The Latest Scandal

John 6:56-69

August 26, 2012

Scandals:  They seem a bit more prevalent when elections are near, but we are certainly never free of them.  All too often we open up the paper and see the latest scandal – replete with public indignation, apologies, promises to get help, or convoluted excuses. 

We don’t have to reach back much beyond this week:  Senator Akin scandalized almost everyone with his words; he certainly embarrassed his own party.  Then, just as democrats were feeling smug, the headlines three days ago announced: “Minnesota lawmaker won’t step down after rest stop scandal.”  Kerry Gauthier, a democrat in the Minnesota house of representatives, did not conduct himself as a representative should – well, as anyone should.  Scandals are just not hard to come by.

So what makes for a good scandal?  First, obviously, someone has to do something offensive:  morally or legally reprehensible.  It has to go against the very grain of how we think people or institutions should behave. 

But a scandal is more than someone offending people.  It’s a scandal when we are shocked – shocked not just because it’s offensive, but because of who it is that’s offending us.  A scandal usually involves someone we identify with – someone from our own group who we expect to act and believe pretty much as we do – and so we’re embarrassed by them when they act so offensively.  Or it involves someone we trust or expect to do good, and so we feel betrayed by them when they let us down.   Scandals involve our leaders, our heroes, our trusted institutions.

And a scandal is public.  It elicits not just my indignation – it causes public outcry.  It has to be offensive enough and shocking enough that people react publicly.

We have bank scandals, sex scandals, doping scandals.  Scandals seem to be everywhere.  And then, this morning when we come to church, maybe hoping for a little break from the world of scandals, we have Jesus caught up in his very own scandal.

Jesus caused a scandal – in every sense of that word.  He offended people, he shocked and betrayed people who identified with him or trusted him, and it was all quite public.

Now, in Jesus’ defense, he didn’t wait for the tabloids to announce his scandal.  He named it himself. “Does this scandalize you?” he asks his followers rhetorically.  He knows they are scandalized.  He knows they are offended.  He knows they feel shocked and betrayed because he is the one who is offending them.  And he knows he is doing it in a very public way. 

But what exactly was the scandal?  What was his offense?  Remember the progression we have been following for many weeks now as we’ve waded through the sixth chapter of the gospel of John.  Chapter 6 started out with Jesus feeding the 5,000.  This was not a scandal.  This was great.  He was able to make food where there was none.  He was able to gather folks together and nourish them.  He was the hit of the party.  So far, so good. 

Then, Jesus talked about the bread that comes from God.  It was a moment of nostalgia, and the people ate it up, so to speak.  He reminded people of the manna God sent to their ancestors in the desert after the Hebrews escaped slavery in Egypt.  Jesus, through his words, was showing himself to be truly Jewish…Jewish to the core.  He showed the people that he knew the stories, understood their significance, and it gave him some credibility.  John tells us the crowds were following him – pushing in on him wherever he went.

But then, just as he was gaining some popularity, some credibility, some respect, he started calling himself the bread.  Now, this was moving into scandal territory.  Jesus was saying he was somehow sufficient for people in the way the bread in the desert fed and saved their ancestors.  Which doesn’t seem like a huge deal until you remember that the religious elite were the ones who told people what they needed to be right with God.  In other words, Jesus started telling people they didn’t need the temple and its rituals, they didn’t need the priests.  He was the bypass highway.  It was the start of a scandal.  It might have been okay for some people to hear this, but the religious elite were calling for him to make a public apology and seek some counseling.

But Jesus couldn’t just stop there.  He didn’t just call himself the bread.  He said that to connect with God they had to “eat his flesh.”  Last week, I said this these words are obviously metaphorical, and they are.  They’re also “fighting words.”  Eating flesh was prohibited in Jewish law.  Drinking blood, another thing Jesus tells them to do, was prohibited in Jewish law.  In fact, it was as illegal – and disgusting – to them as sex with a minor is to us.  So, Jesus is not only saying that he can help people bypass the religious authorities, he is also thumbing his nose at their laws…the laws they believed gave them life, made them holy, offered them a way to communion with God.  He insulted people’s religion, and you just don’t do that.

So he was definitely offensive.  But people were also shocked to find him as the one offending them so terribly.  Remember, people were starting to believe Jesus was the Messiah.  The one who had come to usher in a new kingdom – a Jewish nation living under the Torah laws.  He was the dream candidate for king of this nation – and they were placing all their hope in him.  All of a sudden, he becomes this vulgar, immoral, arrogant, scoff-law.  Jesus disappointed them - bitterly.  He went after their sacred cows.  He made fun of their religion – his religion too, by the way – and was not very PC about it.  They felt betrayed because they had begun to trust him, identify with him, put him on a pedestal.  Scandalized by what he said, John tells us that many of the disciples who had been following him left him.

And of course, he did all of this as publically as one could at a time without TV, internet, twitter, and facebook.  He said these things in the synagogue, and he said them to large crowds who had gathered around him, he said these things to anyone who would listen.

So Jesus is right – he’s smack dab in the middle of a scandal.  But Jesus, perhaps unlike some of our politicians and sports heroes who fall from grace, seemed to want to scandalize them…or at least he didn’t seem to care very much if he did.  And then, once they were offended, felt betrayed, were embarrassed to be seen with him for fear others would think they were like him, he had the gall to ask them to follow him.  Talk about someone who wouldn’t bow out of the race no matter what the Jewish National Convention said. 

The temptation for us is to read this as a Christians versus Jews story.  The Jews were scandalized because he mocked their religious leaders and institutions.  But the disciples stayed by his side – and hey, aren’t those disciples our faith ancestors?  We get to sit back and laugh when Jesus makes vulgar jokes about the rituals of the Jewish faith tradition.  When he points out the hypocrisy and abuses of the religious elites, we point right along with him.  When people desert him we “tsk tsk” from our secure place in the Christian faith – we didn’t leave him…we’re right here.

It’s not our first instinct to place ourselves alongside the Pharisees and Sadducees in the story.  These are the enemies of Jesus, so they are our enemies too, right?  Well, that’s a convenient way to read scripture, but it’s not particularly honest. 

I’m afraid we have to imagine ourselves sitting on those hard pews in the synagogue next to our Jewish brothers and sisters as the scandal unfolds.  They are the religious elite – they are the ones with power, with influence, who control the comings and goings of the faithful.  They are, in short, the church.  When the bible says, “and he said these things while he was in the synagogue in Capernaum,” that should terrify us…we should immediately hear, “and he said these things while he was in the sanctuary of First Pres of Grinnell, Iowa.” 

It’s true our faith began as an alternative to the religious institutions of Jesus’ day – which had gone awry with power, exploitation, legalism.  And the hope is that we do bear a glimmering reflection of the early Christian church.  But the same was true of Judaism.  It began as a response to the exploitive systems in Egypt.  It began as an alternative world where the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger were welcomed and cared for.  It’s roots are deeply embedded in the God of grace and justice.  And Judaism bears the marks of this beginning to this day.

But, like many things that begin with good intentions, human frailty sneaks in and warps the original intention.  I think we all know that institutions are subject to becoming their own worst enemy over time.  Religions – with their well intentioned creeds, useful organizational structures, initially necessary to support life-giving ministry – are nevertheless subject to the same forces as the Jews were thousands and thousands of years ago.  We go astray, and the religion becomes a sad farce of what it once was. 

When we place ourselves in the story with those sitting in the synagogue that day, we have to ask ourselves what are our traditions, our religious laws, our institutional structures, that Jesus might mock?  What would Jesus challenge that would offend us to the core?  I wonder about how we do communion in our churches today – just to stick with the bread theme?  It’s the ritual that is meant to remind us of Jesus and all he lived and died for, and yet mostly what it does is help delineate groups from one another:  Christians from non-Christians.  Catholics from Protestants.  Presbyterians from Lutherans.  Believers from non-believers.  Those who show up for worship on Sunday from those who don’t.  I suspect Jesus could say a couple of vulgar things about that, don’t you think?

Or what about worship?  Does modern, American Christian worship truly reflect the spirit of God, or is it more an homage to consumerism, capitalism, exceptionalism, segregation, classism?  Does the extravagance of our houses of worship belie what we say about who God is as known in Jesus of Nazareth – the one who didn’t start up a church, but rather wandered homeless in order to meet people where they were.

This is a passage that should stop us in our tracks and make us look at those things we hold most dear and wonder if Jesus would say something as utterly offensive to us about those things as he did to the religious people of his day. 

And if he did, what would we do when he said, “follow me”?  Would we be like the many disciples who left him that day?  When Jesus’ words put him at odds with their tradition, when what he said was offensive, when he fell from the pedestal they had placed him on, they distanced themselves from him about as fast as Romney distanced himself from Sen. Akin.  Would we do the same?

Or, would we try to be like the twelve who stayed.  They probably had all the same feelings, and emotions.  Embarrassment that they had been hanging out with such an offensive guy.  Betrayal because Jesus wasn’t going to be the king they longed for.  Anger that he was attacking things they had held dear their whole lives.  But, for some reason, they stayed.

At some point the disciples had to realize that they were no longer following the new king – at least not the king as everyone imagined.  They were not in on the ground floor of a mega church.  In this scene alone, Jesus has massive crowds gathering to see him and hear him and instead of making them comfortable, offering them the top notch Sunday school, a coffee bar, and a gym with basketball courts, he drives them away with his offensive sayings.

 

So why did some people stay?  Why were they willing to join a scandalous movement?  According to Peter it’s because they had already come to know him as the holy one of God.  They were not just there because he was a local hero, or because he did amazing fetes and healed people with a wave of his hand.  They were not following him because he was popular.  After spending time with him, they had come to know him as the very embodiment of the God that they knew through their scriptures and traditions – of Yahweh.  Where else can we go? He said.  This is the most true thing I’ve ever known.

Jesus is what I have.  I do trust him – I have chosen to trust him.  And it’s not like in other scandals.  Part of the problem in so many scandals is that we trust people who are not trustworthy in the first place.  Who said we should expect so much from Sen. Akin, or John Edwards, or Lance Armstrong, or the South Korean badminton team, or name your fallen hero?  They are not the source of true life…of meaning and purpose.  We never should have been “following” them in the first place.

But Jesus is trustworthy – at least that’s what I have based my life on.  And any offene he gives me is not license to distance myself.  I have to follow him anyway.  And because of who he is – because of his life, I have to accept that he would not approve of everything we do, who we are as a church.  Not just accept, but expect.  The one we’ve chosen to follow was pretty scandalous, especially when it came to calling the church to task for how off the path they had gone.  The one we’ve chosen to follow has very little concern for our pride in religion – especially when that pride gets in the way of loving and serving those Jesus did have great concern for.  Jesus is not a hero.  He’s not a political leader.  He’s not the ultimate Presbyterian, or even the ultimate Christian.  He had little concern for such things.  He’s the needle in our side, constantly calling us beyond our parochialism, beyond our need to be the best, to be right, to be righteous.  His very life and death on the cross mocks our religion when it is more about those inside the church than out. 

Most likely following Jesus will put us outside the mainstream.  That’s not a comfortable place for most of us.  But Jesus came not to live in the mainstream…he came to help those drowning in that stream.  Jesus is a scandal I think we can live with; he’s a leader I think we can follow.  Because isn’t the real scandal how short the world falls of the Glory of God?  Amen.