John 6:51-58 (NRSV)

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.