Hard lesson from Jesus

You stare at your teacher. She's teaching about how plants turn sunlight into their food, but you stopped understanding -- or listening -- about a million years ago. She's still talking, but you have no idea what she's talking about!

This week's Gospel (John 6:51-58) tells about people who felt like that. Jesus said some strange things, but they thought this had to be one of the strangest: He said that to get to heaven, people have to eat His body and drink His blood! Not many people understood that or listened to Him.

"I am the living bread from heaven," Jesus told a crowd. "Whoever eats this bread will live forever. Whoever eats my body and drinks my blood will be with me, and I'll be with them. Just as my Father sent me and gave me life, anyone who feeds on me will live."

Jesus' followers were like that. They hung around with Him because they liked hearing Him say that God loved them; but when He got to the hard stuff, lots of them tuned Him out.

When you finally start to see what your teacher is talking about, you feel great! You feel like you could do anything, because you get it -- you understand how sunshine helps plants grow! It was tough to learn that, but now you know it.

Jesus' lesson was tough. He called Himself "living bread" that we have to eat. That was a way of saying people had to listen to Him -- to "eat" what He was saying -- to learn about God. But Jesus really meant people had to eat His body and blood, too. We do that when we go to Communion: We take Jesus' body and blood inside us by eating bread and drinking wine. Doing that, along with following Him the rest of the time, is how we get to heaven.

Lots of stuff in school is hard, but you have to learn it to pass. Jesus' lessons were hard, too, but learning them meant something better: that He'd live in us always, until we see Him in heaven!

PRAYER FOR THE WEEK: Jesus, help me learn the hard stuff from my teachers and you! Amen.

(06-03-99)