THIS lection carries us into the guts of eucharistic Christianity (vv.55-56), when Jesus declares: “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.”
Much physical, literal blood has been spilt over the meaning of those words. The Greek alethes keeps it a matter of alternative whether to call Jesus’s flesh and blood “true” or “real” bread and wine.
Transubstantiation, though, goes further, insisting that Christians take the word “real/true” to mean “physical/literal” flesh and blood. Thus, the bread of communion is as truly, as really physical flesh because the beef in my chilli con carne. The elements may seem like what “earth has given and human hands have made”, and “fruit of the vine and work of human hands”, but really, truly, they should not. They are literal human flesh. They are physical human blood. This demands a feat of pietistic gymnastics beyond a lot of us.
Amid all of the theories that float to the surface in a single generation only to sink back down in the following, three important patterns will be distinguished. I even have already mentioned one: submission to the meaning as physical or literal, which sidesteps all that tedious struggling to search out how it could actually mean what it seems to say. Another option is to shrink the act of receiving Christ’s true flesh and blood right into a remembrance that’s little greater than a reflex, shorn of further significance. A 3rd possibility is to trust that Christ is “really” present, and “truly” received, but in bread that continues to be bread, or wine that also tastes and appears like wine — since it still is bread or wine.
It is usually a relief to fall back upon the wisdom of the Church of England: her admirable caution about claiming or imposing a single authoritative interpretation of the flesh-and-blood sacrifice of the eucharist. This avoids excluding those of tender conscience at either end of the eucharistic spectrum, while maintaining that the bread and wine of communion are “consecrated” — so greater than “just” physical substances — and consequently require special reverence and formal guidance.
In the miraculous feeding of the five thousand (John 6.1-14), which formed the primary act of John’s eucharistic drama, there was evidence aplenty to persuade the crowds that Jesus was, on the very least, a holy man, and even perhaps the Son of God. But one miracle was not enough. The crowds were hungry for more.
Instead of giving them what they think they need, Jesus gives them what he knows they need. That seems to be a full exposition of the sign. Indeed, it’s so detailed that the Church cannot fit the entire episode right into a single Sunday’s Gospel. It takes up 77 verses (the entire of chapter 6).
The crowd should not completely without insight. They have enough knowledge of their nation’s history to know the link that Jesus makes between his miraculous feeding and the traditional miracle of manna within the wilderness (Exodus 16; with v.58). He tells them that “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and provides life to the world”. We, who’re at all times reading John in the sunshine of his Preface, are intensely aware that the bread of God is true in front of them. Jesus himself acknowledges it: “I’m the bread of life.” And he repeats it for emphasis: “I’m the living bread.”
It couldn’t have been obvious to the gang that Jesus is the living bread. They knew nothing of John’s Prologue and the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. And the Last Supper (which John doesn’t describe) had yet to happen. We, alternatively, have had two millennia to hone our celebrations and interpretations of the eucharist, which has turn into a principal way by which we experience the risen Christ in our lives.
An ancient tradition held that manna got here to represent, for Israel, God’s wisdom disclosed to humankind. Under the brand new covenant got here this further revelation, of Christ because the true and living bread. Uniting the wisdom of God’s Word (heard and preached) with the brand new, living, bread (Jesus himself) brings us where all Christian worship goals to ascertain us: joined in a single body, through the sustenance of word and sacrament united within the person of Christ.
