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| Photo courtesy of mypathwaysdevotional.com |
Have you ever had a passage of Scripture hunt you down like a blood-hound!? I mean, you read an article, blog post, see your Facebook feed, open up the Scriptures, try to pray, and you are led back to the same Bible verses to continue to wrestle with their meaning or application for your life? Well, that is what is happening in my spiritual journey right now! I have had a lot of questions lately, but one that seems to keep coming up has to do with the "Bread of Life" discourse found in John chapter six. Today I'd like to dive into this passage with you and explore its implications further.
As a born-and-raised Protestant, I've always considered the "Lord's Supper" or "Communion" as we call it, to be a memorial done in remembrance of the first Lord's Supper Christ shared with His Twelve disciples in the Upper Room. I've honestly never analyzed or researched why I believed this until recently.
In John chapter 6, after Jesus feeds the crowd of five thousand, Jesus reveals to the people following Him that He is the Bread of Life that came down from Heaven (6:33, 51). He goes on to explain that if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever (6:51). This puzzles, and even disturbs, His listeners...and yet He continues to be even more graphic, stating that "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day...Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him" (John 6:55-56). It is interesting to note that Jesus uses the verb form of "eat" in these later verses that means "to chew like an animal" and not to merely "partake in a meal." Ewwww.
The crowd is not just puzzled at this point--they are honestly horrified! (Think of this in light of Jewish Kosher food laws; in Kosher butchering, the animal is completely bled as blood was considered sacred to the Jews and belonged to God alone. Thus, for Jesus to offer his blood would have been incredibly scandalous, cannibalistic, and horrific!*) So, in our passage, many disciples began to say, "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" and many of them "turned back and no longer walked with him" (John 6:60,66).
There are many things that confound me about this passage.
First, why did the crowds get so up in arms about this particular metaphor about Christ? Up until this point, Christ had made such metaphorical statements of being Jacob's ladder (John 1:51), His followers needing to be "born again" (John 3), and being "living water" (John 4). He goes on later to discuss how He is the Good Shepherd, the Gate, the Light of the World, the Resurrection and the Life, the Way, the Truth and the Life, the True Vine....well, you get the idea. For some reason, the disciples thought this was different--it seems as though they sincerely did not consider Christ's statement to eat His flesh and drink His blood to be a metaphor!
Secondly, if the disciples had misunderstood Christ's metaphorical statement to be literal, why did Christ, knowing their hearts, make no attempts to clarify the misunderstanding, especially since it resulted in so many walking away from following Him? In fact, so many left that Jesus turned to the Twelve and asked them, "Do you want to go away as well?" (John 6:67). It is then that Peter makes his memorable statement, "Lord, to whom shall we go?"
Thirdly, I am frustrated by how slanted and incomplete my ESV Study Bible commentary is on this particular passage! For example, when it offers to expound upon the verse in which the disciples state it is a hard saying (v. 60), the commentary states: "It was a hard saying because they wrongly interpreted Jesus' statements literally." That's it?! Then when you cross-reference it to an earlier verse (v. 53) when Christ is saying that "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood," the ESV commentary states that "this cannot be intended literally, for no one ever did that" and it goes on to explain that this passage has the spiritual meaning of trusting or believing in Him and trusting in His atoning death. It does mention there is a "parallel theme" with the Lord's supper, but dismisses the idea that this is a truly Eucharistic passage. Ugh.
So at this point you might be asking, why does this all really matter? Who cares whether the bread and wine transform into Christ's literal body and blood (aka transubstantiation), or whether it is just a memorialization of the crucifixion? That's a great question, and one that has caused me to push aside this issue for decades as I've always felt this piece of theology was a "non-essential" (aka non-salvific) issue. But I now see it is MUCH more than that! It is a very serious thing indeed to part ways with centuries-old (dare I say millennium at this point) theological beliefs, especially ones dating back to the time of Christ and the first century church! As far as I can tell according to my personal research to date, it seems as though Christ's followers around the time of the first church and for many, many centuries beyond never contested the belief of transubstantiation--that wouldn't come until the Reformation in the 15th and 16th centuries. In fact, there are miracles that are documented, such as the one in Lanciano, Italy, which occurred in the 8th century, when the bread literally turned into myocardial (heart) tissue and the wine into coagulated blood during the mass service. Furthermore, this miracle has been validated by scientific testing in 1971 (which discerned the blood type to be AB of a male--a blood type that, although uncommon in the general population, is often found in individuals of Middle Eastern descent) and continues to bear testimony to transubstantiation to this very day!
So what do we do with that?...
Well, for me, I plan to continue to read more and pray specifically for discernment regarding the Eucharist. I have found a few blogs to be helpful with this theological issue, as well. One particularly helpful blog is this one, as it uses "sola scriptura" (Scriptures alone) to discuss the Eucharistic theology of transubstantiation and is written by a young mother like myself :) Through it all, though, I am clinging to the Biblical promise that when we seek Him, we WILL find the truth. Lord, keep me open to YOUR truth! AMEN!
*New St. Joseph Handbook for Proclaimers of the Word, Liturgical Year B, page 316
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