Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Safety in Numbers”
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Ephesians 6:10-20/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (John 6:56-69/NRSVUE)
I was looking at the volume controls on the sound board back there earlier this week and noticed that they only go up to ten. Wouldn’t it be better — wouldn’t it be easier to hear in here — if they went up to eleven? I’m kidding, of course.
“Up to eleven” is a phrase that was coined in the 1984 movie titled This Is Spinal Tap. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the film is a fictitious documentary about the exploits of a heavy metal group by that name, one whose main claim to fame is being “one of England’s loudest bands.”
In the scene in question, guitarist Nigel Tufnel (played by Christopher Guest) is giving a tour of his sound equipment to the documentary’s director, Marty DiBergi (played by Rob Reiner, who was the actual director of This Is Spinal Tap); Nigel proudly points out one of his amplifiers, which has a volume knob that goes up to eleven, unlike most others that only go up to ten.
When asked by Marty why this matters, and sincerely believing that this additional number increases the amp’s volume and value, Nigel explains, “It’s one louder, isn’t it?” When Marty then inquires why the amp factory wouldn’t simply make the ten setting be louder, Nigel hesitates and responds disbelievingly: “These go to eleven.”
As ridiculous as all of this might sound, it was even more ridiculous in real life. After the film became a cult classic, real-life musicians and bands started demanding equipment whose control knobs went up to eleven (or higher), and I recently read somewhere that the volume on Amazon’s Alexa device goes up to eleven too. The IMDb website, which rates movies on a zero to ten star scale, gives This Is Spinal Tap a rating of 7.9 out of eleven stars. And the phrase “up to eleven” is now defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. Another curious case of life imitating art, I suppose.
But what made the art funny in the first place is the fact that it imitated life. As is the case with most good comedy, we laugh because there’s an element of truth to it. I mean, we really do live in a world where “more” is generally (and uncritically) understood to mean “better.”
And let’s be honest, we do the same thing around here too. I’ve heard with some frequency during my time in with congregation the lament that there aren’t as many people here in worship as there used to be; that there’s less kids participating in Sunday School and in Youth Group than there used to be; that there’s fewer people volunteering to serve in the church than there used to be. I don’t doubt that all of this is true, though we’re definitely not the only church for which it is true. And apparently this creates some angst for amongst us.
But if we believe that less is bad, then that’s pretty much believing that more is good from the opposite direction. I guess what I’m really wondering, though, is why this matters so much to us — because, frankly, it doesn’t matter all that much to Jesus.
For the past few weeks our gospel reading has come from John’s “Bread of Life” discourse, the part of the Fourth Gospel in which Jesus teaches his followers over and over (and over) again that he is the bread of life, or bread from heaven, or the bread that will give eternal life — you get the picture. But amidst Jesus’s seeming fixation upon baked goods it’s easy to miss something else that’s been going on the whole time — something that reaches a critical point today.
Just before Jesus begins talking about bread, John tells us about the growing and increasingly aggressive crowds that have been pursuing Jesus around Galilee; in fact, they’re getting so good at tracking him down that they manage to arrive where he’s headed before he gets there. Heck, some of them even planned to take Jesus by force and make him their king.
At some level, it’s easy to understand why they’re so eager to be near Jesus. I mean when you go around healing people and feeding people with few questions asked and no strings attached you probably shouldn’t be too surprised when they take a liking to you.
Jesus, of course, isn’t surprised in the least — which is why he says to the crowd that just so happens to be waiting for him on the far side of the Sea of Galilee when he arrives there, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”
And immediately thereafter, Jesus starts describing himself as the Bread of Life, at which point things get real, real fast. The Jewish authorities, who have a problem with pretty much everything that Jesus does, have a really big problem with him telling people this. How could this Jesus, son of Joseph, this poor laborer from down the street in the bad part of Nazareth, possibly be so presumptuous as to say that he’s the bread that came down from heaven? In their minds, it’s blasphemy of the highest order.
But Jesus doesn’t stop saying these things; in fact, he keeps doubling down on them, telling anyone who will listen that he’s the Bread of Life, that they will only find eternal life by eating his flesh and drinking his blood — which, to be fair, is kind of a weird to say.
As Jesus continually ups the ante here, the people who had clamored to be around him just a short while ago get more and more uncomfortable; and Jesus is well aware that many of the folks who just recently couldn’t seem to get enough of him are now complaining about him behind his back. So what does he do? He turns up the heat even more, basically saying to them, “This whole bread and blood thing offends you? Just wait until you see me rising up to heaven, where I came from in the first place. How are you going to feel about me then?”
And as Jesus has been saying these increasingly provocative things, the crowds around him have quietly and gradually been getting smaller and smaller; as John tells us in today’s passage, “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Jesus, of course, has always known that were some who did not believe in him, that there were some who followed him around simply for the healing miracles and free food.
But Jesus doesn’t seem the least bit angry or upset about any of this; he doesn’t chase them down in order to get them to come back; and he doesn’t judge them either. He simply turns to the last remnant of twelve disciples (that is to say, his Apostles) and asks them, “Do you also wish to go away?” And Peter, who is generally the spokesperson for the group, pipes up and answers: “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.” In other words, “Knowing what we know about you, where else would we choose to be?”
Honestly, when you stop and think about it, it’s kind of surprising that Jesus was even able to find twelve disciples to stick with him at this point (well, eleven, really, because Jesus also knew from the first that the one named Judas was going to betray him).
You see, all of that stuff Jesus had said about eating his flesh and drinking his blood wasn’t just talk, he really meant it — and whether he meant it literally or metaphorically really isn’t the point. Because, no matter how you choose to look at it, what he was telling those people back then (and, frankly, is still telling us today) is that true discipleship means incorporating who Jesus is and what he says and what he stands for and what he does — incorporating his very being — into our very being; it means making him a part of us and us a part of him; it means loving God and loving our neighbor and loving our enemies and caring for the least of these as he did. And, make no mistake about it, these are big commitments — ones that not everyone is ready to make.
People come to church — people come to this church — for all sorts of reasons, and they’re not ours to judge (either the people or the reasons). As today’s story tells us, Jesus didn’t judge those who chose to follow him, those who chose not to follow him, or those who chose to follow him only up to a point. What Jesus did, however, was draw a small group of people into closer relationship with him and with one another, and inspired them to go out and love the world. And if that was good enough for Jesus, then maybe it should be good enough for us too.
Sure, Jesus and his first disciples were able to build a movement (and a pretty big one at that), but that wasn’t the point of what they were doing, in and of itself. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself because that’s what God is calling you to do — that was the point of what they were doing; the numbers, such as they were, were incidental.
Jesus didn’t act from the assumption that more necessarily meant better;
Jesus didn’t seek followers for the sake of having more followers;
Jesus didn’t recruit disciples as if he were working on commission.
So then, why, pray tell, do we?
Perhaps we’d be better served, by focusing instead on serving better, on leading with love, on being faithful stewards of the resources we’ve been given, on changing our community and the world for the better, and trusting that God will take care of the rest.