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.