Pentecost 10 – 2021
John 6:24-35 (a reflection)
Marian Free
In the name of God, in whom we live and breathe and have our being. Amen.
There are a number of hymns that formed my faith at a time when I was too young and therefore too ill-informed to put words to my thoughts and feelings. The most powerful lyric for my young self was the line from “Hallelujah! Sing to Jesus” which we would have sung today had we not been in lockdown. The second verse begins: “Hallelujah! not as orphans, are we left in sorrow now.” For reasons that I do not understand, I found these words incredibly comforting. I have hummed them to myself over and over and they have sustained me throughout my Christian journey. Another line that struck a chord in my young self comes from the hymn “Immortal, invisible” – “from Christ in the story, to Christ in the heart.” Even in my primary school years, those words made it clear to me that having a relationship with God was so much more than intellectual assent.
The hymn “Dear Lord and Father of mankind” (or its new form “Dear Father, Lord of humankind”) is another that has continued to inform my spiritual life. The entire hymn speaks of allowing ourselves to rest in Jesus, but the words that I find myself humming from time to time – especially when I am stressed or anxious are:
“Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease,
take from our souls the strain and stress
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace,
the beauty of thy peace.”
When I first began practicing meditation, I took myself very seriously and did all that I could to achieve a state of detachment or at least some sort of mental state that was free from all distractions. In other words I was “striving” to reach some imagined ideal! I now realise that this was an unrealistic goal, and that meditation – like all spiritual practices – is meant to be more a “relaxing into” than a “striving for”. In fact, striving to achieve any sort of goal is counter to the goal of meditation which is more about letting go and letting God.
I think that this may be the point of this morning’s gospel.
If you did not already know, the entirety of chapter six in John is a discourse on bread. (As we read the entire chapter over the course of six weeks, it can be a real challenge for the preacher and for anyone unlucky enough to be choosing hymns!) To recap – Jesus has just fed a crowd of 5,000 with five barley loaves and two small fish. Needless to say, the crowd are impressed by Jesus’ actions, and they begin to murmur among themselves: “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus, aware of this and that the crowd intend to make him king, withdraws by himself.
Meantime the disciples have returned by sea to Capernaum where Jesus joins them (having walked on the water to do so). It is here that our gospel today begins. The crowd, seeing that a boat is missing, realise that Jesus and the disciples have crossed the lake. They too make their way over the lake in search of Jesus. When they find him, they ask: “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus is suspicious about their motives in seeking him out and the ensuing conversation proves him to be correct. While the crowd have intuited something about Jesus, their understanding is still very basic, and this is the crunch – they ask: “What must we do to perform the works of God?” The crowd don’t get it, they think that they need to do something for God and they don’t yet understand that the important thing is simply to accept what God does for them. They want to be active, not passive, they want to strive, not to rest.
This is often our problem. We too want to do something. We want to have something to show for our efforts, to have something that will affirm our sense of self, something that will demonstrate that we are worthy of God’s attention or something that might just be a basis for a pat on the back. We live in a world in which nothing is for nothing. We are used to an economy of exchange – you do something for me, and I will do something for you. If you want something you will have to pay for it. It is hard to imagine that our relationship with God should be any different.
This is the tension of the spiritual life. It is natural for us to want to strive, to attain a level of perfection, or to have a standard against which to measure ourselves, when all that Jesus wants is for us to trust. The work of God, Jesus says is: “to believe (trust) in him whom God has sent” (6:29). Instead of focussing on what they can do Jesus suggests, the crowd should focus on what God has done for them. They should trust in God’s love for them that has been demonstrated in God’s sending Jesus (God’s only Son) into the world. God’s hope is that through trusting Jesus, the people will come to trust God (John 3:16). The crux of the matter then, is whether or not we trust in God, whether we believe that our salvation depends on what we do or on what God has done.
If we truly believe that God sent Jesus into the world to save the world, we can stop striving, because the hard work has already been done (and not by us).
All that is left for us to do is to trust in God and in God’s unwavering love for us.
Swallowsrest 