Do You Want to Leave Too?

The day before, they had wanted to make him king.

He had fed a hillside full of people from a boy's lunch, and the crowd decided on the spot what he was. Truly this is the Prophet who is to come into the world. They were about to take him and crown him by force, so he slipped away up the mountain alone. The next morning they got into boats and crossed the lake to find him.

They found him in Capernaum, and he talked to them in the synagogue there, and by the time he finished, the room had emptied.

Not the curious. Not the critics. His own people were walking out the door.

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What he said was hard, and John doesn't pretend otherwise. He called himself the bread that came down from heaven. He said that whoever ate his flesh and drank his blood would have life. People who had followed him for months heard it and stopped. This is a difficult teaching. Who can accept it?

He didn't take it back. He didn't explain it a second, gentler way so they would stay. He asked them whether it offended them, and said the words he'd spoken were spirit and life, and then John writes one of the quietest sad sentences in the Gospels.

From that time on many of His disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him.

John's word for it is walking. They had walked the lake roads with him, slept on the hillsides, eaten the bread. Now they stopped walking. Nobody stormed out. They just went home and didn't come back, the way most people leave most things.

Then he turned to the Twelve.

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Do you want to leave too?

It reads like a dare in English. It isn't one. In John's Greek the question is built to lean toward a no, the way you'd ask a friend at the door, "You're not going too, are you?" Several English translations render it just that way. He wasn't daring them to go. He was asking the way people ask when the room has just emptied and they'd like to know who's still there.

Simon Peter answered. And what he said is worth reading for what's missing from it.

Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life.

He didn't say he understood the hard teaching. Nobody in the room did, as far as the text lets on. He didn't defend it or explain it to the others. He didn't say where would we go, as if the question were about a better group or a better building. He said to whom. He'd looked around at the other options, and every one of them was a person, and none of them was this one.

That was all Peter had. Not a system. A name, and a reason that fit in one sentence.

He added one more line. We believe and know that You are the Holy One of God. He said it for all of them, in a room that had been full that morning.

There's a detail here that's easy to pass over. Capernaum was Peter's town. Mark tells of a Sabbath early on when Jesus taught in that synagogue and walked straight from it to the home of Simon and Andrew. The people walking out the door that day weren't strangers from across the lake. Some of them were very likely his neighbors, people he'd bought from and sold to and stood beside on other Sabbaths in that same room. Peter watched his own town decide this was where they stopped, and then he had to walk home through it.

Staying is easy to admire from a distance. Up close it often means being the one left in the room after everybody you know has gone home, and not having a good explanation for why you didn't go with them. Peter didn't have one. He had a person.

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The story doesn't let Peter stay tidy, and it's better for it.

Not long after, on the worst night of all, Peter stood warming himself at a fire in a courtyard and was asked three times whether he was one of this man's disciples. Three times he said no. The man who had said to whom would we go went, for one night, as far away as a person can go while standing in the same yard.

And his answer in Capernaum still stood. It had never depended on Peter being strong. It was true when he said it, and it was true the night he couldn't, and it was true the morning after.

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Some time later, in Jerusalem, there was a man who had been blind from birth, questioned by people who knew far more than he did. They wanted him to say what he thought of the man who healed him. Was he a sinner? Was he from God? He couldn't settle any of it. He didn't try.

Whether He is a sinner I do not know. There is one thing I do know: I was blind, but now I see!

Put him next to Peter and something comes clear. Neither of them had the whole of it. One couldn't explain the hard teaching. The other couldn't answer the theology. One had a name he couldn't leave. The other had one fact about his own eyes. Both of them stayed on what they had, and neither pretended it was more.

When the group thins and the old certainty goes quiet, you don't need the whole system back to keep walking. One thing you know, and one person you can't find a replacement for, has been enough before.

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Where this meets your week

The group that thinned. A role usually comes with a crowd. The people at the office, the board, the congregation, the parents on the same team for twelve seasons. When the role ends, a lot of them stop walking with you. It's one of the quieter losses that come with the end of a role, and hardly anyone mentions it at the send-off. Nobody is cruel about it. They go home and don't come back, the way the disciples did in Capernaum. John doesn't say one bad word about the ones who left.

Make two short lists. On the first, the people who used to be around because of the role. On the second, the people who are still around now that it's gone, even if there are only three. Don't spend long on the first list. Call one name from the second list this week, for no reason at all. If the reason feels too thin, give them this one: "I was thinking about who's still in my corner, and you came up. How are you doing?" Then let them talk.

The teaching you can't swallow. Some people carry one piece of faith they can't accept anymore, and they've assumed that one piece means the whole thing is over. Peter stayed while the hard saying still sat there unexplained.

If there's a line you can't get past, write it in one plain sentence. "I can't believe a loving God would let my sister die like that." "I don't believe everyone outside the church is lost." Under it, write a second sentence: "What I still can't let go of is..." and finish it. Then leave both on the page. Don't try to reconcile them this week. You're allowed to stay in the conversation with a question still open, the way the twelve did.

When faith ran on a schedule. For people whose role kept them inside the building, the staff, the deacons, the ones who ran the nursery or the sound board, belief and the calendar were tangled together. When the calendar stops, faith can go quiet with it. The question in Capernaum leaned toward hoping someone would stay, and it didn't come with a schedule attached.

Take ten quiet minutes this week, no program, no reading plan. Same chair, same time, three mornings in a row. Don't try to pray well. If anything at all comes to mind, say it out loud in a plain sentence, even if it's "I don't know if anyone's there." On the third morning, write down whether anything was still there. A little counts.

Someone you love who left. A child, a friend, a spouse who walked out of faith and didn't look back. Nothing in the story tells anyone to chase the ones who turned back, or to win the argument with them.

Don't argue this week. Have dinner with them. Keep walking with the person, whatever they've stopped walking with. Ask about their work, their kids, the thing they're building. If faith comes up, try saying, "I'm still figuring some of it out myself," and mean it. Let the subject wait until they bring it up, even if that takes years. The twelve who stayed didn't stay because anyone argued them into it.

Doing it with someone else. This chapter's question is a good one to ask with a friend, a spouse, or two or three people who've known you a long time, because the group thinned for all of you. Meet somewhere ordinary, a kitchen table, a booth at breakfast. Each person answers two questions, and nobody comments until everyone has gone: "What's one thing I do know?" and "Who's still walking with me?" Keep it to five minutes each. If someone says "I don't know anymore," that's an answer. Write it down and go on to the next person. Meet once and see if anyone wants to meet again. If they do, keep it to the same two questions for a while. They hold up longer than you'd expect.

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Write your one thing on a card.

Tonight, or first thing tomorrow, before the day fills up. Use an index card, or the back of an envelope, something small enough to carry. Give it fifteen minutes at the most.

On the front, the blind man's sentence, with the end of it left open: There is one thing I do know. Finish it from your own life. Not what you were taught to say. What you would still say if the room emptied. "I was carried through the year of the chemo." "My kids turned out kind." "Something met me in that hospital chapel."

On the back, Peter's question, in your own words if you like: "To whom would I go?" Answer it honestly. If there's a name, write the name. If there isn't one yet, leave it blank and keep the card anyway.

Put it somewhere you'll see it in the morning. The bathroom mirror, the dashboard, the inside of the cabinet where the coffee is. Read the front on the days that are quiet. Read the back on the days the room feels empty.

If the front stays blank after fifteen minutes, write "I'm still here" and stop. That counts as one thing. If you write something and doubt it by Thursday, don't throw the card away. Peter said his sentence in Capernaum and denied it by a fire not long after, and it was still true. Neither side has to be finished for the card to be yours.

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The room in Capernaum had been full when the day started.

By the end there were twelve men left in it, and one of them still said we.