Episode Transcript
PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Abba, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Abba, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
John 6:52–69 (NIV)
Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.”
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
CONSIDER THIS
Jesus had already performed the great sign and wonder of feeding five thousand people on “the far shore of the Sea of Galilee” (John 6:1). After this, Jesus and his disciples crossed the lake in order to reach Capernaum. Realizing that Jesus was no longer on the far shore, the crowd who had been fed crossed the lake as well, headed for Capernaum, and looked for Jesus. The scene is now set for the lengthy discourse in which Jesus taught the people: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (v. 51).
This last teaching evoked a sharp response from the Jews who had heard it. Earlier they had been well fed; now they were puzzled. They argued among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Knowing what they were quarreling about, Jesus responded in a way that only puzzled them further: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.” One of the reasons this teaching was so difficult for first-century Jews is that the Torah, the Mosaic law, taught that blood must not be consumed. If we consider the passage, “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting” (Gen. 9:4–5), along with, “I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people” (see Leviticus 17:10–12), we immediately see the problem.
The response of Jesus to the Jews in Capernaum, however, was not only difficult in its original context, but it also has remained a challenge for the church today in that various theological traditions discover and affirm different meanings in these very same words. How can this be? Part of the difficulty is that Jesus employed large and powerful metaphors in his discourse at Capernaum and disagreement has emerged in terms of their proper referents, then as now. We will not solve all of these interpretive challenges here, for they are simply too great, but what we can do is describe, in grace and charity, two key ways (though there are more) our text has been interpreted by different Christian traditions.
One way to decipher the challenging declaration of Jesus in our text that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” is to discern its meaning against the backdrop of what Jesus taught earlier: “For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (v. 33) and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (v. 51). And now for the crucial question: Who or what is that bread that must be eaten and that will give life to the world? It is none other than Jesus Christ himself, “the living bread that came down from heaven.”
Beyond this, however, our text states: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood,” and so here we have a focus not simply on bread and flesh, taking in the larger context, but also on blood. The addition of the word blood in this setting does, indeed, make a significant difference; it adds to the meanings that are already present. How so? Since blood is likely an allusion to Christ’s crucified body bleeding on the cross, then the difficulty of our text of eating the flesh of Christ and drinking his blood is not resolved by simply referring to the person of Christ, who has come down from heaven, but it must also include the event of his crucifixion on the cross when his blood was poured out and spattered. That’s what the addition of the word blood suggests.
Viewing the eating of bread and the drinking of wine as a deep and rich consumption of the person (Christ) and event (on the cross) that are brought together at Calvary is a powerful metaphorical way to communicate the high standards and requirements of Christian discipleship. All of this is taken into us such that it becomes a part of us. In a certain sense, this is what it means to be a follower of Jesus. This may come as a surprise to some who have never considered this large passage in quite this way. One of the things to marvel about here is that Jesus taught truths of vast importance in very few words.
Accordingly, to be a disciple of Christ is not just the taking up of another path, another way, to some generalized or common goodness. Indeed, there is nothing ordinary or common about this journey. The words that Jesus proclaimed require nothing less than that Christ be in us, interpenetrating our very being! The relation between Christ and his followers will be greater, tighter, closer, and more intimate than what we might have initially supposed or imagined. His blood will course through our veins. His life will become our life: “the one who feeds on me will live because of me.” This is not any half-hearted following that costs little. The expense is huge, staggering. So then, in this first interpretation, Jesus employed words—he made use of powerful rhetorical expressions, to point to both his life and death, to his own person and to the event of his dying. By doing so, he also illuminated the path of discipleship. This journey, then, is marked by the all-consuming nature of personal and communal appropriation, a genuine ingestion. No wonder some people were put off by this teaching.
Another way of interpreting the words of our text—“unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you”—is to see them in light of the Lord’s Supper which Jesus officiated shortly before his death: “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you’” (Luke 22:19–20). This is the sacramental or the liturgical view, and it is championed by several Christian traditions. In fact, many of the early church fathers, both in the East and the West, interpreted our text essentially in this way. To illustrate, Cyril of Alexandria (AD 378–444), in his “Commentary on the Gospel of John,” wrote the following: “Even the body of Christ itself was sanctified by the power of the Word made one with it, and it is thus endowed with living force in the blessed Eucharist so that it is able to implant in us its sanctifying grace.”1
Since no human being is a pure spirit like the angels in heaven but is composed of body, soul, and spirit, then it is understandable that at the Last Supper Jesus would identify all of the earlier meanings that he sought to communicate at Capernaum with the physical, tangible realities of bread and wine. Jesus, in so many ways, was a great teacher. As earlier there was an economy of words, now there is an economy of things. In this current setting, there are, in fact, only two. We take the bread and eat it, and the life of Christ, the body of Christ, is now in us by faith as we are open to receive all that is truly present. Again, we take the wine and drink it, consume it, and the blood of Christ—its life-giving power—is now in us by faith as we are open to receive all that is truly present. To participate in this sacrament, then, is a rich and overflowing means of grace. It is a fountain of life. It will, of course, be necessary for all disciples, then as now, in light of Jesus’s own clear command to “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).
Recall that in the first interpretation of the difficult passages of our text, Jesus used words, a distinct rhetoric, to point to his own person and to an event: his bleeding death on the cross. In a similar fashion, the second interpretation employs distinct objects—the bread and wine of the Last Supper—once again, to point to the person of Christ and to the event of his bloody death on the cross at Calvary and to view this now in a sacramental way. In each case, metaphors point to realities beyond themselves. That’s the whole point in using them. And things like bread and wine do so as well. Consequently, a flat, literal interpretation will hardly work here; it will only baffle or confuse its hearers. And that’s why Jesus affirmed, as a good teacher: “The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life.” So then, consuming the bleeding, dying body of Christ on the cross, and feeding on all of its profound and life-changing meaning, is the reality that Jesus always pointed to whether by word or by object. What an economy of expression; what a path of discipleship!
Some of the larger group of disciples, however, who had witnessed the feeding of the five thousand, and who had followed Jesus to Capernaum, found this teaching to be disturbing: “This is a hard teaching [the Greek word, σκληρός, sklēro˘s, suggests “harsh or severe”2]. Who can accept it?” Jesus spoke with them further but then, as our text indicates: “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” This unexpected turn of events may have perplexed us in the past especially if we noted, somewhat painfully, that Jesus did not run after these departing disciples and shout something to the effect: “Wait, don’t go; you’ve misunderstood what I’ve said. Give me some more time and I will explain it all to you.” Instead, Jesus simply let them walk away; he let them go—and they never came back.
To be troubled in this particular matter (if it looks like Jesus is not being a good teacher or an energetic evangelist) is a sure sign that we have misread this passage. These disciples did not leave because they didn’t know what Jesus was teaching—oh, they got that. They left because they couldn’t accept it.
After this, Christ turned to his twelve disciples and asked: “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Simon Peter spoke for all when he exclaimed and in a way similar to his confession at Caesarea Philippi: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
THE PRAYER
Jesus, thank you for being my example of self-giving sacrifice and love, but help me, Lord, to grasp and cling to the true meaning of Holy Communion—to embrace the truth that you abide in me, and that I abide in you. Your life is my life, your blood, the life-giving power that flows through me. Help me, Lord, to share that life and power with everyone I meet.
