John 6:53

‘Jesus therefore said to them, “In very truth I tell you, unless you do eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood you do not have life in yourselves. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day”.'

Jesus now made plain that what was in mind was His death, and that all who would be saved must benefit through that death. As mentioned above His words are full of irony. You do not know it, He is saying, but in plotting to kill Me you are fulfilling God's purposes. If you do not put Me to death (eat my flesh and drink my blood), life will not be available. He might well have added, ‘consider Isaiah 53. It is all laid out there'.

As we have seen above, ‘eating flesh' and ‘drinking blood' are Old Testament metaphors for putting someone to death. This comes out vividly in Isaiah 49:26. ‘I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they will be drunk with their own blood as with wine', referring to the oppressors turning on each other and killing each other. Such metaphors may be unusual to us, but they were an essential part of life then, as is demonstrated by the phrase ‘partakers in the blood of the prophets' (Matthew 23:30).

He then goes on to say, ‘once you have done so you will be able to eat My flesh and drink My blood by coming to Me in true faith to share in My death and receive life, that is, to partake of the advantages of what I have done for you'. Compare for this idea 2 Samuel 23:17 where David refuses to ‘drink the blood of' his associates i.e. benefit from the risk of death of his associates.

In the end all who would be His must ‘eat His flesh and drink His blood' in both ways. We must all firstly recognise that it was we who crucified Christ. We must acknowledge that it was our sin that nailed Him there, and that caused the intense suffering through which He went. We have ‘eaten His flesh and drunk His blood'. Then we must come to Him in confident faith and receive Him and His words, drinking them in and letting them fill our whole being, dying to the world and all its claims by being ‘crucified with Christ' and sharing His resurrection life (see Galatians 2:20, which could be seen as a commentary on Jesus' words), thus eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood in accordance with John 6:35..

The idea of literally drinking blood was strictly prohibited in the Old Testament and would have been abhorrent to every Jew. It is clear therefore that Jesus would not have used this metaphor unless it meant something other than just drinking blood, even on the spiritual level, and equally clear that the Judaisers recognised the fact (they did not protest). So the Old Testament pictures of ‘killing people' as ‘drinking blood', and of ‘benefiting from the death of (or risk of death of)' as ‘drinking blood' gives us the only reasonable and satisfactory explanation. And indeed it does serve to explain why they did not react in horror at the suggestion. They knew what He meant, and that He knew their hearts. Furthermore the following chapter (chapter 7) will immediately begin with an emphasis on the fact that their aim was to put Jesus to death, and this is stressed continually throughout the chapter, which demonstrates that this was very much a thought which was on Jesus' (and John's) mind.

So in the end the Bread of Life would be available because of His future death which they would bring about, when He would be ‘given for the life of the world'. And all who come in faith to eat of Him and receive its benefits will have eternal life and be raised up at the last day.