21st Sunday of the Year
Our first reading today recounts the great assembly of the Jewish people held at the ancient city of Shechem. The twelve tribes are gathered together in a kind of parliament. Joshua presides over the parliament as leader. It is a ritual set-piece, given in three parts. Joshua begins with a summary of Israel's history; he then throws down a challenge to the people of Israel: will they follow Yahweh, the God of their ancestors, or lend allegiance to the pagan gods of the neighbourhood? A choice is called for. The third part of the ritual is that this choice is ratified there and then through a ritual covenant.
At the core of the ritual is choice. The tribes of Israel mingled with pagan tribes and came into contact daily with pagan gods. Religious diversity meant not so much different ways of worshipping God, but of different Gods competing for worship. The Jews did not deny the possibility of the existence of many gods. But they made a moral choice to follow Yahweh. Israel's fundamental religious assertion is not that 'there are no other gods', but rather, 'there are no other gods for us'. Yahweh was a moral choice.
Israel chose Yahweh over all other gods for the plain and simple reason that Yahweh had chosen Israel over all other peoples! Israel had prospered under their leader Joshua. Yahweh had raised up Josua as a leader for them. It would be foolish now in these days of prosperity to abandon Yahweh for those neighbouring pagan gods. So the following of Yahweh was a deliberate moral choice.
A similar choice is called for in our gospel reading, if in different circumstances. At the beginning of this particular chapter, we are told that great crowds followed Jesus. He had been enormously popular. They had gone to great lengths to seek him out. Some had even hijacked boats and sailed to Capernaum to reach him. But, increasingly, throughout the discourse in chapter 6, the disillusionment of the crowds has increased. They grumbled against him, we are told several times by the author. Jesus reminds them of the way in which their ancestors grumbled against Moses in the desert. 'We have been here before', he tells them.
But the rebellion continues. And, by the end of the discourse he cuts a lonely figure. His popularity entirely evaporated. "As a result of this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer walked the way with him." They had come to Jesus, we must presume, with different expectations of him. What did they what of him? The expectations of him must have varied greatly.
Four very different reasons are given in Chapter 6 to explain the extent of the crowds that followed him. The chapter opens with the following explanation: (1) "A large crowd followed him because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick." A sizeable section of the crowd, the Judeans, (2) wanted to make him their king. Jesus confronts them with a third (3) reason: "I say to you, you are looking for me because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life." We must presume that the fourth section, the few who remained with him, continued to work for the food that endures for eternal life.
Every Christian will at sometime along the road face a similar crisis. As we make the pilgrimage from infancy to adulthood, not just in a physical sense, but in a religious sense also, our needs will change and our motivations will alter. Our expectations of Jesus will change as we travel the way. The needs that we expect him to address will alter. The needs the preoccupy us in times of sickness will be quite different to those that preoccupy us in times of rude good health, for example. But our needs, and to some extent also our motivation, are largely irrelevant: the important thing is the choice to be made: either to stay on the journey with him, or.....or what? What choice have we? Jesus presses Peter on this point: "What about you? Do you want to go too?" Peter answers for a fair few people: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the message of eternal life." The choice is between Meaning or meaninglessness.