Unfiltered — Part 1 | Where Else Would We Go
You have ticked a box you never read. Everyone has. Seventeen pages of legal text scroll past, you agree to all of it, and you never think about it again. Pastor Jess DiSabatino opens Unfiltered, a series on the hard sayings of Jesus, by asking whether you did the same thing with him in John 6. Something happened once and you said yes, but most of us scrolled fast. This is the sermon where the highlights run out.
Series: Unfiltered
Scripture: John 6:53-60 | John 6:66-69 | Leviticus 17:11
Pastor: Jess DiSabatino
Date: September 13, 2026
Key Takeaways
Almost nobody reads the terms, and almost nobody reads all of Jesus. You scroll to the bottom, tick the box, and carry on under an agreement you never actually saw. Something real happened at some point: a church you grew up in, an invitation, an experience that shifted something, and you said yes. But most of us scrolled fast. We kept the highlights, loved what we saw, and moved on. That is a fine way to download an app and a poor way to follow a person.
Everybody loves Jesus now, because everybody has edited him. For most of history, claiming to follow him got you excluded, imprisoned, or killed. Now he is on bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and tattoos, and every camp keeps a version that fits: the one who ate with outsiders, the one who called people to repentance, the one who preached the Sermon on the Mount. Pastor Jess does not call that cynical. People love the Jesus they have met. The trouble is that the Jesus they have met has been run through a filter that quietly removes whatever made them uncomfortable.
The hard saying in John 6 was not confusing, it was scandalous. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. To Jewish ears that landed straight against Leviticus 17, which forbids consuming blood and says why: the life of a creature is in the blood, and God gave it for atonement on the altar. Jesus is not ignoring that law. He is completing it. In one sentence he puts himself where the altar stood and claims to be the atonement, which is a far larger claim than the crowd came for.
The disciples who walked away left from clarity, not confusion. Verse 66 says many of them turned back, and these were not spectators. They had already given things up to follow him. They understood the terms and decided the cost was too high. Pastor Jess puts the rest of us in that room with a picture from Costco: a cart loaded with groceries, a long conversation about everything in it, and a person who is still starving. You can read about Jesus, study him, discuss him in a small group, and admire him, and stay unfed.
Peter’s answer was not certainty, it was hunger. Jesus turns to the twelve and asks whether they want to leave too, and Peter says, where else would we go, you have the words of eternal life. He never claims to understand. He has looked at every other option and found them empty. That is what mature faith sounds like: not comfort, not a finished theology, just someone who has tasted something real and knows there is nowhere else to go. The meal has been on the table the whole time. The only question is whether you are admiring it or eating it.
