11 August 2024 John 6:41-51
“The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” John 6:51
Jesus promises His flesh for the life of the world – His life for ours. And His life living in us does not mean that we stop being who we are. Just the opposite – we become the perfect version of who we are. We become our perfect selves, as we have always existed in the mind of God.
The problem, of course, is that we have no idea what that perfect self might be because we cannot understand perfection. We cannot even begin to perceive what a perfect life, a perfect self would be. We can’t measure anything by perfection because, in fact, we measure everything by imperfection. Every point, every run, every goal, every touchdown in every game ever played by anyone is a tabulation of someone’s failure. There is only a score when someone fails. Crime rates, gas mileage, interest rates, batting averages, bowling averages, body counts – every measure by which we answer the question, “How are we doing?” is a measure of how much we have missed by. So, when Jesus says, “My life will make you the perfect version of you,” we have no idea, really, what He is talking about. Small wonder, then, that the people who listened to the Bread of Life Discourse (John 6:22-71) wound up saying, “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?” (6:60). It isn’t that it is offensive as much as it is beyond our comprehension. It is like the square root of a negative number – perfection in human minds is undefined.
We don’t know what our perfect self might be. But we can know Jesus. We can know the One who speaks health into being, whose word pushes death aside. We can know the One whose word becomes food, enough and then some for enormous crowds of people. We can know the One whose word creates an environment from which evil flees. We can know the One who has been so irresistibly fascinating for so long that even those who reject Him say things like, “I don’t believe in Jesus, but I miss Him.” So, when that One says, “My life will become your life, and you will be the perfect you,” we have a reason to trust Him. And when we do, He says, as He said so frequently in the gospels, “Your faith has made you well” (cf. Matthew 9:22).
We can’t get our minds around perfection, but we can get our minds around Jesus. And when we are puzzled, we don’t have to go far to find help. There are Bibles everywhere, there are Churches everywhere, every moment can be a moment of prayer. All those who already have a living relationship with Jesus are called to make themselves and their relationship with Him available. The news about Jesus is out there, and we have God’s own assurance that it cannot fail: “My word shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11). If you want to get your mind around Jesus, and haven’t yet, just ask. God is waiting to answer that prayer.
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