John 6:1-21
Letting Jesus in the Boat
James Sledge July
29, 2018
The Lord
is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. The word Lord
doesn’t actually appear in the 23rd psalm, but most English
translations continue a Jewish practice that replaces the personal name of God
with “Lord.” Many Bibles print it in all capitals to alert you to this.
Jesus said, "Make the people sit down."
Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down… Translated
literally, Jesus said, “Make the people lie down,” and they
lie down in the grass, in green pastures. Once I saw that, I couldn’t help but
hear echoes of the 23rd psalm. And those aren’t the only echoes here.
John’s
gospel has no Last Supper, but here, at Passover, Jesus took the loaves, and when
he had given thanks, he distributed them… Jesus also distributes fish
which was often part of communion in the early church. The first readers of
John’s gospel surely saw their own celebration of the Lord’s Supper reflected
in this story.
Jesus
says, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost."
When God had Moses feed the people of Israel with manna in the wilderness, no
leftovers could be gathered. But here the leftover bread, manna, fills twelve
baskets.
John’s
gospel is quite different from the so-called synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark,
and Luke. Those three gospels present a very human looking Jesus, but John goes
to great lengths to present Jesus as fully divine. Jesus is the Word, the logos
of God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.
In
John, Jesus, the Word made flesh, is the Good Shepherd, the bread of life, the
resurrection and the life, God. But the crowd doesn’t get that. They think him
a prophet and want to make him king, so Jesus withdraws to the mountain. The
gospel doesn’t say how he manages this without the crowd following, but he is
God in the flesh, after all.
Once
they realize Jesus is gone, the crowd disperses and heads home, leaving only the
disciples. As darkness approaches, they make their way to the boat and head for
Capernaum, for home. Says the gospel, It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come
to them.
Does
that strike you as at all odd? Jesus hasn’t come to them yet, hasn’t gotten
there yet, but the disciples head out without him. What’s that about?
Some
of you likely know that a boat or a ship has been used as a symbol of the
church since the very early days of Christianity. Almost always, this boat or
ship is depicted with a sail. It is powered by the wind, by the Spirit. It is
not simply dependent on the strength of those in the boat. And I wonder if the
gospel writer might not be making a point about the church the sets out under
its own power, without its sail, without the Spirit, without Jesus.
John
tells the entire story of Jesus walking on water in just a few sentences. The
disciples head for home without Jesus. It’s dark. The sea becomes rough and
windy, and they’ve struggled to go a few miles when Jesus appears, walking on
the water. The disciples are terrified, but once they realize it’s Jesus, they
want him in the boat.
That’s the whole story, but John
provides a curious little postscript, …and immediately the boat reached the land
towards which they were going. By themselves they’d been straining, fighting
the wind and rough seas. But then Jesus gets in the boat, and immediately
everything changes.
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One
of our close, theological cousins as Presbyterians is the United Church of
Christ or UCC. Those initials spawned an old joke that I’ve probably told to some
of you. The joke goes, “What does UCC stand for?” and the answer is,
“Unitarians Considering Christ.”
The
joke works, or at least makes sense, in part because the initials fit, but also
because the UCC is a progressive, ecumenical, Mainline denomination that seeks
to be inclusive and avoids evangelical language about Jesus being the only way. But sometimes this can lead to people having a vague, fuzzy, image of God without many
specifics or particulars. In that sense, other than initials, the UCC is little
different from many progressive Presbyterians.
When
someone joins a Presbyterian church, when parents bring a child for baptism,
when an adult is baptized, when young people are confirmed, they all profess
that Jesus is Lord. This faith statement goes all the way back to the first
generation of Christians. It speaks not only of Jesus as master and ruler over
one’s life, but it also picks up on that use of Lord as respectful substitute
for God’s personal name. Lord means Yahweh, and Jesus is Lord.
When
someone is ordained in the Presbyterian Church, the first ordination question asks
“Do you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledge him Lord of all
and Head of the Church, and through him, believe in one God, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit?”
As
Presbyterians, our theology is clear. Jesus is absolutely central to our faith.
Our boat would never set out without him. Or so we say. But practically
speaking, Jesus teaches a lot of stuff that rubs us the wrong way. He talks
about sin. He criticizes wealth. He says to invite the poor into our homes. He
speaks of turning the other cheek, not resisting someone who would do us harm.
He insists that even the most important of us must behave like lowly servants. Jesus
can be a real pain when he’s in the boat.
Yet
Christian faith, along with Judaism and Islam, insists that on our own, even with
the best of intentions, we humans inevitably mess up God’s wonderful creation,
mess up our lives and the lives of our communities. What makes religious faith
different from a philosophy is knowing that we cannot do it on our own. Without
divine help, without God empowering and guiding us, our tendency toward
self-preservation will inevitably lead to harming others, most often the weak
and the vulnerable. And even those of us who see ourselves as champions of the weak
and vulnerable will end up being part of this problem.
We
often forget this, forget that when Christian faith doesn’t have Jesus in the
boat, it ceases be the body of Christ. That is equally true for liberal,
Unitarians considering Christ sort of churches and for conservative, red, white
and blue, Make America Great Again churches. We can be nice groups of helpful
people, angry political agents, and all manner of other things, but we cannot
be the body of Christ without Jesus, without the divine.
Evangelical Christians who too easily
wed Christian faith with conservative politics, a fear of immigrants, or a
right to be armed for self-defense, end up shoving Jesus out of the boat, even
if they say his name a lot. More progressive churches such as this one have a
different problem. We easily embrace a social justice message we associate with
Jesus, but we often toss out his call for repentance, his insistence on the
problem of sin, his expectation that we will seek God’s word in scripture. And
when we do, we shove Jesus out of the boat. We may have a nice philosophy, may
be doing some good in the world, but without Jesus in the boat, we are not the
Church. We are not the body of Christ.
____________________________________________________________________________
In
recent years, the willingness of some evangelical Christians to embrace Donald
Trump, to support policies towards refugees, immigrants, and the poor that are
clearly at odds with the teachings of Jesus, has seriously undermined their
claim to be witnesses for Christ, and has done great damage to the reputation
of Christianity in general.
And
far too often, progressive congregations offer no real alternative, at least
not a fully Christian one. And I am increasingly convinced that the critical
project for Mainline, progressive Christianity in the coming years is to figure
out what it means and what is required for Jesus to be in the boat with us, for
us truly to be Christ’s body.
The
good news is that Jesus wants to be in the boat with us. Jesus longs to join
us. He even seeks us out when we have headed off on our own, and he’s just waiting,
hoping we will invite him into the boat with us.
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