Master Chef: Galilee

Another guest post! This time by Peter. Everyone say, "Thanks Peter!" 

Master Chef: Galilee

For us to say we understand is not enough, because often times we don’t, sometimes we just hold on, and wait.

Creativity is what underscores all the innovators in whichever genre. When we watch the popular cooking competition ‘Master Chef’ for example, the creativity that goes into coming up with the various foods and their names, serves to win over (or not) the judges in a markedly stiff competition for a prize.

However, despite all the creativity that goes celebrated for their abilities to fire the senses up through skill, imagination, color, texture and design, there is still a sense that Jesus’ offerings of his own “body and blood”, a follow up on his critically acclaimed ‘two fish and five loaves that fed multitudes’, notwithstanding creativity, even in this day and age, would have also enraged a public outcry to said television network and the series’ show-runners, as it did then in Galilee. We have seen scandals made from lesser ‘raves and rants’.

But in yet another one of those especially poignant passages that so frequently and powerfully marks the gospels and charges them with the character of Christ (John 6), we encounter Jesus and His twelve in a moment of deep sorrow followed by a great flash of glory. (And isn’t this the only way glory is experienced as demonstrated by Jesus Christ)

Jesus has just alienated many of His disciples by telling them that they must "eat (His) body" and "drink (His) blood." This startling directive must have been even more astonishing to its original audience than to us. They did not hear it through the filter of some two thousand years of systematic theology contrived to intellectualize and cushion us against the blow of His outrageous command, or the familiar relationship that comes from learning of his character. He hit them square in the face with it, and they felt the full force of it, and they were repulsed.

Here, Jesus, who was habitually pushing the margin of reason into the realms of faith, crossed the line. Here, He ventured too deeply into the uncharted territory of the kingdom of God, articulated too clearly the good, yet disturbing news of that kingdom, and called for an obedience too radically opposite to the reasonable sensibilities of many disciples at that time. He called them to follow too far outside their well-defined comfort lines...and they ran away in disgust or stood paralyzed in terror as Jesus walked on - walked on into the blinding light of the liberating truth He had just spoken.

The twelve stayed with Him - maybe reluctantly, maybe for reasons that they didn't know. But when Jesus asked that heartbreaking question, "Will you also leave Me?" it is Peter - the impetuous apostle - who gives us the secret to the hidden heart of discipleship:

"Where else can we go? You have the words of life!"

Peter may very well have been as perplexed over the point of Jesus' teaching as those who abandoned Him, but he was not confused about the person Jesus. Peter might have misunderstood His methods and mission, but he was certain that Jesus was the Messiah. He may have been in the dark about where he was going, but he knew that in Jesus there was light. He may have been scared nearly to death by the demands of discipleship, but he knew that in Jesus there was life. Just before this confession of his dependency on and the sufficiency of Jesus, he had sunk in the storm of intimidating waves and been rescued by the hand of a Master who knew his weakness and the shallowness of his faith (Matthew 14:22- 31).

There is much that we are intimidated by in our walk: our own fallible selfish will and singularly carnal desires – the windows and doors whose locks that don’t seem to close from the inside; doctrines that run counter to our cultures and egos; the zeitgeist that tasks itself on dismissing the age-old faith and beliefs we were raised on, beliefs that in fact seem sometimes nearly irrelevant if not insurmountable; the weakness of our human natures and the seeming severity of God's.

We can get lost in the endless debates over the mechanics of Christianity, even our own place in it, and sink in the despondency of our powerlessness to grasp the mystery of grace, but in the midst of that, we must do what the writer to the Hebrews advised and what Peter did, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith." It is He who calls us and enables. He offered Himself!  His body is our bread; His blood our drink. He has the words of life. He asks the impossible; just to get it out of the way, because it was always going to get in the way… then offers Himself. “I am the Way, the truth and the life.”

Like babies that seemingly endure a diet not of their choosing or making, for their own well-being, we too must trust He who offer’s Himself. We must trust God’s Word is better than bread, for “man shall not live by bread alone.”

One question I hear asked again and again on these cooking competitions by the judges is whether the contestants “are on that plate?” inferring whether they present a personal labor of love, something revealing not just their prowess but their own, identity, culture, passion, etc.; Well, the Master Chef from Galilee did just that, didn’t He?