To whom shall we go?

To whom shall we go?

Once you have encountered the love of God, where can you go?

This Sunday’s Gospel is the last in a series of five texts taken from Chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, whose centerpiece is the Bread of Life discourse, a discourse that some of Jesus’ disciples (if you’ll pardon the pun) found rather hard to swallow, because they are only hearing Jesus at the most literal level.  Even when he points them to the patent yet powerful intangibility of his message – The words I have spoken are spirit and life – many people remain fixed on the tangible, shocked by Jesus’ suggestion that he is the Bread of Life, registering bread only as a physical substance to be consumed, nothing more.

Who stays?  Well, the Twelve, it seems, and Peter, for sure.  When Jesus asks, Do you also want to leave?, Peter responds with an extraordinary expression of faith:  Master, to whom shall we go?  Peter has made the leap to appreciation of the intangible that so many other disciples were unable to make.  He accepts the Bread of Life for what it is:  the eternal, infinite love of God for all humanity.  And once he has done so, there is, so to speak, no escape, nowhere else to go; his old life is no longer open to him as an option.

Jesus came to cause our hearts to open, so God’s love could live there.  It’s about becoming.  It’s not about arriving – but rather, the journey there.  And the only way to go is with Jesus, the Way.

This reflection is based on Fr. Pat's Thursday night Scripture class.

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