn’t follow that formula. Today, we see the great “sea change” in his ministry. In one day, Jesus he went from being the “odds on favorite” to being behind in the polls. He lost the support of most people because he said what was on his mind. Make no mistake, Jesus didn’t think the mic was off while he whispered to a colleague. He wanted people to hear and to know what he thought and where he stood. Jesus told his followers that he was the Son of God. He insisted that he had come down from heaven, from God the Father, whom he clearly regarded as his own Father. His listeners understood he was claiming to be God, even while he stood in front them as a man. Jesus told them that if they believed in him as their Savior, he would give them something even Moses couldn’t: eternal life. You couldn’t have picked a more offensive message to preach to a crowd of Jews if you had tried. For thousands of years, going all the way back to Abraham, they had been surrounded by people who carved rocks and trees into gods. Many kings around Israel had claimed to be descended from the gods. When Jesus spoke, the Jews were ruled by a people whose official religion held that the gods had often come down in human form. So for a man to stand before them and claim that inside his body and blood was God was offensive. Then to add to that the claim that you were about to do more for Israel than Moses had -- well that was too much to bear. Moses was the founder of their nation, the man who spoke face to face with God and then led them up out of Egypt and through the Red Sea right up to the borders of the Promised Land. The man who had given them the Law. No prophet since had been so great or so important. For Jesus to claim that he could give something Moses couldn’t offended his hearers.
Jesus knew that it would. He knew who would believe in him and who wouldn’t. But he said it anyway. He got in their face with the truth because believers need to know what the truth is. And it cost him. Jesus wasn’t talking to his enemies. All the people who were listening considered themselves to be his followers. John even calls them disciples. But when Jesus said all this, they said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” And they began to grumble. What kind of “damage control” did Jesus do? What kind of “spin” did he put on his remarks? He asked them, “Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!” Jesus didn’t back down at all. Instead, he told them that their problem was that they were relying on their flesh -- on what their eyes and ears and their reason and tradition told them, instead of relying on what the Holy Spirit was saying through the Son of God. He told them that he was giving them words that were “spirit and life.” They were God’s message and had the power to give them eternal life. But then he added, “Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” And he didn’t try to convince them. In effect, Jesus told his own followers, “It’s my way or the highway.” And a great many chose the highway.
There is only one way to understand and accept Jesus’ hard teachings: through the power of God. Faith -- even faith in specific doctrinal truths or teachings -- is a gift God gives. It isn’t something that we can somehow generate or do. Jesus wasn’t prepared to change his teachings or make them more palatable for people who had a problem with them. He insisted on the truth and left it up to the Holy Spirit to convince people by the power of his Word. Are we willing to follow Jesus’ example? For the most part, the doctrines Jesus specifically spoke about in John chapter six don’t cause us the problems they caused the Jews. In general, people who are willing to be called Christian are willing to at least pay lip service to the idea that Jesus is God, that he is the Savior, that he gives eternal life. But there are other doctrines which many Christians have real problems with. The Scriptural teaching on fellowship -- who we can pray with, who we can celebrate the Lord’s Supper with, who we can join our churches to; the scriptural teaching on the Antichrist -- that it is the institution of the papacy; the scriptural teaching that only the Triune God is real, all others are human inventions. All these teachings are offensive to a great many Christians today. Will we do what Jesus did? Are we willing to teach the truth and leave it up to the Holy Spirit to change people’s hearts? Or are we tempted to modify our positions, to de-emphasize those tough doctrines, to simply pay lip service to them without really invoking them in our own lives? Every Christian struggles with those things. Every time I have to stand up here and teach one of those truths, I get nervous. There’s a part of me that hopes that some people who are just learning about us maybe won’t be here that Sunday to hear things that I don’t know if they’re ready to understand yet. I’m sure there’s a part of you, too, that struggles to confess those hard truths to relatives that don’t accept them, or to friends that aren’t even interested in understanding a position so radical. We all fear the price we may have to pay. So sometimes we just don’t. We look the other way. We avoid the fight.
That’s not what Jesus did. When we hold to every teaching of God’s Word except the ones that make people angry, we haven’t been faithful to God at all. We don’t deserve anything but hell for that. But thank God that today he shows us Jesus sacrificing popularity for the truth. Thank God, not because we have such a good example. It that’s all this was, I’d want to cut these pages out of my Bible, because what Jesus did and said is a standard I can never live up to. I’m glad God put this here, because this is Jesus taking my place. We struggle to speak the truth and we don’t always win the battle. Our hearts condemn us because we haven’t stood fast on the Word of God. But Jesus always did exactly that. And he did it for us. God has let Jesus’ hard words replace all the times we were too afraid of what it might cost us to speak the truth. Every time we are in a situation where we need to testify, no matter how good or how poor a job we do, God gives us credit for what Jesus did in his word for today. Then God gives us credit because Jesus did more. He kept on preaching and teaching and making people angry until they trumped up charges against him and nailed him to a cross and killed him. In that death, Jesus paid for all the times we didn’t want to share the hard truths for fear of what people would think. He paid for all the times we chickened out. Then Jesus rose. His resurrection says, “Don’t feel bad about it anymore. Stop beating yourself up! God forgives you, because of Jesus.” It’s all gone. God doesn’t keep track of any of it anymore.
II.
We all know that Jesus challenged his enemies. Over and over again, he clashed with the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes and the priests. But when he said these things, he wasn’t speaking to any of those people. He was talking to people who thought they were his disciples, but who really understand what that meant until this moment. When they did, many of them jumped ship. But some stayed. That’s why Jesus said what he said. Hard teachings cause hard results. They force some people to confess.
Why did some people stay even when so many were leaving? Not because they were better disciples. Not because they were less hardened in their false ideas. Not because they were more noble than the rest. They stayed because the Holy Spirit was working in their hearts and he enabled them to trust their Savior even when they had to swallow and admit that what he was saying was hard to accept because they were Jews,too. When the crowds were leaving, Jesus turned to the twelve and asked if they wanted to go, too. At that moment, we see the power of God on display. Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Jesus knew before he ever spoke who was going to leave and who was going to stay. But he said those hard things anyway, because he wanted this beautiful confession. Those hard teachings put Peter and the other eleven disciples on the hot spot. There was simply no middle ground left. Either you trusted in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as the Savior of the world who alone could give you eternal life or you left. Because the Holy Spirit had reached out and touched them, Peter and the other disciples trusted Jesus enough to accept even the hard teachings he was giving them. From that moment on, Peter’s second great confession separated them from those who had abandoned Christ. The only way for the disciples to cross over to where the former disciples were was to do what Judas did: go along with the confession for now, without really believing it.
God has placed all his hard teachings in front of us for a very simple reason. He wants us to abandon any pretense that our faith is logical or reasonable. It’s not. It makes no sense to sinful human minds at all. He wants us to abandon any belief that we can all just “get along” and not worry about the things that divide us. We can’t. There is no middle ground between what God teaches and unbelief. He wants us to give up any thought that what we believe is close enough to what other Christians confess that we don’t have to worry about it. The hard teachings in the Scripture demand a clear confession from us. But the most a sinful human being can ever do is be a Judas. We can mouth the words without buying into them. To really make a confession that God reads as true and complete only happens by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word of God. That is the Word that we have before us today. It isn’t the Wisconsin Synod’s word. It isn’t Martin Luther’s. It certainly isn’t mine. God is showing us these things. God is showing us Jesus, who loves us so much he died for the sin that makes it impossible for us to do what God wants. God is showing us Jesus who was perfect to replace us, who are totally and completely ruined by our sin. When he shows us Jesus living and dying and rising from the dead, he gives us his power to confess. That power is called forgiveness. It’s called the gospel. The gospel lifts us up. It cleans us off. It puts God’s Word in our hearts and in our mouths and it leads us to confess, day after day, without counting the cost. I wish I could say that if we just got enough of that Word we’d be free of the sin that makes it a struggle. But we won’t be free until Jesus frees us from this life. But even now, in spite of the total and complete ruin that sin has worked in our hearts, we have the power of God in us through the gospel. That power will enable us to confess.
Are you willing to be a “hard-nosed” Christian? Can you be a “hard-core” Lutheran? My friends, that’s exactly what the Holy Spirit is working to make us. His power in the gospel will make us exactly what God wants us to be. Trust that power. Amen.