Saturday May 6
The experts talk about the crisis of Galilee or the crisis of the bread; it’s the time when Jesus' disciples are divided among themselves while he begins the journey to Judea. Many left and no longer went with him: against the dramatic background of this phrase the figure of the traitor Judas looms. To follow Jesus we must overcome the temptation to think ‘according to the flesh’, not to look for purely natural evidence and to choose the supernatural light of the spirit. The profession of faith of Peter gives us the key to the process: You are the Holy One of God. Peter recognizes the transcendence and divinity of the Master.
Alternative
“This sort of teaching is very hard!” they said. The word translated here as ‘hard’ is skleros, and it doesn’t mean ‘hard to understand’, so much as ‘hard to accept’. For us today it may indeed by hard on both counts. Also in John’s gospel, Nicodemus found the Lord’s related teaching on ‘being born again’ hard to accept (ch. 3). In each case, instead of entering into complicated explanations, Jesus just placed the mystery there once more, “Unless you are born again... ” (3:5); “unless you eat...” (6:53). It is hard for us who live in cultures that are saturated with the commercial spirit, to understand these mysteries. The commercial spirit is built on pure logic: supply and demand, and profit. But these mysteries of faith touch a deeper place in us than the rational brain. They touch the source of life itself in us. That is a place that it is sometimes ‘hard’ to reach. There is a kind of ‘spiritual hardening of the arteries’, or ‘sclerosis’ (a word that comes from skleros).
