19th Sunday in Ordinary Time B
John 6:41-51
“If God really became man, if that’s true, then I’ll accept all the rest,” once said a professor of New Testament exegesis who was known for getting to the bottom of things relentlessly.
This is indeed the core of Christianity: the incarnation of God. And if that is true, the rest is a trifle. The rest is no small matter: that God has willed a church, that the church has hierarchical structures, that there are signs of God’s real presence – the sacraments – that the church is a place of worship and so on. But the incarnation of God remains the core and the prerequisite for everything else. Christian faith stands and falls with it.
Today’s Gospel deals with precisely this question. And it causes offence – then as now. Who is this Jesus? How can someone who looks like an ordinary person, whose origins are known, claim to be the bread of life? And even more: this bread is not just any ordinary bread, but Jesus’ flesh, which gives eternal life.
How are we supposed to believe all this? The answer depends on how we think of God, what we do or do not believe in him. The evangelist John puts it like this: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” Who God is for me determines what I think of Jesus and that I find my way to him as the one whom the Father has sent. The Father must draw us to Himself. That sounds like attraction, fascination, being captivated that we need to recognize Jesus’ real nature.
Only those who do not cheaply dismiss the question of God, of the first and last things in life, of the whence and how and whither, will not consider it inconceivable that God has something to say to them that can go beyond everything that a person cannot come up with themselves. Only those who are not absorbed in eating, sleeping, sex and work will be open to the fact that God can surprise us in unexpected ways. Just as Jesus says: You must become a disciple of God to get a sense of who Jesus is. That he is the “God from Nazareth”.
Jesus’ listeners, however, do not prove to be disciples of God, but apply their standards to Jesus: “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” How does he come to claim something that is supposed to be significant for us? A spectacular miracle worker who taught them to shudder, yes, that would have been acceptable. But someone who is human like them, who is not at all different from them except for a weird strangeness every time he speaks of God? The resistance ignites right here, in his humanity, in what connects us closest to him.
They grumble against the fact that God could have chosen precisely this way, this man Jesus, to reach people. They block such a request from God just as the people blocked it for years on their journey through the desert.
With this objection of the people against Jesus, John has brought to the point with absolute sharpness where the distinctive Christianity of our faith is rooted: namely that in the concrete, special man Jesus of Nazareth, the question of salvation, of the ultimate accomplishment of life for all people comes to a head. This is because in this man God himself is there and acts in an incredibly human way. And because the presence of God in this man can no longer be understood in a distanced way from the outside but can only be grasped with faith. Only by those who engage in personal experiences with Jesus.
The provocation of Christianity lies in the fact that the position a person takes on Jesus Christ is nothing other than his position on God in his revelation. This statement is unavoidable if someone wants to be a Christian. Jesus Christ is “God from Nazareth”.
