I can’t do this anymore. I quit.
Overflowing ICUs, wrangling about masks, a pandemic that just won’t end, Afghanistan, Haiti, that massive climate change report….it’s too much. I’ve been turning off the news as soon as I turn it on this week.
Or maybe, for you it’s been something more local – work or the return to school, a complicated relationship, a project that just keeps growing.
And you think, or you say, or just feel:
It’s too much.
It’s too difficult.
I’m done.
That’s what people are saying about Jesus, too, in the story we hear today.
After a long discussion about bread, ranging from incomprehensible miracles to Jesus’s insistence that we need to not just believe in him, but actually eat his flesh and drink his blood because he is bread,
many – maybe most – of those who’ve been following Jesus just…can’t anymore.
It’s too much to ask in a relationship that you want to be living in me and me in you and that we get there by…cannibalism?
I’m tired just trying to follow the logic, and this is a lot more commitment than I’ve got right now.
Because of this, John tells us, many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.
They quit.
It’s just too hard.
I mean, it is that hard to follow Jesus, a lot of the time. So much of what he invites and encourages and commands us to do is counter-cultural, a steep path of self-sacrifice and compassion and courage and re-prioritizing and giving up the lives we have for eternal life.
It’s hard to remember all his teaching, hard to figure out how something Jesus said two thousand years ago in a whole other language and culture applies to the work ethics or daily meal or relationship crisis in front of me or you right now.
And when he’s asking us – as he is today – to accept the radical messy intimacy of eating his flesh, the surrender of control so he can live in us, and we in him, it can be extra hard.
It’s basically impossible to succeed at this. Failure seems almost guaranteed.
And who wants that?
You and I – and our friends and families and most of the folks around us – are well trained to avoid failure.
We don’t want to be embarrassed at school or work or the tennis court or home or in the court of public opinion when something falls apart spectacularly (like ending a certain twenty-year war, or the messy wreck of a meal in front of guests or of a project in front of the boss).
I don’t like the shame inside my own head when I screw up something I wanted to do well, even if no one else notices.
So…
when failure seems likely, it may seem better to opt out.
Better not to join a club because the rare times you went bowling there were a lot of gutter balls. Better not to volunteer to teach Sunday School because you don’t know the answers to your own questions about the Bible. Better not to try to make new friends because introductory conversations are so awkward and I fumble small talk. Better to avoid math classes, or literature, because they’re hard.
A teacher friend of mine told me recently that this is common in so many of us, and maybe easier to notice in kids. Kids who start succeeding in school naturally at a young age tend to find ways to opt out when they run into an early snag, or failure. They decide that they just can’t do math, aren’t good at reading or science or art. And slip into habits that reinforce that, like not taking optional classes in that area, or (like me) not doing the homework, so that failure can be my own choice, instead of because the work is challenging for me.
This is well studied, and I’ve learned that teachers – and lots of parents, it seems – are being equipped to help kids find a “growth mindset” in those cases.
“Maybe you’re not good at math YET,” they say, “but you can be.”
They share the stories about the failures of famous scientists and other heroes. Make failure a natural part of the learning process, so that we can say, “I can’t do all of this yet, but maybe next time.”
Not yet means there’s something exciting, something powerful, about trying again.
Not yet means there’s all kinds of potential, and power, and discovery to be had by doubling down, and staying in.
And that may be Peter’s secret.
John tells us today that when almost everyone else who’s been following Jesus opts out, turns away, quits because it’s just too hard to keep up, Jesus turns to the few who are left to ask, “What about you? Are you leaving, too?”
And Simon Peter says, “Where else are we going to go? You have the words of eternal life.”
I don’t think Peter is saying he’s got it all figured out.
In fact, Peter’s got a track record of mis-steps and wrong answers and failures at this discipleship thing that become pretty famous in his community, stories still told today.
I think Peter’s saying, “We’re convinced that eternal life is worth failing, and trying again, and again, and again. We’re not there yet but we can be. We know that you will help.”
Maybe that’s our secret, too. Our secret to staying in the story.
This discipleship thing – this following of Jesus, this self-sacrifice and compassion and courage and re-prioritizing to grow so close that he’s in us and we in him, this giving up the lives we have so that we live his life and he lives ours – this discipleship is too much for us.
We’re all but guaranteed to fail the first time we try. Probably over and over and over again – like Peter himself.
Almost none of us are going to succeed at what Jesus is asking of us. Not yet.
And never on our own.
But we can, eventually, with God’s help.
And to succeed at following Jesus – when we succeed at compassion and courage and generosity beyond our own expectation; succeed at self-sacrifice and justice and healing that brings us union with God’s own heart – well, that’s eternal life, divine life, living in us here and now. It’s more life, more abundant, extraordinary, expansive, joyful life than we can ever imagine or reach for by ourselves.
We’re not good at it yet – or very few of us are, and none of us right when we start – but we’re never supposed to be trying to succeed at this alone.
“You have the words of eternal life,” Peter says to Jesus. You have what we need to succeed. And Jesus wants – demands – to share it with us. Eat this food I give you, he says. Rely on me for fuel, for the resources it takes to live God’s life in this world.
When we “eat Jesus”, when we risk that weird, uncomfortable, even disturbing intimacy that lets God live in us, and us in God, we don’t face climate change or humanitarian disasters or parenting or work or daily dilemmas or the constant distresses and challenges of COVID alone.
We don’t have to rely on our own strength and resources to face the news, to stay in challenging relationships. We can do more, face more, in fact, because each time we try something in response to the news or the challenges in front of us, even if we fail, it’s part of the whole world-transforming resources of God, the work that’s not done yet, but will be.
The same tradition that tells us about all Peter’s failures as a disciple tells us of how – trying again and again, fed by the death and resurrection of Jesus, feeling Christ living in him – Peter eventually became a model, a leader, one who could share eternal life with others.
That’s our story, too, your story and mine. Or it can be.
We might fail spectacularly at facing the news, or solving the world, or our own problems, today.
We might not be any good at following Jesus, or being part of God today.
Not yet, maybe.
But we can be. We will be.
And those are the words of eternal life.
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