As one of the chief
Biblical sources for believing that the actual body and blood of Christ are
literally, physically, present in the Eucharist, Roman Catholics (and others) often
cite John 6: 22 ff., commonly known as the Bread of Life discourse. To do so, however, seems to me to ignore the
context of Jesus' words and to misunderstand his meaning, as the following
explanation will demonstrate. The text
is not Eucharistic.
I invite, indeed strongly encourage, you to read each
portion of the text identified before reading the explanation offered below.
Context
and setting (22-25)
Geographically, this conversation between Jesus and those
around Him occurred primarily, though not exclusively, in the synagogue of
Capernaum (v. 59). Those to whom He
spoke were a mixed audience that included his disciples and other followers,
his Jewish opponents, and countless unbelieving hangers on, eager to fill their
bellies. Nearly all had seen Him
multiply fish and bread in order to feed 5,000 hungry persons at once (John 6: 1-15). Many of them followed Him to Capernaum to get
more free food, if they could, apparently missing the profound theological
significance of the miracle they had witnessed and from which they had
benefited.
They did not understand that just as their forebears had
been fed by the God-sent manna (also not Eucharistic) from Heaven centuries
earlier in order to sustain their lives while they sojourned in the wilderness,
even so had God now sent his Son from Heaven in order to feed their souls while
on their sojourn through the wilderness of life in a fallen world. By feeding the crowd with miraculously
multiplied fish and bread, Jesus was demonstrating that He was to his audience
(and to the world) something like what the manna was to the ancient
Israelites. But his audience did not
understand the point, so many of them followed Him to Capernaum not for
spiritual sustenance from God, which He came to supply, but simply for more
food. Some among them apparently had an
inkling that his miracle showed he was the Messiah, but they wanted more proof.
The context for this discourse, then, is not the Passover
meal, during which Jesus instituted for his small band of disciples the ritual
breaking of bread and the drinking of wine, by which they were to remember Him
until He returned (Matt. 26: 26 ff.).
While near in time (v. 4), the Passover meal is still seven chapters
away -- seven chapters. The discussion
here between Jesus and this mixed multitude is something quite different from
the Last Supper and his exclusive instructions to his few followers. To read this discussion as if Jesus were
speaking of a distinctly Christian sacrament to a largely unbelieving Jewish
crowd, and obliquely introducing to them without any explanation the concept of
transubstantiation, is blatantly to disregard both the textual context and the
audience, who first address Jesus, not about the Passover meal, but about how
He managed to get to Capernaum without taking the last boat available, the one
in which his disciples had departed (v. 25).
Jesus'
first statement (26, 27)
As is sometimes the case with Jesus, He does not answer the
question posed to Him, but instead goes directly to the issue at hand, in this
case the crowd's shallow motivation for following Him to Capernaum: the food.
In order to meet them where their minds and hearts actually were at that
moment, Jesus employs metaphorical language about food and advises them to work
for the food that does not perish, food unlike the ancient manna or the recent
fish and bread, both of which eventually rot.
Rather than physical food that perishes, He directs them toward a very
different kind of food, a food that lasts, and that yields eternal life. Physical food is not the sort of food He has
in mind in this regard, and physical eating is not what He recommends, though
that is the sort of food and consumption they now seek. The soul nourishment He has in mind was
something that He, the Son of Man, had been appointed and approved
("sealed") to give them by God Himself. That nourishment of soul is not subject to
decay the way physical food is. Jesus is
clearly distinguishing between physical food and food for the soul, and
focusing their attention on the latter.
The metaphor of eating and drinking that Jesus employs here
was common enough among ancient Jewish teachers and writers, and normally stood
for appropriation -- in this case appropriating Jesus.
The
people speak (28)
The people respond to Jesus' admonition to work for the
imperishable food that yields eternal life by asking Him what works they ought
to perform in order to get this imperishable food. Though we might well understand that their question
was sincere, in light of what follows it was ill-conceived and misguided.
Jesus'
second statement (29)
As directly as possible, Jesus tells them that, in order to
have eternal life, they must believe -- not eat and drink -- believe. No mention, metaphorical or otherwise, is
made here of food or of eating.
Believing in the One Whom God sent is the key that unlocks the door to
eternal life, not the mastication of body or swallowing of blood. Jesus is plainly and simply instructing them
to move their attention away from food to something far more important and
enduring, namely the well being of their souls through faith in Him. Physical food and physical eating are simply
not in view here. Faith, not food;
believing, not eating; is the issue
The
people speak (30, 31)
Perhaps some of his listeners understood that His point
pertained to faith and not to eating because, in response to his instruction
that they believe in Him, they asked him for additional signs as a basis for
their belief -- as if the healings (v. 2) and the feeding of the 5,000 (v.
11-14) they had recently witnessed somehow were not enough. Others, just as
apparently, still thought He was talking about normal food and drink. To them, He responds.
Jesus'
third statement (32, 33)
As He did in verse 26, Jesus responds to the people on his
own basis, not theirs. Though they are
thinking still about the physical food from Heaven that sustained their
ancestors in the wilderness, He responds by directing them to the metaphorical
bread that comes from God and that gives eternal life to the world -- and not merely to the Israelites in the
desert. Surely his reference to bread
here is a figure of speech, for no combination of flour, salt, herbs and yeast
yields eternal life for the world.
Bakers create many wonderful things in their ovens, but salvation is not
one of them. By speaking this way, Jesus
is trying to move his listeners away from their crassly self-indulgent and
materialistic view of the Messiah and his reign. He tells them about a higher, a more ideal
(so to speak) kind of bread. He wants
them to know that the manna from Heaven was prophetic, or indicative, or
predictive, of the Incarnation, of Him and his entry into the world so that by
faith the world might be saved.
The
people speak (34)
His reference to the bread that gives eternal life evokes
from them a strong and direct response, even demand: "Give us this bread always!"
It is difficult to know for certain if they understand to
what Jesus is referring, but it seems that they do not. They do not ask for help to aid their belief
in Him. They ask for a bread that is to
be given, not a day at a time, or only for a while (as was the manna), or for a
one-time feast of fish and bread such as they just experienced from the power
and largesse of Christ. They ask instead
for bread to be given them always, apparently thinking that if they were given
it -- and were given it always -- it
would yield eternal life for them simply because the giving of that physical
bread continued.
Jesus
fourth statement (35-40)
Again, Jesus makes plain for them that the bread He has in
mind is figurative bread, not literal bread, and that He Himself is the bread
of which He speaks. He tells them that
they must come to Him and believe in
Him because He is the bread of life. If
they believe in Him, they will not
hunger and they will not thirst. Again,
in keeping with the figurative language He has been using, the eating and
drinking to which He refers are not physical.
They are used in reference to believing.
Neither are the hunger and thirst they assuage physical. He is not saying that if they believe in Him
they will never again need to eat or drink, which would be the case if He were
speaking of literal bread. Of course
they will grow physically hungry and thirsty again. One does not cease to be physically hungry or
physically thirsty simply because one is now a believer. That is not the sort of eating and drinking,
or the sort of hunger and thirst, He has in mind. But, if they believe in Him, they will find
enduring spiritual satisfaction because faith in Him is nourishment for the
soul. Once they turn to Him in faith,
once they believe, their souls will have found the food on which their souls
were meant to feed, food that yields not mere physical satisfaction, but
eternal life. They already had eaten
physical food on the other side of the lake.
But that sort of eating did not keep them physically satisfied. Nor did it redeem them. The sort of satisfaction Jesus has in mind
does not emerge from literal eating and drinking, but from believing. Believing in Him, He boldly states, is the
very will of God. Because it is, if they
believe in Him, God will deliver them on the day of resurrection.
The
people speak (41, 42)
Jesus' insistence that He came down from Heaven stirs up
dissent and debate among them because they know that He comes from
Nazareth. They know his parents. Knowing his parents and his hometown, they
figure they know and understand his origins.
They do not.
Jesus'
fifth statement (43-51)
In
order to put right the false objections they entertained about his Heavenly
origins, Jesus reminds those who have been drawn to Him that they were drawn to
Him by the very will and power of God, and He quotes from the Scriptures to
that effect. Once again He urges them
to believe in Him because belief (not
eating) is the path to eternal life (v. 47).
In explanation of his admonition to believe in Him, he reiterates the
analogy He employed earlier by telling them again that, just as their ancestors
ate manna in the wilderness, they themselves should eat his flesh and drink his
blood -- startling and graphic language that compares the Israelites eating
manna in the wilderness with his audience believing in Him. That is, just as the ancient Israelites ate
manna in the wilderness and thereby found sustenance for their bodies, they
themselves should believe in Him and find sustenance for their souls -- eternal
life -- a process that He graphically and memorably figures forth as eating his
body and drinking his blood, a figure of speech He explicitly employed earlier
(v. 35) when He clearly and overtly identified believing in Him with eternal life itself. His point here is to urge them onward to
belief, not urge them literally to gnaw on his body and to drink his
blood. In other words, because their
minds seem so firmly fixed on the pursuit of physical food, He makes a
shockingly graphic reference to physical food, and to eating and drinking it,
as a verbal means by which to catch their attention, and thereby to re-direct
their thoughts from food for their bodies to food for their souls, namely the
eternal life that is the blessed consequence of believing in Him. So that they, in their craving for food and
drink, might turn to Him in faith, He refers to Himself as food and to believing
in Him as eating and drinking.
Notice
carefully that in verses 35, 40, and 47 Jesus clearly indicates that believing in Him yields eternal
life. When, therefore, He indicates in
other verses that eating his flesh and drinking his blood also yield eternal
life, He clearly is drawing a connection between believing, on the one hand,
and what He calls eating and drinking, on the other. In this figure of speech, the latter
symbolizes the former, not the other way round.
The believing is literal; the eating and drinking of his actual body and
blood are not. To take his words
literally, as if He were linking their eternal salvation to some kind of
grotesque cannibalistic ritual, is abhorrent.
To imagine that He is directing them literally to feast on his body and
to drink his blood is a notion any ancient Jew would have found both wicked and
disgusting -- and clearly against the quite specific injunction of God Himself
against any such practice (Gen. 9:4).
That is not what Jesus intends.
By
calling Himself "the living
bread" in v. 51, He puts beyond all doubt that his language here is
metaphorical. Babies and goats, for
example, are alive. Loaves of bread in an oven or stored in plastic bags on a
grocery store shelf are not. Wafers,
crackers and loaves are not alive. Jesus
is referring to Himself as the living bread, and his use of the word “bread”
here is unquestionably metaphorical.
Bread is not alive. Jesus
is. He cannot be speaking literally
about Himself as "living bread."
He is a man, not a loaf. Bread is
not alive; He is. It must be a
metaphor. It cannot be literal. Nor, in keeping with his non-literal
language, does He mean for us literally to eat His body and drink his
blood. Chewing Him up and swallowing Him
down are not what He has in mind.
The
people speak (52)
Still not properly understanding Jesus' metaphorical
language, the crowd was shocked and grew deeply puzzled: How could they
possibly eat his body or drink his blood?
It was unthinkable. Had they
understood his words in the non-literal way in which He meant them, their
befuddlement and disgust would have quickly disappeared. Their befuddlement is rooted in their
misunderstanding Jesus as speaking literally.
Jesus'
sixth statement (53-59)
Jesus continues to press home the startling metaphor He is
employing, apparently intending by its cannibalistic absurdity to shock His
hearers out of their preoccupation with physical food and with physical eating
and drinking. So He repeats and
amplifies His point, which is expressed in the aorist tense (v. 53), which denotes
a once-for-all action, a grammatical choice thoroughly unsuited to the repeated
participation required in the RC Eucharist, were the Roman reading here to be
followed.
The
disciples speak (60)
Some of Jesus' disciples were among those who mistakenly
thought He was speaking literally. Because
they did, they too found His words deeply offensive, and (as one translation aptly
puts it) "hard to stomach." Because
of their misunderstanding, and the shock and offense to which it led, He
provides His own explanation of the teaching He has just articulated.
Jesus'
seventh statement (61-67)
As He sometimes does after He speaks figuratively and
non-literally (cp. for example, Luke 8: 11ff), Jesus explains carefully to His
disciples exactly what He meant. He
tells them that He is not speaking about actual flesh. He tells them that the flesh yields no
benefit, none. As in the King James
translation, "the flesh profits nothing." The word "nothing" could hardly be
more absolute. Any benefit He has been
talking about up until now is not related to flesh or to eating it. Flesh profits nothing. By contrast, what He has been talking about
up until now yields unimaginable profit -- namely eternal life. If
flesh profits nothing, and if what He has been talking about yields the
unimaginable profit and benefit of eternal life, then He cannot have been
talking about flesh. By explaining
Himself in this way, Jesus was correcting the error of some of his disciples,
an error they shared with the crowds that also had mistook his meaning by
interpreting Him literally. His words
are spiritual, He tells them, and it is His words, His message, that brings
eternal life, and which He puts forward for their acceptance and beleif, not
his flesh and blood for their physical consumption. Those fleshly things profit nothing, He
insists.
The RCC, it seems to me, falls into the exact error Jesus
worked so carefully to correct throughout this discussion. The RCC insists that Jesus is speaking
literally about eating human flesh and drinking human blood, and that He is
doing so in agreement with their transubstantiationist view of the
Eucharist. But you could hardly insist
that Jesus is telling you to eat His flesh and drink His blood in order to
obtain salvation if He tells you that the flesh you eat profits precisely nothing. Salvation is very far from nothing. If the RCC is intent upon understanding Jesus
literally, then the word "nothing" ought to be literally understood
as well. In short, by misreading Him as
they do, Catholics are ripping the Bread of Life discourse out of its
historical setting and planting it foursquare into the upper room and the
Passover, and by doing so they thereby insist that Jesus was, without any overt
explanation at all, incorporating for a disparate Jewish audience in Capernaum the
Greek philosophical notions we call "substance" and
"accidents," as well as the distinctions between them. No one in Capernaum at that moment -- not
Jesus, not his disciples, not his Jewish opponents, and not the food-seeking
multitude -- says anything explicitly about the Passover meal or about the
Eucharist, much less about the later RC doctrine of transubstantiation or any
of its theological corollaries and Greek philosophical underpinnings. By insisting what it does, the RCC is reading
enormous amounts of its own theology back into the text. As the next few verses indicate, Peter, whom
they follow, does not.
Peter
speaks (68-70)
While
some of Jesus' followers left Him at that time, Peter did not. Once Peter heard and understood Jesus'
explanation of the connection between eternal life and believing in Him, he
stood firm. Indeed, rather than
following the deserters, Peter rose to the theological and spiritual profundity
of which he is sometimes so capable.
Though others might go away, Peter knows that the words -- not the flesh
-- of eternal life come from Jesus because Jesus is the Son of the living
God. In John 6, Jesus Himself makes
plain repeatedly and
precisely how He expects people to obtain the gift of
eternal life -- by believing. Peter
gets it:
"we believe," Peter says, not "we eat, drink, or
swallow" (v. 69).
Salvation is appropriated by faith, by belief, not by
the
gastro-intestinal system. The
eating and drinking are
figurative of belief.
Belief is not figurative of
chewing, drinking, or swallowing.
What
we have in the bread is symbolic of his flesh.
The flesh He gave for the world was real. It was crucified and has ascended into
Heaven, which is where it remains until now, and will remain until the Second
Coming. That flesh is not on earth. We know where that flesh is. We know where his body now resides. His disciples themselves told us so. They watched it ascend to Heaven. They told us about the event. They told us exactly where his body now
is. It is not where some traditions
insist it is.
Perhaps
long exposure has inured us to how shocking the Roman way of interpreting Jesus
really is. In order to feel it again, we
ought to interpret a parallel passage from the same text. In John 15: 5, Jesus says, "I am the
vine and you are the branches."
I quote the words of
a Catholic fellow discussant words regarding John 6 here: "No matter how much you deny it, those
words are unambiguous. They are clear,
direct statements and *by definition* are not the [sic] figures of
speech." If I applied his bold
words and bolder hermeneutic to the passage in John 15, then Jesus' words are
both literal and true, and the only reason that He and all Christians don't
appear to have bark for skin and leaves for hair is because while the substance
of both His body and ours has changed from body to bush and from hair to leaf,
we still look like we did before because the accidents remain the same. Despite all appearances to the contrary,
Jesus really is a vine and we really are branches. He really is a door (John 10: 7, 9); He
really is a shepherd, and, by extension, we really are sheep (John 10:
7-16). The only reason He doesn't look
like a door and we don't look like sheep is because, while the substances have
changed, the accidents have not. It's a
miracle. How we can have the
substance of branch and of sheep simultaneously must be a miracle too.
