Many of those who listened to Jesus during his public ministry found some of his sayings ‘hard’, and said so. Many of those who read his sayings today, or hear them read in church, also find them hard, but do not always think it fitting to say so. ¶ Our Lord’s sayings were all of a piece with his actions and with his way of life in general. The fewer preconceptions we bring from outside to the reading of the Gospels, the more clearly shall we see him as he really was. It is all to easy to believe in a Jesus who is largely a construction of our own imagination — an inoffensive person whom no one would really trouble to crucify. But the Jesus whom we meet in the Gospels, far from being an inoffensive person, gave offence right and left. Even his loyal followers found him, at times, thoroughly disconcerting. he upset all established notions of religious propriety. he spoke of God in terms of intimacy which sounded like blasphemy. He seem to enjoy the most questionable company. He set out with open eyes on a road which, in the view of ‘sensible’ people, was bound to lead to disaster. ¶ But in those who were not put off by him he created a passionate love and allegiance which death could not destroy. They knew that in him they had found the way of acceptance, peace of conscience, life that life indeed. More that that: in him they came to know God himself in a new way; here was the life of God being lived out in a real human life, and communicating itself through him to them. And there are many people today who meet Jesus, not in Galilee and Judaea but in the gospel record, and become similarly aware of his powerful attractiveness, entering into the same experience as those who made a positive response to him when he was on earth.