The Love in Daddy's Hands

​Today, at last(!), we wrap up Christ’s long discourse on the bread of life. Once again, Jesus has told people to “eat my flesh and drink my blood.”
 
Many in the crowd took Jesus literally and were understandably repulsed. As we heard last Sunday, they “disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” (6:52).
 
Even some of Jesus’ followers were troubled. In our reading for this morning, they said, “this teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
 
Jesus did not back down. Jesus also didn’t clarify exactly what he meant. Instead, Jesus told the crowd and his disciples that “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”
 
It is as if Jesus were challenging them. You don’t understand what I am saying. You don’t like what you hear. So, do you trust me? Do you trust me enough to accept what I am saying even when it’s hard. Can you believe that what I am saying is good news, is spirit and life, even though it doesn’t sound that way to you right now?  
 
The challenge was too much for some of them. John tells us, “many of [Jesus’] disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”
 
Peter himself struggled with what Jesus had said. So, Jesus confronted Peter directly. Is it too much for you, too? “Do you also wish to go away?” Or can you trust that this hard saying truly is spirit and life?
 
For once, Peter rose to the occasion. Peter knew that Jesus had “the words of eternal life.” And so, even if Peter couldn’t make sense of the troubling words he had just heard, Peter could still affirm that Jesus was “the holy one of God.” And Peter kept following Jesus, waiting and hoping that someday he would understand better what the whole eat-my-flesh and drink-my-blood thing meant.
 
I love this story. In this story, Peter shows us what faith looks like. In Peter’s struggle we get a picture of one of the great challenges on the Christian journey. How can we come to accept the hard things as spirit and life?
 
Today we aren’t much bothered by Peter’s particular problem. We know what Jesus meant when he told us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Jesus was not proposing cannibalism as some of them seemed to think. Jesus was giving us the gift of the Eucharist. Knowing that, we easily understand Jesus’ words that day as spirit and life. We’ll benefit from that spirit and life in a few minutes, when we share the sacrament.
 
But I suspect we all have had our struggles with hard things.
 
Some of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels are difficult to hear.
 
A big one is, “Take up your cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:35).
 
If we take Jesus seriously, we might say, with the departing disciples in our reading, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And yet we believe that this saying is spirit and life.
 
But I think especially about hard things that happen, things that come as unwelcome answers to our prayers.
 
On the night before he died, Jesus himself prayed, “Father, take this cup from me.” Jesus added, “Not what I want, but what you want.” And God did not want to take the cup from Jesus. A hard answer to Jesus’ prayer. And spirit and life for us.
 
Sometimes we experience what Jesus experienced that night. Sometimes the answer even to our most heartfelt and faithful prayer is, “No.” In those times, God’s word in answer to our prayers can be hard to accept.
 
We pray, God, bring peace to the holy land. God, heal the person I love. God, help me in this situation that is really hard for me. God, I am lost; guide me.
 
And God answers however God answers.
Faith means a lot of things. But one of the real tests of faith is finding ourselves in Peter’s position. We pray, and God’s answer strikes us as hard.
 
The question for us, as for Peter, is, can we respond with faith? Can we remember that Christ is the Holy One of God? That Christ has the words of eternal life? That what we are hearing or experiencing, hard though it may be, has God in it, bringing good out of it, offering us spirit and life in the midst of it? Can we respond with enough faith, enough trust, to accept God’s words and seek for the spirit and life in them?
 
I think of two quotations which get at what I am asking. The first comes from another book Deacon Terry gave me by Michael Casey. This one is on humility, which Terry apparently thinks is a growth area for me.
 
Here is what Casey says. “Humility calls us to recognize that God’s gifts come sometimes in disguise. This means having faith in a Providence that is active at all times….Sometimes we have to subordinate the instinctive evaluation of a situation to our faith that all that happens comes from God’s hand and is meant for our good. The lower truth of our immediate reactions must yield to the higher truth of a loving and caring God. Sometimes it is only many years later that the real meaning of events is revealed.”[1]
 
I’ll say that again in my own words. When things don’t go our way, our instinctive reaction is negative. We think it is a bad thing. But of course we don’t know everything. We are not in a position to judge what God does or says. If we can remember that, then maybe we let go of our instinctively negative reaction and instead respond in faith, trusting that God loves us and cares for us.
 
Hopefully we will understand someday. Hopefully we will eventually get the spirit and life in the hard thing God does or says. But it may take years. We may not understand in this lifetime. And so we are stuck with faith, with trust, with the knowledge that God’s love sometimes moves in mysterious ways.
 
The other quotation is simpler. It comes from a country song by Holly Dunn called “Daddy’s Hands.” I loved this song when it came out, nearly forty years ago. I hadn’t thought of it in years until it came back to me during a session of contemplative prayer a week or so ago.
 
Here are the lines that came back to me, although I needed a little help from the internet to get them right.
 
“Daddy's hands were soft and kind when I was crying; Daddy's hands were hard as steel when I'd done wrong; Daddy's hands weren't always gentle but I've come to understand; There was always love in daddy's hands.”
 
The song is about the singer’s father. But I hear it as a song about our heavenly father. God’s hands can sometimes seem hard as steel. Certainly, God’s hands aren’t always gentle. But, as Holly Dunn sings, and this is the key point, “there was always love in daddy’s hands.”
 
The challenge, but also the gift, of faith is to trust that love, and to work at seeing the love in God’s hands, even when they are hard.
 
This is my prayer for us: that we can follow Peter’s example and trust that Christ’s words are spirit and truth even in those times when we struggle to see the good news in them. And I pray that in Christ’s name. Amen.


[1] Casey, Living in the Truth, 24.