Feed on this Bread
The Season after Pentecost • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Introduction
Introduction
To begin this morning, I want to remind us a few things. First, John’s Gospel was the last canonical Gospel to be written. There is no need to get into the specifics of dating at the moment, but for our purposes, it’s important to remember that by the time John’s Gospel is written, the Church has been celebrating communion for probably five decades, if not longer.
Second, whenever you’re reading the Gospels, it is important to remember that Jesus’ words spoken into one context but they were written down for a different context. That is to say that Jesus’ intended audience and John’s intended audience are not the same.
Third, we’ve been lingering in John 6 for a while now, and it’s important to remember that this discourse comes after and is directly related to the feeding of the 5,000. Jesus is speaking to roughly the same crowd that were fed by the fish and the loaves. That crowd comes seeking Jesus, and when they find him, Jesus says:
Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.
Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.”
The rest of the discourse has been about that food that endures to eternal life, and it leads to Jesus’s now infamous saying, “I am the bread of life.” In fact he says this twice. He says first:
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.
And then a bit later:
I am the bread of life.
Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.
This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
I mentioned last Sunday that the readings a verse was skipped between the readings from two Sundays ago and last Sunday, and it happens again this Sunday. Here is that missing verse.
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
You might expect Jesus to pause for a moment and explain the metaphor. Instead what he does is double down.
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
These words would have been shocking. Eating flesh was one thing, but drinking blood was another. One of the best-knowing Jewish food laws was the prohibition against drinking blood. You can look at Leviticus 17:10-14 and look that up if you like, but when it came to eating and drink, drinking blood was expressly forbidden. So what is Jesus saying?
One of the more forgotten stories of David occurs while the Philistines have occupied David’s hometown of Bethlehem. David had three men with him who were particularly renowned for their bravery, and one day they heard David say this:
And David said longingly, “Oh, that someone would give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem that is by the gate!”
The three men hear this request, broke through the camp of the Philistines, drew water out of the well, and brought it to David. Do you remember what David did? He refused to drink it, and he poured it out to the Lord. Then he said this:
2 Samuel 23:17 (ESV)
and said, “Far be it from me, O Lord, that I should do this. Shall I drink the blood of the men who went at the risk of their lives?”
David does not mean that he would drink the blood of these three brave men. What he means, instead, is that it wasn’t appropriate for him to profit from their sacrifice. He would only be drinking water, but by profiting from their sacrifice, he would be drinking their blood. Now, centuries later, David’s true Son says something even more profound.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
The one who will make the sacrifice this time is not David’s friends, but David’s son. He will give his flesh and blood for the sins of the whole world, and those who would benefit from that sacrifice must eat his flesh and drink his blood.
But there’s something else I want you to notice hear. Notice that in verse 53 Jesus speaks of eating his flesh, but in the next verse, he says something else:
Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
Notice he says not eats, but feeds. These are two different Greek words. The former refers generally to the act of eating, but the latter is much more physical. It refers to the act of chewing, even audibly. If one were to attempt to spiritualize completely the idea of eating flesh and drinking blood, the choice of the word “feed” negates that possibility. David would have had to drink the water to drink the blood of his friends. The act is inherently physical.
Jesus continues:
For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.
Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.
As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
I hope you can hear the symphony of biblical theology reaching a crescendo in these verses. There is a New Exodus going on in the ministry of Jesus. There is a new Egypt and a new Pharaoh, and together they go by the names sin, death, and the devil. Jesus, the Son of David, the Son of Man, is rescuing people from this new Egypt by the offering of his flesh and blood. And now the people of God are on this New Exodus, and so there is a new manna, a new bread from heaven. But it is not like the manna of the first Exodus, which the fathers ate and died. It is something better, a new meal of Jesus’ own flesh and blood, by which Christ abides in you and because of which, on the last day, he will raise you up. And it cannot be overly spiritualized. It cannot be disconnected from the physical action of eating and drinking.
Jesus’ audience may have been puzzled.
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
They may have been puzzled, but those first century Christians who received and shared John’s Gospel were not. They knew the meal to which Jesus referred. Paul had been telling Christians to celebrated it from the very beginning. 1 Corinthians was written around 55 AD, so even by very conservative estimates, three decades before the Gospel of John, and in that letter Paul writes this:
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread,
and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Christians had been celebrating the meal of the body and blood of our Lord for decades before John composes his Gospel. John’s audience knows the meal to which Jesus refers, and to suggest otherwise, as many low church, American commentators do, is exegetically and historically nonsensical.
So this is biblical eucharistic theology. Biblical eucharistic theology is not trying to figure out how the words “this is my body” and “this is my bloody” can be true sentences. We take Jesus at face value. Whatever he meant by those words, so we mean when we repeat them. That question of how these words can be true is not the concern of biblical eucharistic theology, and so it is not our concern. Our concern, like Jesus’ and John’s, is what this meal means for the disciples of Christ.
Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.”
I am the bread of life.
Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.
This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.
Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, 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.
There is a world outside these walls that wants to sell you food that perishes. They want to sell you something that they swear will meet your needs and quell the hunger inside you. But it never works. Not permanently. For there is only one meal that can satisfy us forever. There is only one meal that unites us to Christ and he to us. There is only one meal that leads to eternal life. There is only one meal given by Christ on the cross and given to the church for the life of the world. There is only one meal of Jesus says about those who eat it: “and I will raise him up on the last day.”
I invite you today on behalf of our Lord Jesus Christ to eat his flesh and drink his blood so that you may have eternal life and so that when the last day comes, Christ will raise you up.