Many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” . . . As a result of this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6.60, 66-69)
In 1964, the New York Post news columnist Gene Smith wrote a historical study of the last years of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency in the early part of the 20th century. Aptly entitled, When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson, the book recounts the triumphant entry of Wilson into Paris after the end of World War I.
Exuberant crowds cheered him as he made his way down the Champs Elysee, saluting him for his role in securing a victory in World War I for the Allies. Similar crowds collected on streets as he made his way through other European cities, their cheers filling the space with energy and enthusiasm. However, when Wilson returned home to the United States, he found far fewer cheers.
Embarking on a cross-country colossal tour in an effort to drum up support for America’s entry into the League of Nations, he found resistance and ridicule, many in Congress intent on sabotaging his efforts. Experiencing severe headaches, Wilson was forced to cancel the trip before it was completed and suffered a stroke that left him paralzyed on his left side, sequestered in the White House behind locked doors, guarded by his devoted wife, Edith Bolling.
Told by a dispassionate reporter, the historical profile of Wilson’s last years offers a reflection on what happens to a man when the cheering stops. One moment popular and praised by the populace, the next bullied and bludgeoned by backbiters, his stature as a statesman slackened, Wilson ends up a beaten and a broken man.
As we consider the content of the passage of sacred writ that is presented to us today, the conclusion of chapter six of John’s gospel, we find ourselves in eerily similar circumstances, not with a political leader, but with the Galilean Rabbi called Jesus who undergoes the same experience of when the cheering stops.
Often called “the Bread of Life Discourse,” Chapter 6 of this Johannine writing begins with the feeding of the multitude, which leads to the Rabbi’s teaching on seeking the bread that does not perish, and concludes with this ignoble passage where many among his followers reject him and his words, “returning to their former way of life,” as the text states, “no longer accompanying him.”
Painful to hear, more painful to experience, the scene finds the Rabbi with a greatly reduced following, men and women who abandon him because, as they admit, “This saying is hard. Who can accept it?” Unable to accept him as the bread of life sent by the Most High God to feed his people on earth, as he had done with manna for the starving slaves in the Sinai Desert, these disciples choose a different path now, no longer walking with Rabbi Jesus, walking back on their commitment.
Inclined to take the easy way out ourselves, casting these defectors as cowards, we easily find ways to keep our focus on their abandonment of the Teacher, less easily moving the focus to ourselves, where a similar case might be made for our own cowardice in walking the way of Rabbi Jesus. It is always the first choice–to criticize others for what we also do.
So, the more proper use of the scriptures, now as always, is not to become critics of those within these pages who fail to follow the way of goodness and truth, whoever and wherever they appear, but to see ourselves in them, challenging not them, but ourselves who also fail and fall short of the call to walk in the path of righteousness.
With this approach, then, we turn to look within, not outside, asking ourselves if we also have found the teachings of the Rabbi to be difficult, so difficult that we choose to depart his company, even if we may continue to maintain the appearance of following in his ways, calling ourselves his students, adding hypocrisy to the misdeed of desertion.
It was the British writer and theologian, G.K.Chesterton, who once quipped, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult; and left untried.” Clearly, his words stand as a challenge to half-hearted and lukewarm disciples, pulling the curtain on our abandonment of the ways of Jesus, choosing to “return to our former way of life”, as did those first followers who found his way too difficult.
While there are many lenses in which to view this waning or withering of our spirits, there is one that is not so often heard or spoken anymore, a way of understanding our response to the call of Rabbi Jesus that could, if applied, correct our course, lifting us out of our doldrums as disciples, putting us back on the path that the Galilean walked. And that is by reclaiming our discipleship as a duty.
As anyone in these times knows, duty is no longer an honored or hallowed word, carrying now a connotation of a burden, an obligation, a usurpation of personal freedom. Why the word duty has become pejorative in our times is open to debate, a precipitous fall from grace that may suggest more about us than about its usage. If a word is not spoken anymore, it is because it no longer speaks to the times.
Duty, as defined by the dictionary, means a moral or legal obligation, a responsibility or a commitment. Inherent in the definition is the understanding that there is another to whom this commitment is owed or made, arguing that duty is other-oriented, not self-oriented, an attribute that goes a long way in explaining its lack of popularity in our self-centered times. If duty is still allowed, it is duty to oneself, not duty to another who is outside ourselves.
Duty, in short, has fallen on hard times, with the result that we do not respond well to long-term commitments, resist like stubborn mules when we hear talk of obligations, and resent being reminded of our responsibilities. A woman visiting her mother in the nursing home told of a nurse who refused to respond to the urgent need of her mother because, as the nurse said, “she’s not one of my patients.” A sense of duty simply didn’t register with this employee, who understood her job in a very narrow sense, not as a wider calling that would have her lend assistance to any and all.
In another day and in another time, duty was understood and lived, taught and honored. Not even considered extraordinary, but the ordinary way of living in a world with others, duty was found in the home, in the workplace, in cities and in the countryside, so common that those who failed to do their duty were frowned upon, considered oddballs.
When Ray Lambert died at the age of 100, he was the longest-lived veteran of the landing on the beaches of Normandy in World War II. Honored late in life for that heroic mission, he told the story in his memoirs that carried the title, Every Man a Hero. He explained his reason for writing the book in this way, “I worry that the connection to the past, to the values that put us on that beach and saw us through that terrible day–values that took us from Africa to Italy to France and beyond–will weaken and die when we are gone.”
He is probably right, especially if we read his book, learning in its pages of the duty that left no compromise in the hearts of these young soldiers who understood that many, if not most, would not survive to tell of the deeds. Within the first hour on the beach thirty percent of the men were either killed or wounded. And still Sargeant Lambert, a medic, continued to move ahead, facing Hitler’s machine guns and bomb blasts.
Only 23 at the time, a farm boy from Alabama growing up in the Great Depression, Lambert was wounded twice that morning but was still able to save more than a dozen lives. Hit with a bullet in one arm, rendering it useless, he gave himself a shot of morphine so that he could continue to rescue other wounded men with his one good arm. He saved many from drowning, bandaged others, and shielded wounded men behind other lifeless bodies.
With two vertebrae broken in his back and his arm badly damaged, Lambert was transported back to a hospital in London, where he remained for a year, gradually recovering from his wounds. Later, in explaining why he did what he did on that day, he said, “I just kept going. I was thinking of only one thing–getting to the men who needed me.” Then he added, “You did the job you were trained to do.”
In those words, we find perhaps the best definition of duty yet that we’ve seen. He said that he wrote his story for a reason. “I share it not for myself, but to tell you what we all went through–to show that whatever difficulties you, too, encounter, they can be overcome.” Certainly a clarion call for courage, his words, unfortunately, may fall on deaf ears, people weaned on the excesses of our times, catering to our every need, not on the deprivations of the Depression, as he was, a fertile field in which to grow a sense of duty to others.
Perhaps it is time for us to reclaim duty as a part of our identity as followers of the Galilean Rabbi, who himself understood his duty to his heavenly Father as the cause for his mission on earth, never turning away or turning back, but continuing on the path before him, however hard the path, even as it led to his crucifixion on the cross on a hill outside Jerusalem, his last hours spent with the the disdain and the derision of the bloodthirsty crowd assaulting his ears, the crowds begging not for his rescue, but cheering for his demise.
With a reappropriation of our duty as followers of the Galilean Teacher, our identity becomes clearer and less compromised. We better understand that our duty tells us what to do, keeps us on the right path, and reminds us daily that we are for others. Or, better said by the Scottish scripture scholar, William Barclay, who wrote, “In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.”
Many of the Rabbi’s followers, we learn today, found his way too hard, disavowed their duty, and returned to their old way of life, leaving him with one question for those who remained, “Do you also want to leave?” That is the question we are now left to answer. The answer, I suggest, will depend on our sense of duty.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 