When It’s Hard to Believe
John 6:56-69
Tony’s Overview Video
How to Use
Preparing to teach
- Read the Bible Lesson by Tony Cartledge in this month’s issue of the Nurturing Faith Journal
- Watch Tony’s Video for this session
- Select either the Adult or Youth teaching guide and follow the directions
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Key Verse: John 6:69 –
“We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
All of us know what it’s like to be in school and tackle a new subject. Did you find some harder than others? Most of us do. When I was in high school, I took every math course offered. I loved Algebra and Geometry. I could do Trigonometry with my eyes closed and I thought Physics was fine. I carried a slide rule in the long leg pocket of my overalls, and I could use it. I won the senior math prize at my small high school, but I had never heard of a “function” until I got to college and was enrolled in “Pre-Calculus.” I got through it with a lot of head scratching and some help from a friend, but when I took full-blown Calculus the next quarter, the landscape changed.
I went to class faithfully and studied hard and followed the professor through derivatives without too much trouble. But then, he introduced “imaginary numbers.” I have quite an imagination, but I could not get my head around imaginary numbers. I got lost that day, and never caught up. I wondered if the part of my brain that could comprehend imaginary numbers must have been damaged when I was playing high school football, back when we were not prohibited from, but taught to go in head first. I have a twice-broken nose to prove it. In any case, I wound up with a 79 average and made the first and only “C” of my academic career.
I had gone to college with the intent of becoming a pharmacist. But in an advanced chemistry course on quantitative and qualitative analysis, the professor started writing calculus equations on the board, and I concluded that pharmacy wasn’t my calling after all.
Calculus was a hard teaching for me, and I couldn’t bring myself to pursue it.
A hard teaching (vv. 56-66)
Our text for today has to do with another hard teaching, and a lot of people who refused to follow where it led. It is the same hard teaching from John 6 that our lessons have been concerned with for the past two weeks. Jesus was speaking in the synagogue at Capernaum, according to v. 59. He was addressing a crowd that included his closest disciples, along with a mixed bag of followers, hecklers, and curiosity seekers. Jesus had fed many of them with a miraculous meal of bread and fish. Later, he segued from bread in the belly to the bread of life, utilizing an increasingly edge vocabulary that culminated in a most shocking claim:
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever” (vv. 56-58).
That’s when many in the crowd said “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (v. 61a). The word they used for “difficult” is sklēros, the root of our word “sclerosis,” which refers to a diseased organ or tissue that becomes hardened in some way. The same word could be used for hard wood, for hard knocks, for a hard person, or for something hard to understand. “Who can accept it” translates a phrase that literally means “who is able to hear it?”
The idea of eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood sounded scandalous, for obvious reasons. How could anyone accept such a hard teaching? When Jesus heard them murmuring, he asked “Does this offend you?” (v. 61b), literally, “Does this scandalize you?” The Greek word skandalizomai (look familiar?) meant “to cause to fall,” or “to give offense.” Jesus was asking, “Does this teaching trip you up?”
You would expect Jesus to offer some comforting explanation that would reassure them that everything would be fine if they would just hang with him, but he did not: he pushed even harder. “If that trips you up,” he said, “what would happen if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” (v. 62). In other words, what if you saw me take off and fly back to heaven, just shoot right up to the place I came from? Can you imagine that number?
As they stared in slack-jawed amazement, Jesus switched angles and came at the issue from a different perspective. Many of those who heard Jesus were struggling because they could not comprehend anything beyond the physical. Finally, Jesus explained that he was talking about spiritual things, not physical. “It is the spirit that gives life;” Jesus said, “the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe” (vv. 63-64a).
Even when he explained it, it was still a hard teaching, and not everyone could accept it or believe it. [DD]
John tells us Jesus knew that not everyone would believe him. Not everyone could accept his teaching. The number of people willing to crawl that far out on the limb was pretty slim.
When Jesus added “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father” (v. 65), he was not teaching that one has to be especially gifted by God in order to understand. What he meant was that only those who opened their hearts to the drawing power of God’s Spirit could begin to understand what he meant.
Perhaps those who said “this is a hard teaching, who is able to understand it?” were trying to comprehend Jesus with their brains, rather than opening their hearts to God’s Spirit.
That is not to say we shouldn’t use our brains when thinking about God. One of the greatest problems with the church is that too many Christians never think about their faith at all. There are some things that the human mind simply cannot comprehend, but where our intellectual faculties let us down, our spiritual faculties take over.
The truth is, we can’t study hard enough to “get” God – but when our hearts are receptive, God gets us. [DD] Some things are not communicated by words, but by the Spirit. Regrettably, the sad truth is that many who heard Jesus that day could not get their minds around what he was saying, and were unwilling to open their hearts to embrace it. One of the most doleful texts in the Bible is this: “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (v. 66). [DD]
A Fateful Question (vv. 67-69)
As he watched the erstwhile followers turning slowly about and drifting away, Jesus looked to the twelve who followed him everywhere, and pointedly asked them “Do you also wish to go away?” (v. 67). In other words, “Are you ready to pack it in, too? Are my teachings too hard for you, my demands too great?”
Simon Peter gave the answer that continues to inspire followers today: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (vv. 68-69).
Do you see what is different about Peter and those people who had turned their dusty sandals away from Jesus? Peter had managed to put hearing and mind and heart together. He acknowledged that Jesus had the words of life. The caretakers of their Hebrew traditions had the words of the law, but only Jesus had the words of life. The words of Jesus inspired Peter and taught him to think in new ways. But there was more to Peter’s confession than an acceptance of Jesus’ words. Speaking for the others, he went on to say “we have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Because of what they had heard, had seen, had experienced, Peter could say “we have come to believe.” Because they were open to the inner working of the Spirit of God, he could say “we have come to know” that you are the Holy One of God.
“Believing” and “knowing” are tricky words for Christians, because they can mean different things.
“Believing” Jesus does not just mean we accept the reality of his existence and his claims: it means that we trust him enough to give him our lives.
“Knowing” that Jesus is in fact the Holy One of God, the Messiah sent for our salvation, is not something that we know in the same way we know that 2+2=4. It is something we know in the same way we know what falling in love is like: we know it because it happened to us.
To say “I know that Jesus is the Savior” sounds like a piece of rational knowledge that one can prove, but we can’t. We can more appropriately say “I know Jesus as Savior” because we have accepted him to be our Savior, and we know what happened in our spirits.
If we truly believe the words of life, it is not because we give intellectual consent that they are true, but because we choose to bet the rest of our lives that they are true. If we can claim to know Jesus, it is not because we memorized a lot of Bible verses, but because he has touched our open hearts and forgiven us and blessed us with his abiding presence.
Like those ancient hearers around Jesus in Capernaum, we may also face times when we are tempted to turn back and no longer follow. There is a sense in which we must decide this every day: will we join the many who found Jesus too hard to swallow and turn away, or will we stand with Peter and say “To whom will we go? You have the words of life!”
Adult Teaching Resources
Download the PDF of teaching resources for this lesson.
This PDF contains the Teaching Guide, Digging Deeper, and Hardest Question pages.
Read Scripture online: John 6:56-69
Youth Teaching Resources
Parent Prep
Who do our students follow? Not on Instagram or Twitter, but that may give us a really big clue. Who do our students model their life after? Who do they want to be like? Who are they trying to make themselves out to be like? Sometimes, these answers can be overwhelming or hard to swallow. You might not agree with who your students say. But there is hope. The National Study on Youth and Religion says that parents are still the number one influence to their faith. For some of you, this may have been hard to hear because you might not think you are the best example. But you should hear, you still influence your students. Let that sink in and then live it out.
Additional Links/Resources
Read Scripture online: John 6:56-69
Download the PDF for youth teaching resources using the button below. This PDF contains the Teaching Guide for this lesson:
Video
Encourage youth to check out this video ahead of the lesson.
“Following the Leader” from Peter Pan
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