Why People Walk Away From Jesus

In life, we are occasionally presented with provoking questions that require us to choose between two opposing options. In Sunday’s first reading, Joshua issues a blunt challenge to the Israelites - either renew your covenant with God or serve the strange gods of the other nations. In the Gospel, Jesus asks the disciples to make a choice—either to believe and accept His teaching to sacramentally consume His Body and Blood or return to their former ways of life.

We have reached the climax of our four-week meditation of the Eucharist in John chapter six. After Jesus intensified His teaching to eat His flesh and drink His blood we witness that many of His disciples drew back. The vast majority of His committed followers in a sense said “This is too much. He is too extreme.” When He started this discourse, He had five thousand people eager to commit to Him. Now, He is only down to twelve somewhat confused disciples. Even with a large swath of people abandoning Him, Jesus makes no effort to soften His words or clear up potential misunderstandings about the meaning of the Eucharist. Jesus' words of “eating his flesh” and “drinking his blood” would be rabble-rousing for Jewish ears to hear. Yet, He didn’t seem to care that people were offended by His teaching. Rather, He turned to them and bluntly asked, “Does this offend you?” (John 6:62). Yes, instead of using the word “offend” some translations use the word “scandalize” or “shock,” but the concept remains the same – God’s teaching is supposed to make us uncomfortable initially. Much like a personal trainer needs to make an obese person feel the pain of the workout, God’s message necessarily needs to jolt our sinful soul. To prevent this, our culture has devised a phrase to turn the tables back on God’s messenger. This phrase is, “You’ve offended me.” This response is designed so the person can cunningly duck out of God’s message because it's too challenging to hear all the while playing the victim card. But, in reality, all it does is display the immaturity and selfishness of the person. God doesn’t need your emotional approval before He articulates the truth. In a similar vein, does mathematics or physics need to consult your feelings before revealing the facts of science? No. In the study of God’s physical world, one’s feelings don’t enter into the equation. Undoubtedly, if our feelings did come into play, it’d obscure God’s laws as I’m sure our feelings would prefer gravity to be different, thus allowing us to fly. As Peter Kreeft observed, “In the Christian era, we used to conform our mind and lives to reality, but now in our post-Christian society people attempt to conform reality to our feelings.” Since our culture is so obsessed with feelings we become overly fixated on how others will respond, that we’ve watered down the message to appease the reaction of the other. Obviously, Jesus didn’t put much stock in how the crowd would respond. He was perfectly content with having the majority be offended and walk away. St. Paul reverberates this point when he asserts that our message shouldn’t be concerned with pleasing people but with pleasing God (cf. Galatians 1:10).   

Christianity on earth is not about everyone in the world being unified to all believe and accept Christ. In heaven (and purgatory) everyone will be unified in Christ. Yet, in our fallen earthly world, the main thrust of Christianity is to divide the good from the bad. By definite proclamation, Our Lord said He came to separate the sheep from the goats (see Matthew 25:31-41) and earlier said He came to cause division and even place families against each other (see Matthew 10:34-36). There is no unity between the sheep and the goats. So, to our societal response of “you’ve offended me,” the answer is yes, God’s message is supposed to offend a hardened soul. Imagine an obese person went up to the personal trainer after the workout and said, “You caused hurt in my body!” The trainer would then nonchalantly respond, “Good, that means it's working.” In fact, to whimper about the teaching offending one’s feelings only speaks to the emotional childishness of the person. Therefore, Christ expects His teaching will provoke a shuddering response to the point of 98% of the crowd walking away from Him.  

Here, we see why they walked away. What Jesus does provide us is a helpful lesson on the distinction between the spirit and the flesh when He asserts, “It is the Spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.” The church fathers teach us the difference between the Spirit’s ability to enlighten our minds (John 14:26) and human reason’s inability to comprehend revealed truth apart from well-formed faith (John 8:15). To have an earthbound only perspective in light of divine mysterious will leave one bewildered, and inevitably cause him to walk away because he finds the faith “too extreme.” Here, by indicating “the flesh” Jesus is speaking of human reason removed from well-formed faith.
In our Catholic faith, there is a tendency to reduce the supernatural to the natural. It takes the deep supernatural doctrines of Catholicism and applies them to human anthropology, psychology, and social justice. In this watered-down version, the faith is merely presented as being “nice.” The problem with this method is its reducing Divine revelation, theology, covenantal union in prayer, and the sacraments to a vague earthly concept that is rooted in coddling one’s feelings. Jesus' message today allows us to comprehend that the natural or “the flesh” cannot contain or adequately interpret the supernatural. The natural and supernatural are integrated, but the supernatural has to be primary. The phrase “on earth as it is in heaven” in the Our Father suggests that earthly concepts follow its lead from heavenly realities. As Bishop Barron puts it. “The supernatural cannot be naturalized, but the natural can be supernaturalized. A focus on the supernatural intensifies one’s commitment to the elevation of the natural.”

This past summer many Catholics attended the Eucharist Congress. In this setting, people squarely focused on the Eucharist for a week. What made this event unique is that it highlighted the world of the supernatural – a world that we cannot see but firmly acknowledge exists with saints, angels, and the Creator God. Once we fixate on the supernatural first, Jesus' words begin to make sense to our human reason. The question we are confronted with today is which vantage point are you going to make primary in your life – the natural or supernatural?