Chewing the Almonds When Your Teeth Are Aching (21st Sunday Ordinary B)

A tour bus driver drives with a bus full of seniors down a highway, when a little old lady taps him on his shoulder. She offers him a handful of almonds, which he gratefully munches up. After approximately 15 minutes, she taps him on his shoulder again and she hands him another handful of almonds. She repeats this gesture about eight times.

At the ninth time he asks the little old lady why they don't eat the almonds themselves, whereupon she replies that it is not possible because of their old teeth, they are not able to chew them. "Why do you buy them then?" he asks puzzled. Whereupon the old lady answers, "We just love the chocolate around them."

The chocolate around the almonds may stand for the spiritual high and, perhaps, the prestige, or any perks, for that matter, which Christians love about in following Christ. The almonds may represent the hard and difficult core of our Christian faith—the cross and all its implications! Today’s Gospel would have us reflect on our tendency to enjoy only the ‘chocolate’ and to reject the ‘almonds’ of discipleship.

“This saying is hard; who can accept it” (Jn. 6:60)? This was the murmur of many disciples who were listening to Jesus and who found his words difficult to accept. Many of these gave up following Jesus and “returned to their former way of life” (v. 66); after all, they were following Jesus to get what they had been expecting from him—bread and political liberation. But Jesus refused to be the Messiah of their expectations. So when they had enjoyed the chocolate, they threw the almonds away.

The Twelve disciples, however, did not follow suit. When asked if they would want to leave, Peter answered that they had nowhere else to go but to Jesus who had the words of eternal life (v.68). The twelve disciples are the exemplar of a committed discipleship—accepting even the cross of following Jesus. Later on, their own lives as martyrs would become powerful testimonies of their faith in Jesus!

This reality of the two types of disciples in Jesus’ time invites us to examine the quality of our own brand of discipleship today. This allows us to speak of ‘cheap’ discipleship on the one hand and, on the other, of ‘costly’ discipleship-- or for fun, 'chocolate discipleship' and 'almonds discipleship' respectively.

Cheap discipleship means following Jesus to satisfy our personal needs and agenda. This is the kind of discipleship that enjoys only the chocolate but rejects the almonds because they are difficult to chew. It is following the Jesus of our expectations but not the real Jesus who demands conversion and transformation. Disciples of this kind will readily leave Jesus and his values behind when confronted with difficult demands of faith. Or at most, this kind of Christians will be good at compromising the faith with other perceived values of their own interest. In other words, cheap discipleship is one that does not involved self-sacrifice, only self-nurturance. A very good example perhaps are Christians who ride on the crest of ‘spiritual high’ but who never come down to see the real demands of faith in working for social charity and justice.

Costly discipleship, on the other hand, means following Jesus despite the difficult demands of faith. This is chewing the almonds when your teeth are aching. This means a hundred percent commitment to the person of Jesus and the values of the Kingdom he announced. This means not taking the easy way out when things get rough and tough. Like the twelve apostles, the disciples of this kind believe that only Jesus possesses the words of eternal life.

Hence, the Christians who manifest this brand of costly discipleship maintain their fidelity in their married life despite the convenient options of the culture of divorce or culture of ‘kabit’ in society. These Christians find joy and even pride in being chaste in this age that glorify sexual promiscuity or, at the least, sexual permissiveness. They live a simple lifestyle or even a contemporary form of asceticism precisely as a counterculture to a mindless consumerist society of today. They manifest respect for integrity of creation and even fight for it against the onslaught of exploitative development purportedly pushed for economic gains for the sake of the poor. In this country, these followers of ‘costly discipleship’ strive to be honest when the norm is becoming more and more that of corruption.

Our country is in dire need of people who would embrace this ‘costly discipleship’ in order to transform our society according to the values of God’s Kingdom. This is not an easy task. This calls for a lot of self-sacrifice… for a hundred percent commitment to the words of Jesus… for hope when it seems impossible to change things for the better… for the courage to chew the almonds when your teeth are aching.

This calls for a brave and honest answer to Jesus’ question in today’s gospel: “Do you also want to leave?”