THIS lection carries us into the heart of eucharistic Christianity (vv.55-56), when Jesus declares: “My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Much physical, literal blood has been spilt over the meaning of these words. The Greek alethes keeps it a matter of choice whether to call Jesus’s flesh and blood “true” or “real” bread and wine.
Transubstantiation, though, goes further, insisting that Christians take the word “real/true” to mean “physical/literal” flesh and blood. Thus, the bread of communion is as truly, as really physical flesh as the beef in my chilli con carne. The elements may look like what “earth has given and human hands have made”, and “fruit of the vine and work of human hands”, but really, truly, they are not. They are literal human flesh. They are physical human blood. This demands a feat of pietistic gymnastics beyond many of us.
Amid all the theories that float to the surface in one generation only to sink back down in the next, three main patterns can be distinguished. I have already mentioned one: submission to the meaning as physical or literal, which sidesteps all that tedious struggling to find how it can mean what it seems to say. Another option is to shrink the act of receiving Christ’s true flesh and blood into a remembrance that is little more than a reflex, shorn of further significance. A third possibility is to trust that Christ is “really” present, and “truly” received, but in bread that continues to be bread, or wine that still tastes and looks like wine — because it still is bread or wine.
It can be a relief to fall back upon the wisdom of the Church of England: her admirable caution about claiming or imposing a single authoritative interpretation of the flesh-and-blood sacrifice of the eucharist. This avoids excluding those of tender conscience at either end of the eucharistic spectrum, while maintaining that the bread and wine of communion are “consecrated” — so more than “just” physical substances — and consequently require special reverence and formal guidance.
In the miraculous feeding of the five thousand (John 6.1-14), which formed the first act of John’s eucharistic drama, there was evidence aplenty to convince the crowds that Jesus was, at the very least, a holy man, and perhaps even the Son of God. But one miracle was not enough. The crowds were hungry for more.
Instead of giving them what they think they want, Jesus gives them what he knows they need. That turns out to be a full exposition of the sign. Indeed, it is so detailed that the Church cannot fit the whole episode into a single Sunday’s Gospel. It takes up 77 verses (the whole of chapter 6).
The crowd are not completely without insight. They have enough knowledge of their nation’s history to understand the link that Jesus makes between his miraculous feeding and the ancient miracle of manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16; with v.58). He tells them that “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world”. We, who are always reading John in the light of his Preface, are intensely aware that the bread of God is right in front of them. Jesus himself acknowledges it: “I am the bread of life.” And he repeats it for emphasis: “I am the living bread.”
It could not have been obvious to the crowd that Jesus is the living bread. They knew nothing of John’s Prologue and the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. And the Last Supper (which John does not describe) had yet to take place. We, on the other hand, have had two millennia to hone our celebrations and interpretations of the eucharist, which has become a principal way in which we experience the risen Christ in our lives.
An ancient tradition held that manna came to represent, for Israel, God’s wisdom disclosed to humankind. Under the new covenant came this further revelation, of Christ as the true and living bread. Uniting the wisdom of God’s Word (heard and preached) with the new, living, bread (Jesus himself) brings us where all Christian worship aims to establish us: joined in one body, through the sustenance of word and sacrament united in the person of Christ.