The heartbeat, the core of the 'Great Charter for Justice' (sometimes called the 10 commandments) is a Command to Love God, and a Command to Love our neighbour as ourselves. Each generation adapts the charter to meet the new situation. In theory, they might add something new, but they must never do it is such a way that it causes heart failure. In reality, new traditions take on a power of their own. The distinction between the heart and the edge becomes unclear. What was once a matter of the heart can become an obsession with externals.
The problem is that the heart is on the inside. It cannot be measured directly. External behaviours are on the outside and can be, or so it seems, be more easily measured. Clean hands, pots and pans can be scrutinised. But the heart may not be available for inspection. Therefore, the guardians of the 'tradition' are prone to policing externals.
They ask trivial questions and forget to ask the important one. They can no longer distinguish God's Command from human custom.
But the Beloved Son of God lives out of the Heart, the Centre. He confronts their hypocrisy. He confronts their refusal to hold the inner love of God and neighbour and the outer ways this can be embodied as one dance.
These guardians of the law, the Scribes and the Pharisees, are concerned with ritual defilement, about putting something 'unclean' inside yourself. They move from the outside in, and fret about contamination. With this in mind, all of their energy is focused on the outside world and whatever might make someone unclean.
But Jesus, like all good spiritual teachers, is more concerned about moral defilement, and the havoc it unleashes in the world. This happens in exactly the opposite way. It begins and grows in the human heart, in the cultivation of evil thoughts and intentions. People are destructive from the inside out if their hearts are fixated on fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, slander, envy. Discover what is driving these things and you may know how to make Peace.
But this is the problem. We can agree with Jesus that the heart is a strange landscape, but the reason why we do certain things may not be clear to us. This is why we need to know ourselves well. This is why we need to come regularly to confession. This is why we need the gift of a friend who challenges our worst behaviours and tells us the truth about ourselves. As we become more aware of what drives us we have better choice in whether to go with it or not. If we surround ourselves with 'flunkies' who only tell us what we want to hear, we might never grow in wisdom or understanding. Worst still, we might be destroying love and not know how to reverse the trend.
​Over the course of my life, I have been invited by certain events and challenged by friends to take a good hard look on the 'inside'. I do not find this kind of inner scrutiny easy or enjoyable. Knowing my hidden self doesn't always match the scrubbed up persona I like to present to the world. Lifting the veil and humbly acknowledging who I really am is not an activity most are willing to do. But when I have found the courage to shine a light into my darkness there has always been a payoff. I find I can be a better person. Perhaps this is what Carl Jung meant when he said that we grow up, not by entertaining figures of light, but by making our darkness visible.
It is true that some of the teachings of Jesus are hard to take. We should not be afraid of this. In the Gospels, some people like Him and some do not. But in today's Gospel, even those who liked Him are struggling to trust Him and to understand what He is teaching.
The core message of St. John's Gospel is stated one more. Jesus has come from the Father. His origins are in God and the life He speaks of is born in that place. His identity as 'Beloved Son', flows from this relationship. He offers this same experience to anyone who can trust Him and make His teaching their own. This is something completely new. The older consciousness cannot transcend death; it turns people, who are afraid, in on themselves. Here is a teaching that frees us from fear and opens us up to 'eternal life.'
The pairing of flesh and blood and eating bread from heaven sets the stage for the disciples to unwrap the gift they are being offered. They have been brought up to believe in the utter transcendence of God and their own smallness. What Jesus is saying does not fit well into that mindset. He understands how His teaching might give offence. Perhaps the offence could be less if He, the Beloved Son, started with Earth and ascended to Heaven. But even if it makes for an easier beginning, we still have to trust Him when he asks us to notice the partnership between the physical and the spiritual, earth and heaven, ascending and descending Angels and a descending and ascending Son of Man. Everything comes from above and it is there that we must look to find the truth. This change from 'flesh to spirit', to 'spirit to flesh', is a difficult shift. Many will walk away with their old mind intact rather than trust in the new possibility. Those who stay, do so because they trust the Father.
Staying with Jesus is always a decision and it is a decision that is not made only once. The disciples who left were unable to make the shift. They were not ready to eat the food that the 'bread' who 'came down from heaven' had prepared. The Twelve did stay because they were already eating. The words of Jesus had opened a window into eternal life. If Jesus could give them eternal life, He must come from God. This is the beginning of something amazing which will require them to trust and grow even more.
So, we have two choices. To leave or to stay. But it is the reason for staying that is intriguing. When Jesus asks the question, 'Are you going away too?', Peter answers, 'We have come to believe and know..'. What begins with trust is completed in a depth of understanding and flows as eternal life whenever we gather to fulfill His command, 'Do this in memory of me'.
The community of disciples - the church- only exists to disclose the meaning of Christ as the embodiment of God in the world. We exist for the salvation - health and well-being - of all people, not just for the comfort and consolation it brings us. This means that the only way to build the community of those who 'choose to stay' is to look outwards, to see how we might bring this Good News to the poor. The Church, like the Kingdom of God, cannot grow through following a programme. It will grow through the joyful witness of those who celebrate the gratuitous blessing of Christ. We have to return to the service of the Gospel and the command to spread it to all peoples. Today's Gospel is a heady reminder that this is a painful and costly process precisely because it means stripping away our old safety nets, our addiction to personal comfort and our riches -whether secular or not - which we think are so important for the maintenance of the church.
We must respond to the urgent promoting of the Spirit who gives Life and who through the community, upholds the life of all people. As Jesus clearly tells us; The power of God is at work in the world, the story of Salvation is being told, and we are the privileged and responsible stewards of God. This, it seems to me, is the solid ground of our trust and the reason why we are constantly seeking to deepen our understanding of the Beloved Son of God.
The image which stands out in the teaching in this Sunday's Gospel - St.John,6:51-58 - is "Eating". Eating is something we all love to do. It is an intimate action where we take something that is not us and make it part of us. I often joke that I am fifty percent chocolate! On a more serious note, eating should also help us to remember how we depend on the world and cannot thrive if we are separated from it. Jesus uses this human activity for spiritual purposes. We eat a piece of bread and 'it' becomes part of us. But when we eat Him; when we take in the spiritual nourishment He offers, we become Him.
His audience focus on the word 'flesh' and you can see them struggling with a possible invitation to cannibalism! But Jesus presses on. The division of flesh and blood symbolises his death and reveals the way He is going to make His awareness our own. How Jesus understands his own death is something every disciple should know by heart. Seriously! Jesus uses many images; seeing His own death as a movement from 'a grain of wheat' into 'much fruit'. Far from being an experience of loss, He will be more. He will also be more accessible and available as the Risen Lord than He is as The Jesus of history.
We enter His Sacred Heart whenever we take part in the Eucharist. In this Sacred act, the meaning of His death will be revealed to those who eat and drink. Each time we do this we will deepen our understanding of the divine love that transforms death into new life.
So while it is true that we can eat good food and make it our own without paying any attention to the process, we cannot do that with a new mind. Disciples have to eat and drink in a certain way. The original word Jesus uses for this kind of eating is literally translated as 'munching'. A far cry from the days when we were not allowed to let the host touch our teeth! Bob Noznick's description of what munching looks like is thoroughly described in his book, 'The Examined Life'. "
We meet the food in the anteroom of the mouth and greet it there. We probe and explore it, surround it, permeate it with juices, press it with our tongues against the roof of the mouth along that hard ridge directly above the teeth, place it under suction and pressure, move it around. We know it's texture fully; it holds no secrets or hidden parts". (p.56).
A priest was serving on a World War 1 battlefield in France. He carried the Eucharist in a pyx next to his heart. He suddenly realised just how disappointing it was to be thus holding so close to himself the wealth of the world and the very source of life without being able to possess it inwardly, without being able to either penetrate it or assimilate it. This is the true meaning of the Gospel text. There is only one way to have His life within us, we have to receive this most precious gift. We have to eat His Body. We have to drink His Blood. And if we do this regularly, or even every day, it is good from time to time to pause and to contemplate the infinite preciousness of the Eucharist. And having renewed our mind to His we discover how awesome He really is.
It looks like the crowd are following Jesus but they are really following miracles. Jesus sees through their immaturity and tries to help them to grow up. They seek Him because he has filled their bellies with bread. But they have still not understood what the bread means. They are well aware of their physical hunger and are very focused on filling it. But they are less acquainted with their spiritual hunger and are not sure how to fill that. Jesus tells them that He, Himself, is the one who feeds them with 'Bread from Heaven'. Now He begins lesson number two. They ask him about keeping the law or the works of God. To be faithful, they must do what God does. He teaches them that they can only do these works (the many) if they are united to the work (the One). They must join the One who has been sent. For while, "The Law was indeed given through Moses, Grace and Truth have come through Jesus Christ." (Jn 1,29)
Now comes lesson number three. These ‘would be’ disciples need proof. If Jesus is the work of God, what work will He do that will help them to believe in Him? They know that the Law, the great charter for Justice, is from God, because Moses, the lawgiver, provided manna in the desert. The manna is the only validation Moses needs. But Jesus says, 'Think again!' The manna was not given as proof that Moses was from God. It was meant to reveal the One who put it there. The Father is the One who gives Bread from Heaven and He is giving it all the time. Now they must see that the True Bread which comes down from Heaven is given for the whole world. It cannot be contained within the borders of Israel. It is a gift for the whole of Creation. The Bread is its own reality. It does not point to something else. If you let Jesus in you will have all the proof you need!
Now, lesson number four! The crowd need time to take in the full impact of what Jesus is teaching them. For now, all they can hear is the promise of manna every day. Since the 'Bread of Life' is the spiritual nourishment that flows from God into Creation, and since Jesus is the Beloved Son of God who rebuilds the connection, He himself is the Bread of life. Whoever comes to Him will kiss eternity and they will never feel spiritual hunger or thirst ever again. The Teacher invites those who are locked in the prison of the visible, the material and the temporal to embrace the freedom of the invisible, the spiritual and the eternal. Can they do it?
Once upon a time, there was an exhausted mother who stood up at a retreat and announced that she was tired of giving. Her friends were quick to offer solutions and advice; daycare, part time employment, more husbandfather involvement. Then a voice broke through this conversation, "Honey, you gotta learn how to sing". She told the exhausted mother that she had to change her whole mind, her whole attitude. Nothing suggested so far would provide lasting help. Tinkering with the edges was no substitute for inner change. She had to transform the moments of giving into moments of meeting.
Spiritual Teachers value interior change as the forerunner to new and decisive action. They often tweak and tease the consciousness of their disciples to see things in a new way. Like the other day when I was driving back from visiting my best friend who is dying, I saw, on the billboard of a church, 'Tweet others as you yourself would like to be tweeted'. Brilliant! Or the story Jack Kornfield tells of his spiritual Teacher. 'There is a road I know well, but it can be foggy or dark. When I see someone travelling this road about to fall into a ditch or get lost in a sidetrack on the right hand side, I call out 'Go to the left.' So too, if I see someone fall into a ditch or get lost in a sidetrack on the left hand side, I call out, 'Go to the right.' That's all I do when I teach. Wherever you get caught, I say, 'Let go of that too.' (After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path)[New York:Bantam 2000. Pp268-169]
​Jesus, the Teacher, knows the path well and can help others who are in a fog or in darkness. I like to see Him calling out to us, "A little to the left," or "Go to the right". And I imagine Him saying, "Don't keep hungering after wonders or miracles. Notice the deeper hunger within you for what lasts forever. Turn your mind from doing things and enlarge the inner space from which you are able to do things. Gods' work is always done with God. Stop asking, 'How will I know if this is true?' Instead ask, 'Am I in communion with God and receiving His gift of life. Manna every morning will not solve your problems. Give your heart to me and you will be satisfied for ever." This is the deeper level where Love elevates us and things become easier, less trying, happening more by themselves. If you think you need more of this, you are right.