I'm glad I wasn't there to hear Jesus say this in person!
John 6:47-57 (NIV)
CONTEXT: We began this passage yesterday. People who saw Jesus feed thousands with little food track Him down, wanting more. Jesus urges them to seek eternal food, not what spoils. Despite His signs, they ask for another miracle. Jesus explains that He is the bread of life from heaven, and whoever comes to Him will never hunger or thirst.
47 "... Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
53 Jesus said to them, “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. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.
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60 On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
... 66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
Listen to passage & devotional:
Belgic Confession of Faith, Article 35: The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper
We believe and confess
that our Savior Jesus Christ
has ordained and instituted the sacrament of the Holy Supper
to nourish and sustain those
who are already born again and ingrafted
into his family:
his church.
Now those who are born again have two lives in them.
The one is physical and temporal—
they have it from the moment of their first birth,
and it is common to all.
The other is spiritual and heavenly,
and is given them in their second birth;
it comes through the Word of the gospel
in the communion of the body of Christ;
and this life is common to God’s elect only.
Thus, to support the physical and earthly life
God has prescribed for us
an appropriate earthly and material bread,
which is as common to all
as life itself also is.
But to maintain the spiritual and heavenly life
that belongs to believers
he has sent a living bread
that came down from heaven:
namely Jesus Christ,
who nourishes and maintains
the spiritual life of believers
when eaten—that is, when appropriated
and received spiritually
by faith.
To represent to us
this spiritual and heavenly bread
Christ has instituted
an earthly and visible bread as the sacrament of his body
and wine as the sacrament of his blood.
He did this to testify to us that
just as truly as we take and hold the sacraments in our hands
and eat and drink it in our mouths,
by which our life is then sustained,
so truly we receive into our souls,
for our spiritual life,
the true body and true blood of Christ,
our only Savior.
We receive these by faith,
which is the hand and mouth of our souls.
Summary
There are times when in looking back upon the interactions Jesus had with those around Him, it seems so hard to understand how those listening to Him could have missed the good news He proclaimed. Jesus proclaims the best news of His entire ministry in today's passage - that the one who believes has eternal life - but at the same time it's not difficult to see why that first audience rejected His offer.
Jesus told them that since He was the living bread that came down from heaven, the key to attaining eternal life was to eat His flesh and drink His blood. Can you imagine the look of shock and confusion on the faces of those listening? They'd been listening to His wonderful teaching about loving one another and what it truly means to live in the light of God's commands, and now He's telling them the key to eternal life is eating Him.
So it's no surprise whatsoever that John tells us just a few verses later that from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
Dig Deeper
Theologian R.C. Sproul offers some help in understanding these difficult words of Jesus:
Many biblical scholars through the ages have thought that Jesus was giving a discourse on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper and was saying that unless a person partakes of the real body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of Holy Communion, he cannot be redeemed. I don’t agree with that position.
I believe Jesus was making the point that He is the giver of supernatural life, the living Redeemer who had been sent by the living God to impart eternal life to all who put their trust in Him. Furthermore, He was calling for a deep commitment. He told His disciples: “You have to come into Me, be united to Me, feast upon Me—not just have a casual relationship to Me.” He was calling His followers to a wholehearted pursuit of union with Him—a union without which there is no spiritual life.
To put it another way, Jesus declared that religion won’t do it. Church attendance won’t do it. Good works in and of themselves won’t do it. The only thing that gets us into the kingdom of God, by which we participate in the gift of eternal life, is union with Christ Jesus. To emphasize this, our Lord said, “You have to take all of Me, as if you were ingesting Me."
Our Confession also helps explain Jesus' words. When you partake of the Lord's Supper, you receive into your soul, for your spiritual life, the true body and true blood of Christ, your only Savior, but it's certainly not the act of physical eating and drinking that saves you. Rather the elements of bread and wine are physical signs that seal your eternal union with Christ, which is yours by faith, which is the hand and mouth of your soul.
ACKNOWLEDGE WHO GOD IS: Our Father, the author and giver of eternal life;
ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH GOD'S WILL: Pray that you will not just have a "casual relationship" with Jesus, but rather "a wholehearted pursuit of union with Him;"
ASK GOD FOR WHAT YOU NEED:
Read the New Testament in a year! Today: 1 Thessalonians 4
