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Sometimes people have difficulty understanding Jesus, or say they do. Today's text deals with this issue. Jesus tells his audience that he is the Bread of Life. And they counter with, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" We could excuse their resistance to Jesus if we thought that they were incapable of understanding more than the literal meaning of words. But this is not the point of this passage from John. The crowd appears to deliberately pretend Jesus is speaking nonsense.

We would assume that the message of Jesus would be welcomed. Oh sure, there were those who always saw Jesus as a challenge to their security. People of wealth were put off by Jesus' insistence that wealth and possessions are obstacles to the cause of God.

Again, those holding political power would resist Jesus because he insisted that in God's coming kingdom, the poor and downtrodden will be the rulers instead. This caused many of the temple authorities to oppose Jesus, conspiring with Pilate to put Jesus away. And certainly Pilate would take a dim view of Jesus. His job depended upon keeping order and silencing any rebellion against Rome. We can easily see why Jesus became for Pilate a very suspicious character, and why he quickly ordered Jesus' execution.

Certainly Jesus would offend anyone thinking they had earned their good standing with God. When Jesus began to include moral and religious outcasts in his following they were outraged. Even more, they vilified Jesus when he opened his entourage to women, and even when he offered healing to a Roman officer's son. Because these religious types saw their religious achievements were not acceptable to Jesus, they resisted him.

Are these resisters restricted to the New Testament story of Jesus, or are they people like us all these centuries later? We can keep these Jesus-resisters back in time, avoiding an admission that their sad story is also our story, too: We can risk seeing them as types whose resistance to Jesus is still alive in us, calling for repentance and faith. Let us consider some modern ways in which we, too, resist Jesus.

"Jesus Is My Personal Savior" As Resistance Of Jesus

It may seem outrageous suggesting that "Jesus is my personal Savior" can be a form of resistance to Jesus and his message. Yet, there is a form and style of this confession that can be a means of avoidance and resistance. This is not meant to say that making such a claim about Jesus is wrong, for obviously he brings the saving grace of God into our lives. Our quarrel is not here. Our critique is the limited way this confession becomes the center of so many Christian lives.

This affirmation can become a means of glorying in my salvation without any concern that my salvation is not complete without the salvation of the whole of humanity. If the saving grace of God does not reach out to all people in any age or time, then my salvation is incomplete. Being saved is a matter of God's mercy for everyone. A radical shift in our evangelistic thrust is in order. We could listen to contemporary Christian voices declaring salvation is already given to all humanity. The saving grace of God is present in the lives of all, even in those who live against the ways of God. The Christian advantage is that we already know of our salvation, as it has been declared in Christ. Christians know that all are saved, meaning our evangelistic task is to share this knowledge with everyone, not necessarily converting them to Jesus.

Such a view of salvation delivers us from a view of salvation that resists Jesus. Jesus would be appalled if we claimed salvation through him as our exclusive personal possession apart from all humanity. Jesus insists that salvation does not depend upon anything we can do or profess. Salvation is given out of the grace and mercy of God. This will deliver us from a pious self-righteousness, which Jesus could not condone. We need to be careful that our claim to salvation is not the sort that resists the true meaning of salvation.

The Resistance Of An Eternal Heaven And Hell

This second form of resistance to Jesus is insisting our eternal destiny hangs on a verbal confession in the saving grace of God in Jesus, found in him alone. Heaven becomes the destiny of believers in Jesus and the eternal fires of hell are reserved for all others.

All this was more believable in an earlier time. In some ways it made for an urgency about committing oneself to the ways of Christ. One could not put off a decision for Christ because death might suddenly intrude, depositing us on the wrong side of the gospel. The price paid for this strategic urgency was to limit the mercy and grace of God to this life. Of course we cannot suggest that because God's mercy is everlasting, we can be casual and dismissive about God's grace represented by Christ. Evangelism is better served if we say that an immediate decision is warranted because to delay causes us to miss out on the recognized grace right now. Otherwise we forfeit the wisdom of Jesus, and miss the joy in serving his cause.

The chief reason the doctrine of a future, everlasting hell is resistance to Jesus can be simply put -- it is a denial of the full mercy and grace of God. An everlasting hell causes us to think the mercy and grace of God has some limiting point. One just runs out of opportunities to respond to God's mercy in Christ for this life and the next; or one becomes so evil that God gives him up to eternal damnation.

There's a familiar hymn that speaks to our point. Its lines go,

There's a wideness in God's mercy like the wideness of the sea;
There's a kindness in God's justice, which is more than liberty.
For the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

It is not likely that Frederick Faber, the author of this hymn, was thinking of the ultimate, universal salvation of all, but we can say that his lines could provoke these thoughts. Of course it is dishonest to make texts say what we want them to say, disregarding their plain meaning. It is legitimate, however, to admit the original intent of the text and then to say that it provokes meanings and ideas beyond what its author had in mind. Given this basic honesty about the original meaning of Faber's lines, we can allow ourselves to think that they suggest that the wide mercy of God has no limits -- in this life or the next. Make certain to understand we have not disregarded the judgments of God on human evil. Hell, as the judgment of God in this life and hereafter is real. But the judgments of God are part of the everlasting mercy of God, for their purpose is remedial; not eternal banishment from the mercy of God.

The few statements of Jesus in the New Testament on heaven and hell are unlikely to support our claim. Yet it is permissible to say that Jesus' emphasis on a gracious God allows us to assert that the thrust of his message points in the direction of the everlasting mercy of God. The larger meaning of Jesus can affirm our point -- our sense of the mercy of God means this mercy will never give up on any of the sons and daughters of God. To believe otherwise could be resisting the gracious love revealed in Jesus.

The Resistance Of An Individual Gospel

A final way that we can resist Jesus is to limit the gospel to individuals. Certainly the gospel speaks to the individual person. Presenting the love of God in Christ to individuals is part of the central mission of the church. The gospel speaks to the deep hungers of the human heart and this has been true across the centuries. However, the gospel has another dimension that we have often neglected, causing us to resist the full message of Jesus.

Modern scholarship has made it clear that Jesus' preaching and teaching were more than challenging individual people to respond to a life of love toward God and neighbor. Jesus was from the line of the great Hebrew Bible prophets who believed that there would come a day when God intervened into human history, judging the wicked, and inaugurating a worldwide kingdom of justice, peace, well-being, and everlasting life. This meant that God is interested, also, in how life is structured among all people. A large part of Jesus' message was social, and a critique upon the systems created to manage life together. If we profess Jesus as Lord and Savior we will be charged with seeing that our economic, our political, our cultural, and our religious systems benefit all people equally, especially the poor and the powerless. To fail in this is to resist Jesus.

It is easy to understand why we have shunned this claim and preferred an individual gospel. The great issues surrounding our systems are complicated and complex. There is great resistance to any suggestions of change on these matters. We are troubled that we who benefit from the present social arrangements may have to relinquish our privileges. Small wonder that our churches and pulpits have little to say about the great social issues of our time. Centering on individual needs and concerns, we may evade grappling with this part of Jesus' message, retaining our comforts and securities.

Early in the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine decided to use the church as a unifying force in the empire. He called the bishops from the several factions of the faith together and ordered them to fashion a creed that would be acceptable to all Christians. After many debates and wranglings, the bishops forged what became the Nicene Creed.

Later, Constantine decided to move the capital of the empire from Rome to Byzantium, or Constantinople as it later became known. This left the entire western part of the empire without strong civil authority. Into this social chaos, the church took responsibility for civil, as well as religious authority. The bishops became vital to matters of order and justice; otherwise the western empire might have degenerated into chaos. Those who argue that this decision of the church to administer civil order and justice was a denial of the gospel are out of touch with reality. They do not see that there was no other option for the church. The example of the church in those times is not a warrant for the church to exercise such authority today. Under those circumstances, to remain passive in the face of civil disorder was to concede to the forces of disorder, chaos, and flagrant injustice, any minimal chance for the common decency and joys of life. We are not called to decisions of pure goodness or pure evil. Most of the time, we are faced with making decisions in less than perfect circumstances. The church and Christians are called by Jesus to involve themselves in the larger life around us. It is not enough for us to celebrate a singular personal, individual gospel. While the larger systems of our corporate and political lives are perpetuating injustice, poverty, cultural neglect, ignoring violence, and condoning religious institutional indifference, we have no salvation worth celebrating.

The mood in the church and in our nation today affirms the status quo. We seem unable to mount any great cries for reform and change, lining us up with the larger vision of Jesus. Politicians know that to be elected and keep their office, they must not challenge the way things are. Leaders in the church immerse themselves in church growth fantasies or an evangelism that has little to say about justice issues. There is an old story that a young physician hung out a sign at his office, "Small Fevers, Gratefully Accepted." Well, we are in a "small fever" epoch. Not only do we have little courage for great issues in the realm of politics; we have a similar small vision in our Christian discipleship. As we limit the gospel to person, domestic, and individual issues, we resist the New Testament Jesus. So, we might pray that we be given a larger dose of his spirit, urging us to again celebrate the full gospel of our Lord.