Reflections from The Hill – Straight or Messy? (John 6.59-69)

My Ever-Lovin’ will tell you, if you ask, that I can be a bit of a pain, especially when it comes to living an ordered life. For the most part, this isn’t a permanent problem but I’m here to tell you that there’s something attractive about straight lines.

Like the other day when I reverse parked into a spot outside the gym: the front of the car pointed towards one corner of the rectangle, the rear pointed in the diagonally opposite direction.

I was happy to walk away from this poor example of parking, so I was not in the least impressed when one of my fellow-gymmers yelled “At least you got it inside the lines.” It became a soaked tee-shirt morning that day, for there’s only so much a man can take at 5.45am.

Getting things inside the lines has been a focus since before I was in Grade 1, whether it was colouring in, sitting up straight, doing my homework or, at the risk of repeating myself, parking the car.

The flip side of this is, you guessed it, disappointment on my part when the figurative wheels point in the wrong direction and I am forced to admit that life is, well, messy; there’s no straight path.

Take the Israelites as an example: given the option of walking for seven days in a straight line from Egypt to The Promised Land, the Israelites took a Forty-Year-Walkabout instead. OK, we can argue that their silliness didn’t help but it gives the lie to what might be called The Easy Life.

A similar situation re-surfaces in this week’s Gospel, in the bit where Jesus starts on about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Cannibalism ain’t high on Jesus’ lifestyle agenda, nor on mine as it happens, so what’s all this about?

Here we have to go down the metaphor route: Jesus is making a direct reference to the exodus event I just mentioned, where The Mob was fed with manna; “the bread from heaven”, every day until they reached their destination. By using that allusion, Jesus is saying something special about himself. Neat.

Then it gets messy. The nice and neat, straight-sided, theological cage is rattled by Jesus messing up their story. No longer is it a tale about something that is understandable like bread but it’s been changed into something fairly complex like a relationship.

Manna (the God Bread) was something external back then, something that people picked up off the ground. Now, Jesus is talking about the God Bread being the relationship with Him which, if we want it, will mean taking Him to ourselves, eating and drinking for our salvation. Or, in other words “Turning to Christ”.

Is it any wonder some of the bystanders murmured aloud: “Man, this is hard tack; who can take this on board? He’s gone right outside the lines now: it’s too much for us to handle”, or words to that effect, so they turned back and no longer went about with him.

Understand that we’re not talking about a bunch of hangers-on here, like people who might walk away from a nutter. John calls this lot ‘disciples’, so the chances are they’d been around Him for a while.

They saw Him walk the talk, they had tuned in to His message; he was a nice guy and all that, but they couldn’t cope with the messiness. “Does this offend you?” He asked them. Well, yes.

That’s when Jesus shirt-fronts the Big Twelve with His question. “And you, what about you? Are you going to leave as well?” He had them by the short-and-curlies in a couple of questions. Talk about rattling their cage.

If they’d actually recalled the manna story, they would have remembered how much a meandering story it was: forty years to walk a journey that otherwise took about a week. Life’s not a walk in the park.

We know, don’t we, that life isn’t served up to us in straight lines. There are curve balls coming in from all points of the compass and the solutions to these hiccoughs aren’t always straight forward either. How we long for it to be different.

The words of eternal life aren’t always the ones that fit onto the latest Christian poster or tee-shirt or are on the bottom of our emails. They’re not always simple, cute or easy to hear. The words of eternal life remind us that life is not always plain because solutions to our problems aren’t always straightforward.

It is exactly because the words of eternal life ring true that we can’t leave. Where would we go? Who else will tell us the truth about life? Who else has lived the truth about life so fully? Who else has lived – and died – outside the box?