Don’t Drown Him Out!

“What this country needs” someone said recently, “is an almanac with all-blank pages for those who know everything.”

The same might have been said two thousand years ago in Jesus’ time — as we can see clearly in today’s Gospel Lesson in which Jesus makes some remarkable claims about Himself. “I am the Bread of Life,” He says. “I have come from heaven,” He says. “It is My Father’s Will that whoever sees the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I shall raise him up on the last day,” He says. And the people who think they know everything, the people whose minds and hearts are closed, even to any new word from God Himself, begin “complaining to each other” about Jesus. “Surely this is the Son of Joseph,” they say. “We know His father and mother. How can He now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus says in reply, “Stop complaining to each other…It is written in…