John 6:51-58

Appendix on John 6:51; John 6:51.

What does Jesus mean by the expressions: to eat His flesh, to drink His blood?

1. Many interpreters see here only a metaphor, designating the act by which faith morally unites itself with its object. According to some (de Wette, Reuss), this object is the historical person of Jesus Christ as it appeared before the eyes of His hearers. The expression My flesh and My blood is to be taken in the same sense as flesh and blood, that is, “the human person.” According to others, the object of faith is not only the living Christ (the flesh), but also the sacrificed Christ (the blood); and Jesus describes here at once the appropriation of His holy life and faith in His expiatory death. This interpretation, in one or the other of the two forms which we have just indicated, is easily connected with the beginning of the discourse; for spiritual assimilation by means of faith is certainly the idea from which the Lord starts:

“ I am the bread of life, he that cometh to Me shall not hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst ” (John 6:35). Only we cannot understand, from this point of view, with what aim Jesus gives to this altogether spiritual conception an expression which is more and more paradoxical, material, and, consequently, unintelligible to His interlocutors. If this is all that He means to say, even in the last words of the interview, does He not seem to be playing with words and to lay Himself out needlessly to cause offense to the Jews?

2. This very real difficulty has impelled many commentators to apply these expressions to the scene of the Holy Supper, which Jesus had already had in mind at this time, and which was later to solve for His disciples the mystery of His words. But this explanation gives rise to a still greater difficulty than the preceding one. To what purpose this incomprehensible allusion to an institution which no one could foresee? Then, Jesus cannot have made the possession of eternal life depend on the accomplishment of an external act, like that of the Lord's Supper? In all His teaching, the sole condition of salvation is faith. The Tubingen School, which has attached itself to this interpretation, has derived from it an argument against the authenticity of the Gospel; and not without reason, if the explanation were well founded. But the pseudo-John, who should have wished, in the second century, to put an allusion to the Lord's Supper into the mouth of Jesus, would not have failed to employ the word σῶμα, body, used in the text of the institution of the Supper and in the Liturgical formulas, rather than σάρξ, flesh. A proof of this is found in the unauthentic addition which we read in the Cambridge MS. the Amiatinus, etc., at the end of John 6:56: “If a man receives the body of the Son of man as the bread of life, he will have life in Him.” On the passages from Justin (Apol. I., 66) and Ignatius (ad Smyrn., 7), see Weiss. These Fathers may have founded their expression on our passage itself.

To discern the true thought of our Lord, we must, as it appears to me, distinguish carefully, in the mysterious eating and drinking here described, the act of man and the divine gift, as Jesus does Himself in John 6:27. The human act is faith, faith alone; and inasmuch as the eating and drinking designate the believer's part in his union with Jesus Christ, these terms do not go beyond the meaning which the exclusively spiritual interpretation gives to them. To eat the flesh, is to contemplate with faith the Lord's holy life and to receive that life into oneself through the Holy Spirit to the end of reproducing it in one's own life; to drink the blood, is to contemplate with faith His violent death, to make it one's own ransom, to appropriate to oneself its atoning efficacy. But if the part of man in this mystical union is limited to faith, this does not yet determine anything as to the nature of the divine gift here assured to the believer.

To taste pardon, to live again by the Spirit the life of Christ is this all? We cannot think so. We have seen with what emphasis Jesus returns, at different times in the foregoing discourse, to the idea of the bodily resurrection; He does so again at John 6:54, and in the most significant way. The life which He communicates to the believer is not, therefore, only His moral nature; it is His complete life, physical as well as spiritual, His entire personality. As the grains which the ear contains are only the reappearing of the grain of seed mysteriously multiplied, so believers, sanctified and raised from the dead, are to be only the reproduction, in thousands of living examples, of the glorified Jesus. The principle of this reproduction is undoubtedly spiritual: it is the Spirit which causes Christ to live in us (ch. 14-16); but the end of this work is physical: it is the glorious body of the believer, proceeding from His own (1 Corinthians 15:49). Jesus knew, Jesus profoundly felt that He belonged, body and soul, to humanity. It was with this feeling, and not that He might wantonly give offense to His hearers, that He used the terms which are surprising to us in this discourse.

The expressions: to eat and drink, are figurative; but the corporeal side of communion with Him is real: “ We are of His body,” says the apostle who is least to be suspected of religious materialism (Ephesians 5:30); and to show us clearly that there is no question here of a metaphor intelligible to the first chance scholar, he adds: “ This mystery is great, I speak in respect to Christ and the Church ” (John 6:32). This mystery of our complete union with His person, which in this discourse is expressed in words, is precisely that which Jesus desired to express by an act, when He instituted the rite of the Lord's Supper. We need not say, therefore, that this discourse alludes to the Lord's Supper, but we must say that the Lord's Supper and this discourse refer to one and the same divine fact, expressed here by a metaphor, there by an emblem. From this point of view, we understand why Jesus makes use here of the word flesh and in the institution of the Lord's Supper, of the word body. When He instituted the ceremony, He held a loaf in His hand and broke it; now, that which corresponds with this broken bread, was His body as an organism (σῶμα) broken. In the discourse at Capernaum where the question is only of nourishment, according to the analogy of the multiplication of the loaves, Jesus was obliged rather to present His body as substance (σάρξ) than as an organism. This perfect propriety of the terms shows the originality and authenticity of the two forms.

There is one question remaining which, from the point of view where we have just taken our position, has only a secondary importance as related to exegesis; namely, whether already at this period, Jesus thought of instituting the ceremony of the Lord's Supper. He was aware of His approaching death; the news of the murder of John the Baptist had just reawakened in Him the presentiment of it (Matthew 14:13), He connected it in His thought with the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb, He knew that this death would be for the life of the whole world what the sacrifice of the lamb had been for the existence of the people of Israel.

From these premises He might naturally enough be led to the thought of instituting Himself a feast commemorative of His death and of the new covenant, in order thus to replace the feast of the Paschal lamb, the sacrifice of which was the figure of His own. This thought might certainly have arisen on the day when, being deprived of the joy of celebrating the Passover at Jerusalem, and seeing the multitudes flocking towards Him from all sides, He improvised for them a Passover, instead of that which was about to be celebrated in the holy city. It was this feast, offered to His disciples as a momentary compensation, which Jesus afterwards transformed, in the Lord's Supper, into a permanent institution And is not this precisely the point of view at which St. John desired to place us, when he said at the beginning, John 6:4: “Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was near.” This near approach was not altogether foreign to the thought of the other evangelists; it explains the expression, so similar to that of the institution of the Lord's Supper, with which they all begin the narrative of the multiplication of the loaves: “ He took the bread, and gave thanks. ”

ADDITIONAL NOTES BY THE AMERICAN EDITOR.

Vv. 51b-59. 1. In John 6:51 b a new thought is presented that the bread of which the discourse is speaking is the flesh of Christ. That the reference in these words is to the participation by faith in Christ as dying for the world's salvation, and not to the Lord's Supper, is proved, first, by the fact that union with Christ by faith is the main thought of the whole discourse; secondly, by the fact that the life of the believer through Christ is placed in correspondence with that of Christ through the Father; thirdly, by the entire subordination of the idea of the blood to that of the bread the former comes in, apparently, only in an incidental way, and the thought returns to the bread alone in John 6:58.

The blood has, therefore, no such relation to the bread here as the cup has to the bread in the Supper; fourthly, because no similar representation of the participation in the Supper as related to the life of the soul is given elsewhere; fifthly, because no allusion to the Supper is made in the Gospels, in any other place, until it was instituted, and its institution seems to have had such reference to the closing hours of Christ's life and to the future of the disciples after His death as to make an allusion to it beforehand improbable, and especially at this time and in the presence of an audience of this character. So far as we can judge, the apostles had no such understanding of its meaning and import, when it was instituted, as must have been the case, it would seem, if, as they heard this discourse or thought of it afterwards, they supposed it to refer to a physical eating or to any special rite.

The purpose of the Lord's Supper is given by Paul in connection with the words of the institution of it, in 1 Corinthians 11:25, “This do in remembrance of me;” it would be strange, indeed, if such a more complete unfolding of the idea should have been presented to a company of murmuring and unbelieving Galilean Jews. Weiss ed. Mey. says: “It cannot even be said that at least the same idea out of which the Lord's Supper sprang is here expressed (Olshausen, Kling, Tholuck, etc.; comp. Kahnis, Keim, Hengstenberg, Ewald, Godet), or that the appropriation of Christ's life, brought about by faith in His death, which is here demanded as absolutely necessary, forms also the sacred fundamental idea of the institution of the Supper and the condition of its blessedness, from which the application of the passage to the Lord's Supper (but also at the same time to baptism and the efficacy of the word) necessarily arises (Meyer, with a reference to Harless, p. 130ff.), but, at the most, that a like symbolism to that which is here used lies at the basis of the institution of the Supper.” This statement is to be regarded as containing (as Weiss remarks) the most that can properly be said.

The difficulty which is suggested by Godet on page 40, that Jesus, instead of explaining His spiritual conception (if the view above given is adopted), only adds “an expression which is more and more paradoxical, material, and, consequently, unintelligible to His interlocutors,” seems to the writer of this note to have no real foundation. It was not the design of Jesus, in these spiritual discourses with His adversaries, to make explanations on the low level of their thought, but rather by repeating His ideas in their boldest and loftiest form to challenge their minds to wrestle with them. He wished to force them to see how far removed they were from the life of which He was speaking, by the very difficulty they found in comprehending the terms in which it was described. He would compel disciples and enemies alike to think, and would give them words and truths which might become seeds for future growth, for the very reason that they were, at the beginning, hard to be understood.