Committed Critic

A quick disclaimer: My wife is Roman Catholic (see her blog here), and I am a member of a Church of Christ. We are committed together to working for unity among our Christian fellowships, and we believe that table fellowship––that is, sharing of the Lord’s Supper––should be an early step toward this goal. So as I consider John 6 here, I make no pretense of being a disinterested interpreter.

My friend Scott Slaughter made a good point in response to my last post, and I want to take it up as a new post interpreting John 6. Scott wrote:

Seems to me that Jesus was stringing together little bits of information at a time so the people could understand it.

He feeds the 5000 and the people missed the point. Right off the bat he tells them that they need to work “for food that endures to eternal life”.

So they stand around scratching their heads while thinking about what’s for dinner that night that would keep them alive forever.

Jesus tells them again. “I am the bread of life.”

They miss it again. Eventually Jesus repeats himself…again. Now the Jews really start to freak out, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Seems to me that the people Jesus was speaking to, just didn’t get it. They were so stuck on thinking with their stomachs that they were not making the connection.

How could they make the connection that he meant his flesh his body, his blood would all be a sacrifice for sin?

To me, this entire passage seems to be more about faith than communion. The people got frustrated and went away after waiting for their food handouts. The disciples got frustrated and Jesus calls them on it. Verse 62…“What if you see the Son of Man ascend”…

If they have to see it to believe, then where’s the faith?

I think Scott gives a good reading of what’s going on in John 6, and he highlights something that I didn’t do justice to with the sermon in the last post––that people constantly misunderstand Jesus in John’s Gospel, and that it’s often because they take things literally when he means them spiritually. So let me see if I can think through this more clearly than I did before.

Misunderstanding in John

Nicodemus (John 3) thinks Jesus is talking about being born a second time from his mother’s womb, while Jesus is talking about a spiritual rebirth: the word can mean either “born again” or “born from above,” and it seems Nicodemus thinks the former, and Jesus means more of the latter.

The Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) thinks Jesus is offering her actual water that will last forever: the phase “living water” in Greek was the normal expression for “running water,” and it seems the woman thought that’s what Jesus meant, whereas he actually meant a different kind of “living.”

It seems simple to read these in light of John 3:31 and be done with it: “The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks about earthly things.” If we take that at face value as our interpretive principle, then we expect to see Jesus in John rejecting physical meanings in favor of spiritual meanings.

Spiritual and Physical as a False Dichotomy

But Jesus isn’t always talking about purely spiritual things. In 2:18-22, the Jews misunderstand what Jesus is saying, but the real meaning isn’t spiritual as opposed to physical––rather Jesus was talking about his body (a physical thing) instead of the Temple (another physical thing). Now of course, spiritual application was key––Jesus’ death on the cross was certainly a spiritual event. Yet it was his body, not just a spirit, that died. So while the deeper spiritual meaning of the crucifixion might be key, the physical death on the cross was necessary and indeed central to what was happening.

This is what I was pushing with the sermon: on the one hand there’s a sharp break between the world and God, between the physical and the spiritual. But in another sense there isn’t. My sermon suggests that communion is a place where the division breaks down.

What is being revealed in John 6?

So then in John 6, Jesus tells people to look for food that endures (6:27), which sounds a lot like what he said about water with the Samaritan woman at the well. At this point, we can take Jesus as saying something spiritual, which the crowds misunderstand as physical. Then he calls himself the bread of life and compares himself with the manna from heaven; again, we could take this as spiritual talk which the crowd misunderstands as physical. The Jews think they know where Jesus is “from” (his mother and father, Mary and Joseph), while John constantly reminds us that Jesus is actually “from” the Father above.

Next Jesus says, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). Now things are getting more confusing for the crowd, so the Jews naturally ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (6:52). We as Christian readers assume that Jesus “giving” his flesh must have something to do with the crucifixion (and I think we’re partly right), but we’re waiting for his explanation of exactly what he’s getting at.

Yet what’s striking to me is that Jesus’ explanation that follows says nothing about the crucifixion, nor does it say anything about faith. Instead, he says this (NRSV):

“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. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This 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 forever.”

If the answer to the whole quandary raised by chapter 6 was that Jesus’ talk of bread refers directly to our faith in him through his crucifixion, then what Jesus says here at the end of the discourse is exceedingly unhelpful for making that point. Instead we get “my flesh is true food,” to which is added (out of the blue) “my blood is true drink.” Granted that flesh and blood tend to go together, blood hasn’t been mentioned since John 1:13, and here suddenly it shows up in 6:53, 6:54, 6:55, and 6:56.

So what do we make of this? I’ll grant that there’s not a completely self-evident answer, yet the sudden reference to flesh and blood as food and drink is striking. The last supper traditions in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul (1 Cor 11:23f) all use very similar language to John here. In 1 Corinthians, it’s explicit that churches were reciting that tradition in preparation for communion: bread and wine were body and blood. And it seems like the other Gospels are doing the same thing.

So when John turns to flesh as true food and blood as true drink, it seems that almost any Christian reader at that time would naturally think of communion. To me, that has to be the first interpretation of the text, unless John gives us some reason to think he’s talking about something else. Yet as I’ve noted, John’s concluding explanation for the discourse (6:53-58) doesn’t say a thing here about faith or about the crucifixion. Instead, it repeats over and over again that those who follow Christ must eat his flesh and drink his blood. John must have known people would assume this meant communion, and he does nothing to deny that that’s the case.

The possible problem with my argument here is that Jesus goes on to make another anti-flesh comment in 6:63. Here’s the passage:

Many of his disciples, when they heard this, said [to one another], “This is a hard teaching. Who can heed it?”

Now Jesus knew in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, so he said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the son of man ascending to where he was before? The spirit is the one who gives life––the flesh does not contribute anything. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning which ones didn’t believe, and which one was the one who would betray him.) “This is why I said to you that no one can come to me unless it is granted to him from the Father.”

I can see how someone could want to use this passage to summarily dismiss all the references to the flesh in 6:52-58, but I don’t think such an argument is warranted. Rather, the start of the quote above (6:60) has the disciples wondering who can accept Jesus’ teaching, and the end of the quote (6:65) has Jesus answer that God must be the one to draw people to Jesus. Assuming that that’s the topic of discourse, then the dismissal of flesh in 6:63 isn’t a blanket statement claiming that all flesh is useless, so the Lord’s supper must not entail Jesus’ real flesh. Rather, it affirms that people cannot accept Jesus’ teachings on fleshly terms––which is what the disciples are trying to do, and are finding difficult. Instead, Jesus’ teachings must be accepted spiritually, through faith––which only happens when God grants it to people.

So coming back to Scott Slaughter’s comment: I think he’s exactly right until he writes, “this entire passage seems to be more about faith than communion.”

Instead, I would say that the passage encompasses both of these things, but with an emphasis on the latter. Jesus’ audience is indeed taking things too literally, but that doesn’t mean Jesus’ alternate explanation is purely physical. Both the crucifixion and the communion table are thoroughly physical, but they’re also charged with spiritual action and spiritual meaning. The crucifixion is where Jesus became bread, and that’s why we take communion.

Now, the tough question is: In what sense is the communion meal Christ’s flesh and blood? For that, I’m not sure. However, I see nothing in John 6 that somehow pushes faith and memorial over against Jesus’ actual body and blood. Rather, John seems adamant that somehow, we consume Christ’s body and blood when we eat communion. And while this obviously happens in faith, I don’t think John 6 allows us to reduce the whole thing to faith alone. The eating of Jesus’ body isn’t something we do through faith while eating communion, but rather something we do by eating the physical bread and drinking the physical wine of communion.

I’m not sure how anyone could prove to me that this must be transsubstantiation. But I don’t see how I could read John 6 and then insist that it isn’t.

This post is adapted from a sermon that I gave at Brookline Church of Christ this past Sunday, August 9.

The lectionary text was John 6:35-51:

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever has faith in me will never be thirsty. But I said of you that you’ve seen me but don’t have faith. The ones that my Father gives me––all of them come to me, and I’ll never cast away a person who comes to me.

You see, I’ve come down from heaven to do not my own will, but the will of the one who sent me––and this is the will of the one who sent me: not to lose for him anything that he’s given me, but to raise it up on the last day. That is, this is the will of my Father: that whoever sees the Son and has faith in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise that person up on the last day.”

Then the Judeans started to grumble about him because he had said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven.” They said, “Isn’t this Jesus the son of Joseph? Don’t we know his father and mother? How can he tell us now, ‘I’ve come down out of heaven’?”

Jesus answered them, “Don’t grumble among yourselves!”

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets: they all shall be taught by God. Everyone who hears from the Father, and learns, comes to me. But of course, no one has seen the Father except the one who is from the Father––that is the one who has seen the Father.

Truly I tell you, whoever has faith has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and died; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one who eats it will not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If someone eats from this bread, she will live forever. The bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The last line, where Jesus’ flesh is given as bread “for the life of the world,” highlights the rocky relationship in John’s Gospel between Jesus and the world that will be the topic of this post.

To help clarify the discussion, I want to start out with a sketch of John’s view of the cosmos. It’s helpful if you imagine it visually:

John’s Cosmos
Below is the world, created by God but now a dark place, under the control of evil powers. Above is the realm of the Father, where truth and light reign. Jesus, then, is on a sort of a mission: he is from the Father, but he is sent here, into the world, to bring the light and truth from the Father into the dark world, more or less behind enemy lines.

Like lots of stories, John’s has good guys and bad guys. Most of the dark world rejects Jesus and kills him. But some of the people in the world see the truth when they see Christ, and they have faith. These people remain in Christ even as Christ returns to the Father, leaving the Counselor behind. The promise is that Christ will prepare a place for us, then return to the world a second time and raise us up on the last day to take us with him to the Father.

John on the World
Now, some specific passages. Some of the Jesus’ words about the world in John seem very positive:

John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but in order for the world to be saved through him.”

This is very good news for the world. God loved the world. Not just certain individuals, but the world. Jesus didn’t come to judge or condemn the world, but to save the world.

Yet God’s love for the world doesn’t preclude condemnation for people in the world. For example, John 12:47-48:

If anyone hears my words and doesn’t keep them, I am not the one who judges him; for I didn’t come to judge the world, but to save the world. Yet the one who rejects me and doesn’t receive my words has a judge: the word that I spoke will judge him on the last day.

Jesus is saying that his office isn’t to judge, at least not during his first coming. Rather, the truth is something fixed, revealed by Christ, and people effectively judge themselves by whether they accept it. So the message of good news for the world includes also a message of judgment. Jesus came to save the world, but people in the world who reject him are still condemned.

Then later in the Gospel, Jesus has harsher things to say about the world (NRSV):

If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you don’t belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world––therefore the world hates you (15:18-19).

In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world! (16:33).

Anti-Worldly?
Depending on how you read these passages, it’s easy to end up with a world that people need to be saved from, rather than a world that Jesus came to save. If we’re not careful, we could jump to the conclusion that Jesus is opposed to the created world. At one point in John 6 Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless” (6:63). The book of 1 John, which seems to be written for the same church as the Gospel of John, but at a later date, suggests that this church has actually split from other Christians who deny that Jesus came in the flesh. Apparently they thought that human flesh was unseemly, such that Jesus wouldn’t want to have any part of it. The second century saw an explosion of groups with these kind of beliefs, often called Gnostics. Many Gnostics thought the world wasn’t created by God at all but was actually a horrible mistake, created by demons. And some of the Gnostics seem to have liked the Gospel of John.

Even people who affirm that God created a good world can be drawn into an attitude that flesh is basically evil. For example, we could assume that human lives aren’t very important, because our souls are the only part that will survive. Or that we don’t have to take care of the world, because it’ll be burned up when Christ returns. Or perhaps most likely, we may simply denigrate the world and the bodies God has given us, which are an extraordinary gift. It’s possible, by trying to be more “spiritual,” for us to ignore whatever is physical to the point of ingratitude toward God.

Affirmation of the world
So we have this Gospel that in some ways is very other-worldly. But it is in this same story of John’s Gospel that God becomes very much a part of this world, because John also says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It would seem that that moment changed everything. Christians have long affirmed that once Jesus became flesh, flesh could not longer be dismissed at sinful or dirty. God became a part of the world of matter, a person made of dirt, like the rest of us.

When Jesus, the Word, offered his flesh up to death, he became the bread of life: in his teaching, in the crucifixion, and in the Lord’s Supper. As the lectionary reading tells us, Jesus said that “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). And as he will tell us later in the chapter, his flesh is real food, and his blood is real drink.

So even if the earth isn’t permanent, while it’s here Christ becomes a part of this world for our sake. One of the inspirations for this sermon is a book by a Greek Orthodox priest called For the Life of the World. The author says that the Greek Orthodox church understands all of creation as a sacrament by which God gives us his grace. What that means is that the life that Christ gives us is a life we live in this world. Because of that, we don’t need to be saved from the world itself––not from our bodies, not from the creation around us. This is God’s world, first and foremost, and it’s a gift given to us. Our life will continue eternally with God, but on this earth our life still embraces creation.

Saved from the world
But there’s another side. Christ came to save the world, and he did it because the world is lost. The world is still a dark place, and we still need a savior who is bigger than its boundaries. There are false voices in the world that want to deceive us.

Most everyone agree that there are false voices in the world––politicians, marketers, preachers, theologians, philosophers––we just tend to disagree on which voices are false. 1 John has a guideline for deterining which is which, a passage I alluded to earlier: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2).

We don’t just accept this uncritically, of course. Some people confess Christ and spout lies, and non-Christians often say things that are true and that should command Christians’ attention. And we also have to admit that the even the faithful followers of Christ we love and admire––and of course we ourselves––have our own falsehood mixed in with the truth.

But when we’re considering what the truth is, John does give us a very clear standard to start with, and that’s Jesus Christ. We’re too much a part of this world to be able to save ourselves from it, so we can’t just turn to our own ideas, or whatever we can derive from reason. Christ is the one who came into this dark world and spoke light.

We also have to avoid following just the idea of Christ, or a purely spiritual Christ, which is what the group who left John’s church seems to have taught. Instead, we follow the actual risen Jesus Christ, the word who became flesh and walked among us. And that Christ, who saves us from the world, also leaves us here to live in our flesh in this world. And he remains here with us in the flesh––the flesh that he gave for the life of the world, which is real food, and which Christians share at communion every Sunday. It is at the communion table where the body of Christ (the church) encounters the body of Christ (the bread). There is a sort of nexus between heaven and earth, where Christ’s flesh is present among us here in the world, even as we gather at the foot of God’s throne with all the saints of heaven.

John’s Gospel doesn’t tell us everything we need for our Christian lives––it is famously short on moral teachings, for example––but the book is acutely clear on another point: when we’re looking for truth, Jesus is our starting point. The bread of life that nourishes us is truth, come from heaven down to this world for us. And the place we start is each week at the table of Communion, where Christ gives to us his flesh for the life of the world.

The communion table is the center of our Christian worship, because it is something the God gives to us––lest we get confused and think that the songs and prayers we offer to God are the most important things that happen on Sundays. It is this worship that drives our lives as Christians. The communion table is where we meet him in the flesh, to give us life for our time in this world.