Sunday’s Gospel: Jesus is the living bread, come down from heaven

Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever;
and the bread that I shall give is my flesh,
for the life of the world. (John 6:51)

It is hard for us to imagine the shock of Jesus’s listeners at these words from Sunday’s Gospel. Up until now, they had understood his self-reference as “the bread of life” to be a metaphor for believing in him. At the start of Sunday’s Gospel they do not object to this, but only to the fact that the seemingly ordinary Jesus says he comes from heaven: “How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (6:42).

Jesus then used a phrase that would have triggered a memory in their minds: “Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever,” a strong echo of the fruit of the tree of life (Genesis 3:22).

So their first shock would have been this: this man, whose family we know, now claims that believing in him is like eating from the tree of life, that faith in him gives immortality!

But their shock gets worse: “the bread that I shall give is my flesh.” For Jews, to literally eat someone’s flesh was abhorrent; to metaphorically do so was what enemies did to each other in battle (“evildoers assail me to devour my flesh”, Ps 27:2). How could this man say such a thing: either he is advocating cannibalism or trying to be killed in combat!

The last phrase would also have surprised the disciples: Jesus gives himself “for the life of the world”. Jews then were not focused on sharing their faith with everyone; so to seek to reach the whole world was revolutionary, especially since the “world” was often synonymous with the devil’s kingdom (three times John calls Satan “the ruler of this world” – 12:31, 14:30, 16:11).

As we will see next Sunday, Jesus does not try to tone down his teaching or explain it to be a metaphor; therefore many leave him. Yet despite the shocking surprise, there is a continuity in his teaching: if he started with the metaphorical comparison of believing in him to eating him, is it so inconceivable that belief in Jesus also involves real eating of him? Jesus makes metaphors become real and tangible: he heals blind intellects and then blind eyes; he heals deaf minds and then deaf ears; can he not give the bread of teaching and then give himself as real food?

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