John 6:51-58 (NRSV)
51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever
eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the
life of the world is my flesh.’ 52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying,
‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ 53So 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. 54Those who eat
my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the
last day; 55for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56Those who eat
my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57Just as the
living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me
will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like
that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread
will live for ever.’
Once again, William Barclay’s
work it at the heart of this reflection.
The further we delve into the
depths of John chapter 6, the more I am reminded of why it is one of my
favourite passages in all of Scripture.
I am interested in the way
fundamentalists – those who insist on taking the Bible literally, word for word
– stop here and see this passage as being allegorical. Why? And why do they not
see the wonderful depths of allegory that – for me – is so obvious elsewhere in
Scripture as well? If fundamentalism if correct, then, according to this
passage, they should believe that something distinctive happens to the elements
of bread and wine at the Eucharist and that it actually becomes the body and
blood of Christ!
Once more, our mentor – William
Barclay – provides some useful insights. I do believe that his emphasis on
discovering what a passage meant for the first audience is of great
significance, and he is superb in doing this.
Many modern, western people,
struggle with this passage because we are so conditioned by a literal
scientific way of thinking of proofs that can be empirically verified – “Prove
it …” is what we always want to say. This is just another form of
fundamentalism, empirical, scientific fundamentalism. For the people of Jesus’
day, what Jesus was talking about would have made perfect, even easy, sense.
At this time, animal sacrifice
was common practice. A token of the slaughtered animal was burnt as an offering
to a god. Part of the flesh was given to the priests and part to the worshipper
to make a feast for himself and his family and friends – at which the god would
be present. Once the flesh had been offered to the god, it was believed that he
had entered into it, so when the worshipper ate the meat, they were literally
eating the god. When the people then left the feast, they believed that they
were god-filled. To people who were accustomed to this, what Jesus said would
have posed little difficulty at all – if they accepted that he was a god.
Mystery religions also abounded
at this time. They were essentially passion plays, stories of a god who had
lived and suffered terribly and who died and rose again.
Barclay explains:
John
is ‘… not giving, or trying to give, the actual words of Jesus. He has been
thinking for 70 years of what Jesus said; and now, led by the Holy Spirit, he
is giving the inner significance of the words …’
While I accept this, I do not
believe that they are too far off what Jesus actually said, or else there is a
chance of fabrication on the part of the Gospel writer. I like to think of it
as John just expanding on the actual words Jesus used in order to explain them.
Having looked briefly into the historical context, we also
need to look into the insights Barclay
gives us into the meaning of aspects of this passage. E.g. what is the meaning
of the ‘flesh’. This is a reference to the complete humanity of Jesus as
mentioned in 1 John 4:2-3:
2By this you know the Spirit of
God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is
from God, 3and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.
The Apostle (I have no difficulty in accepting that the author of the
Gospel and the Epistles was the same person!) wants to stress the full humanity
of Jesus for Jesus was (as Barclay explains “… the mind of God become a person
… God taking human life upon him, facing our human situation, struggling with
our human problems, battling with our human temptations, working out our human
relationships.”
Barclay suggests that Jesus is saying here – with reference to his
‘flesh’:
“Feed your heart, feed your mind,
feed your soul on the thought of my manhood. When you are discouraged and in
despair, when you are beaten to your knees and disgusted with life and living –
remember I took that life of yours and these struggles of your on me.”
Our human lives have – since then – taken on a special glory because,
God coming in human form in Jesus, has given human life a special dignity – it
has been touched by God – or as Barclay puts it ‘… Jesus deified our flesh by
taking it upon himself …’
To eat Christ’s body is to feed on the thought that he became one of us
and to reflect on this is to be strengthened, encouraged and blessed as we seek
to imitate His life.
What about the phrase ‘… drinking the blood …’
To modern ears, this seems bizarre; the notion of drinking
blood borders on the disgusting, but the biblical context provides the much
needed perspective.
In Jewish thought, blood stands for ‘life’: if it flows out
from a wound, the patient dies. For Jews, blood is therefore sacred and the
reason why they will not eat flesh that has not been drained of blood. Barclay
suggests that Jesus is, in effect, saying here:
“You must drink my blood – you
must take my life into the very centre of your being – and that life of mine is
the life which belongs to God. When Jesus said we must drink his blood he meant
that we must take his life into the very core of our hearts.”
What does this mean?
Jesus can be a very important person of history, he can be
just a figure in a very important book (and indeed many books) and this will
all that he is, but when he enters our hearts we become part of him. Again,
Barclay puts it well, writing:
“He is saying: ‘You must stop
thinking of me as a subject for theological debate; you must take me into you,
and you must come into me; and then you will have real life.’”
This is what Jesus means by abiding in him and he abiding is
us.
At the Eucharist we ‘feed on him in our hearts by faith and
with thanksgiving.’
So we eat the flesh and drink the blood we feeding our
hearts and our souls on the humanity of Jesus, we revitalise our lives with his
life and we are filled with the life of God.
Until I read Barclay’s commentary, I am sad to have to admit
that it had never dawned on me before that John has no account of the Lord’s
Supper in his Gospel. So, while John’s writing here obviously seems to have a
reference to the Eucharist, he is also implying much, much more. John therefore
writes this vitally important section not within the context of the special
meal, ‘… but in the story of a picnic meal on a hillside near Bathsaida Julius
by the blue waters of the Sea of Galilee …’ and this implies that, for the
Christian, every meal has become a sacrament. It seems possible that John was
making this point to some who might have been making too much of the Sacrament, making ‘magic’ of it, implying
that it was the ‘only’ place where we might encounter the real presence of
Jesus in our lives. John is therefore saying that even meals in the humblest of
homes or the richest palaces – all can become sacraments, as Barclay writes: “
… he refused to limit the presence of Christ to an ecclesiastical environment
and a correctly liturgical service …’
In John’s mind, the altar and the dinner table and the
picnic mat are all alike in that at all of them ‘… we may taste and touch and
handle the bread and the wine which brings us Christ …’
Jesus is not confined to the Churches; we can find Christ
anywhere, if we open ourselves to look using the eyes of faith. John expands
the sacrament with the truth that Jesus is everywhere, probably especially in
the ordinariness of our lives.
Live sacramentally and be blessed.
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