Progressive reflections on the lectionary #31

Monday 19th August 2024

John 6:56-69: Who cares about popularity anyway?

The several weeks that the lectionary readings have spent in John’s gospel is nearly over, and with that, in the UK at least, the summer holiday season also draws to a conclusion. Soon we’ll be back to Mark’s breathless prose and to school too.

I don’t know about you but it feels to me like John kicks the backside out of the bread of life stuff - certainly when you compare it to Mark’s action packed approach, and even to John’s normal style, this bit goes on for a long time. I suppose it’s partly because the lectionary compilers insist on repeating verses.

But in any case this week we reach the end of the passage and find Jesus, who began with a massive crowd (5000+) with now just a remnant.

"This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?" his new disciples ask, so Jesus ups the ante: “Does this offend you? Then what if…” After he raises the bar we learn that “because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”

And so he’s left with the twelve again, the last few.

When you come to think about it, it’s not a dissimilar situation to that which the church finds itself in, in Western Europe and North America at least, these days. Gone are the crowds, gone are the many. “A lot changed when there started to be sports clubs on a Sunday,” one old man told me, after reminiscing about a full to bursting Sunday School. “It was never the same after the shops opened on Sundays,” his wife said.

The truth is, of course, that the reason people leave Church/church are varied, and to be honest that’s not really the point I want to explore, what I’m more interested in is the idea that ‘the crowd’ is necessarily a good thing. In this sequence John’s Jesus makes it progressively harder for people to follow him, as if he almost wishes he never fed them in the first place.

Our metrics of success tend to revolve around scale. If you attract a big crowd, then you’re on to something. If you manage to get that big crowd to come back, week after week, or at least find enough new people to replace the ones who drop out, then you’re really doing well. This is Christendom thinking.

This is the kind of thinking that says the role of the Church is to, ultimately, take over the world. The best outcome, according to this way of thinking, would be that everyone became a Christian.

But that’s not the model presented by John’s Jesus, who definitely seems to prefer a radical remnant - a committed hardcore of people for whom nothing else is good enough. “Do you want to go too?” Jesus asks the remaining few, Peter speaks the none too triumphal words in response: “to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (‘We don’t have any other options’ - the implication being that if they did then…)

The simile of yeast in the dough is another good contrast with the Christendom way of thinking. The object of the exercise is not that everything becomes yeast. Yeast works as a raising agent, it changes what it comes into contact with, it lifts it up. But you don’t want everything to be yeast - that should only be a small part of the mixture. A spoonful in a big bowl of flour.

Similarly ‘salt’ - the worst thing that could happen is that everything becomes salt, or even ‘too salty’ - that’s the way things get killed. Salt is unpalatable, even toxic in large quantities. A small amount of salt is what’s needed - a spoonful in a large pot.

At the end of his bread of life discourse, John’s Jesus is unperturbed by the reality that this remains a marginal movement. Subsequent generations of Christians have found that idea less easy to swallow, demanding that we should find ways of boosting the numbers. Perhaps the honest question we need to ask is, ‘why?’

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