Fr. Stephen De Young:

The Jews then complained about Him, because He said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven”

And this word “complained” here, is again a word picked up from the Torah from the Pentateuch. Remember over and over again, when they’re in the wilderness, “the people grumble” is the way it’s usually translated in English. They start muttering, usually, “Moses drug us out here in the desert to die and everything’s horrible.” So the people all start muttering and grumbling because he said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven.”

And they said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that He says, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

So they basically said, “Who’s this guy think he is? Come on, we know his parents. He grew up over there. Now he’s going around saying he came from heaven. What is this?”

Interlocutor: Is this the same group or a different group from the one that said, “Okay, you’re the Messiah because you…”

Fr. Stephen: This is the same group. This is the same group because what Jesus is claiming here is more than being the Messiah. Remember, their idea of the Messiah is we got to grab this guy, overthrow the Romans and make him the King. Now, you can understand that, right? “OK, well, this is Joseph and Mary’s son, but this guy would be a good leader for us to go and…” But now Jesus is saying he’s the Son of God, he came down from heaven, that you need to put faith in Him, right. He’s not saying to them all, “You need to trust in My Father and he’ll take care of you.” And they might have accepted that, but he’s saying “No, to follow God is to put your faith and trust in Me.” And so the response is that because they don’t see Him for who he is and they don’t believe in Him and they don’t recognize Him… “Well this guy’s putting on airs. Who he think he is? He’s just this kid from Nazareth and now he’s going around saying he came from heaven, he’s an angel or something, I don’t know.” Now, again, we see this again in St. John’s Gospel, Jesus always knows everything that’s going on:

Jesus therefore answered and said to them, “Do not murmur among yourselves. No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.”

So what he’s saying there is, “The reason you’re not coming to Me, the reason you’re not believing in me, the reason you’re not recognizing me is because you have no connection to my Father. You have no connection to God. Because if you did, then the Father would show you who I am, and you would come and you would follow me.”

“It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.”

So he reiterates it again. He says, “Look, read the prophets. All are taught by God. So if you were learning from God, if you were students of God and you were trying to follow God’s ways, you’d know who I am. You’d know that what I’m telling you is true.”

“Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father.”

Interlocutor: He’s referring to himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He’s saying, “By that I don’t mean that anyone really knows the Father outside of Christ Himself. No one knows the Father the way Christ knows the Father, because he and the Father are one.” So he’s not saying that, but he is saying that if you had been yearning for, if you had been seeking after God, then he would have brought you to me.

“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead.”

So that’s pretty blunt, right? “So you came to me and you wanted manna from heaven. You wanted bread, you wanted physical bread.” It’s like, well, God gave that bread to your ancestors every single morning, and every one of them is dead. So what good did it do them in the long run? Why is that what you want? And when he points out that they’re dead, remember, there are two pieces here. It’s not just that like all human beings, they lived and they died. But remember, that generation in the wilderness all died in the wilderness. It was their children who went and… right? So he’s not only saying, yeah, they died and doing good for them, but by the way, remember your ancestors who grumbled in the wilderness? They all died in the wilderness because of their rebellion. So it’s not just a question of believing in Christ and having everlasting life or not having everlasting life, right? Rejecting Jesus, there’s going to be a consequence here. That’s a rebellion against God.

“This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”

So He says, “Look, unlike that manna which they ate and they died, I’m the bread of life. If you come to me, you’ll live forever and not die in both senses.” He’s not just talking about physical death and raising them up on the last day, which I already talked about, but he’s also talking about the condemnation, the spiritual death of rebellion against God. He’s saying you’ll be safe from that as well. Rather, positively, you’ll have life, spiritual life. And the bread specifically is my flesh, right? His body, which he is going to give for the life of the world, predicting his own.

Interlocutor: So he’s definitely talking about the Eucharist here.

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s going to get even more clear than that in a second. Right now, he’s talking about his own physical death. He’s going to give his flesh for the life of the world, meaning that he’s going to offer himself as a sacrifice. The language that’s used in the Torah for sin offerings, for example, is that when a person has committed a sin that is worthy of death, a sin for which there is a death penalty, and if you read the first five books of the Bible, there’s a whole lot of sins for which you deserve death. I mean, I’d be dead 20 times over, just the number of times I talked back to my dad, I would have been done in numerous times, because that was one of those sins worthy of death. You’ve committed a sin worthy of death, you go and offer an animal as a ransom for your life. You go and make an offering to God to say in repentance, to say, “What I’ve done, I deserve to die, but I offer this to you, God, instead, for forgiveness.”

And so what Jesus is saying here is that he is going to offer himself as a ransom in the same sense for the life of not just one person who’s sinned and he doesn’t have any sins of his own, but for the whole world. For the life of the whole world. And this is actually one of the prayers we pray during the Proskomedia service as a priest when we’re preparing the Lamb. At the end of preparing the Lamb, we cut the form of a cross into the bottom and we say, “Sacrificed is the Lamb of God for the life of the world and for its salvation.” Referring to this idea that the cross Christ offers himself.

The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?”

So again, right, they’re not clicking. “Wait. He’s the bread, the bread is his flesh. Eat his flesh. What?”

Interlocutor: I think I’d react that way. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen:

Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.”

That’s about as explicit as you can get. Now, there are a number of people, very well-educated people, mostly Protestants, who will argue that this passage is not talking about the Eucharist. There are several problems with any argument along those lines, but the biggest one is this: by the time St John’s Gospel is written, at least every Sunday, if not every day, every Christian at every church in the world is celebrating the Eucharist, meaning at least every Sunday, if not every day, they’re hearing, “This is my body broken for the forgiveness of sin, this is my blood,” right? They’re hearing it over and over and over again. If St John wrote this at that point and didn’t want them to think about the Eucharist when they read it, he chose very poor wording, right? I mean very, very poor wording. Wording that would make no sense, because anyone reading this kind of would immediately… that’s what they would immediately think. So if he didn’t mean that, St John would have qualified it or he would have phrased it differently, or he was like, well, “Jesus said this, but he wasn’t talking about… because the Eucharist didn’t exist yet”, or whatever you want to use, but he doesn’t. So St John very clearly wants us to make that connection. And it’s not just this language here that’s so explicit. Remember there was the actual verb evcaristo, right, eucharist, back when he broke the bread to feed to them in the same chapter, in the same story, right. So it’s not just once, but over and over again. St John has used language related to the Eucharist in this chapter. There’s no other rational conclusion, but that that’s what he wanted us to think of when we read it.

Interlocutor: How can they argue that that’s not what he’s talking about? I mean, you don’t have to go into it in great detail.

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s all kinds of argument. Like, one of them, and this is going to seem tedious, I know, one of them is that it says “flesh and blood”, not “body and blood”. That’s literally one of the arguments. One of the arguments is the Eucharist didn’t exist yet because Jesus hasn’t had the Last Supper yet, as if Jesus didn’t know what he was going to do in the future. One of the arguments that is actually made by Rudolf Bultmann, who’s a very major Protestant scholar in Germany in the middle of the 20th century, as we’ll see later on in St John’s Gospel. His is the only gospel that doesn’t describe the Last Supper at the beginning of the Eucharist. So he said, “Oh, well, St. John’s Community didn’t have the Eucharist.” Now we would say, well, since he wrote last, there are already three Gospels that describe that. And by the way, it’s in 1st Corinthians, which was also written before St John’s Gospel. So there were plenty of… St. John didn’t need to write again the same thing again. He could fill in the blanks and talk about other things. And he has this passage which seems to be clearly talking about the Eucharist.

So, yeah, those are some of the arguments that are used. I’m trying to be fair and not mischaracterize them, but they are to me extremely weak. Extremely weak. Basically, the big place where they fall apart is the fact that anyone reading this at the time it was written would have immediately thought about the Eucharist when they read this passage. And so if that’s not what St John meant, he would have needed to say so to not give the wrong impression. It’s deliberately misleading if that’s not what he meant.

Interlocutor: Well, when I was brought up as a Presbyterian, I thought this is what he meant. Of course, I wasn’t taught to believe… that it wasn’t called the Eucharist, that the communion was literally the body and blood of Christ, but the Presbyterian communion service uses this language, so how could it not be referring to that?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, it depends on what your definition of is, is [Laughter]. When Jesus says, this is my body, what is this mean? Yeah, I think it’s easiest to just say it means “is” and not try to go beyond that.

But now, this is also important because remember what he just said was talking about offering his flesh for the life of the world. It was a sacrificial language. And so it’s important to remember that we tend to, in the Western world especially, we don’t see a lot of animal sacrifices. But they were ubiquitous in the ancient world. And when I see everywhere, you go to India, the Hindus were doing animal sacrifices, you go to Egypt, they’re doing animal sacrifices. Romans, the Greeks, I mean, everybody was doing animal sacrifices and the Jews of the temple were doing animal sacrifices. So they were all very familiar with this. We tend to think about, but in the modern West we tend to think about sacrifices in terms of killing the animal. Sort of our focus is that you’re killing something, but that was not in any way the focus of ancient sacrificial rituals, whether Jewish or pagan, because you’ll notice we’ll just talk about biblical for now, we’ll focus on that. You look at the biblical sacrifices, not all of them involved animals. There were grain offerings, there were drink offerings where oil and wine was poured out. There were all kinds of offerings. There were cakes that were made, that were offered. There was the show bread in the tabernacle, in the temple, it was bread that was offered. None of these things involved killing an animal, right?

But what every sacrifice involves is food, some form of food. You don’t see anybody sacrificing inanimate objects. You don’t see them making something out of wood and burning it, or sacrificing clothing or textiles. You never see that. It’s always food. If you’re going to eat meat, obviously, precursor, you’ve got to kill the animal, right? So the killing was just sort of a prerequisite to turn the animal into food, so that the food could be offered.

And so, what sacrificial rituals really were, were communal meals, meals that were eaten by the community with God or in pagan rituals with the gods. And so this is why, as we’ll see when we get into St. Paul’s Epistles, food offered to idols is such a big deal and such a big problem because the Greeks had all these temples in their cities, they’re sacrificing all these animals every day. The meat from those sacrifices is all the meat that’s at the meat market. And so for the early Christians, they’re going, “Well, wait, if I go and eat that meat that’s been sacrificed to Zeus, am I participating in this sacrificial ritual?”

And so, what you see in the Old Testament, again, we’ll stick with the biblical sacrifices like in Leviticus is after the animal is offered to God, it’s cut up. And there are portions of it that are burned that are given to God. And the language about that is that what, it’s a sweet aroma in God’s… God doesn’t literally have a nose. But again, God doesn’t eat either. So that’s the same idea. It’s this pleasing… This is how God participates. And then there’s a portion that’s given to the priests, there’s a portion that’s given to the people who brought the sacrifice. And so, eating was the way of participating, the way the person participated in the sacrifice. And so this is the understanding that Jesus is drawing on here, that if he’s going to offer himself as a sacrifice, as a ransom, as a life for the life of the world, then the way that people are going to participate in that sacrifice, the way that’s going to be an offering for them, is by eating part of the sacrifice.

And this is carried through into how we celebrate the Eucharist, because when we have the Lamb there on the paten, it’s broken up before Communion. And there’s a portion that the priest eats, there’s a portion that’s given to the people to eat. There’s a portion that remains in the chalice that represents Christ Himself. The idea is it’s this communal meal where we come to participate in Christ’s sacrifice, which is taking place.

But so that’s what Jesus is talking about here, right? And so, the people who are hearing it aren’t understanding that Jesus is talking about offering Himself as a sacrifice. They think he’s talking about cannibalism. They’re like “What? He wants us to eat them?” And the Romans didn’t get that about early Christianity either. The Christians were accused of cannibalism. They said they have this leader “Chrestus” because they didn’t understand christos, the Messiah. They said this leader “Chrestus”, and they believe they eat him on the first day of the week. They just didn’t get it.

So, he’s getting at this sacramental idea. And so he goes on:

“Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Why? Because that sacrifice of Christ has been a sacrifice for them because they’ve participated in it.

“For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.  He who eats 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 he who feeds on Me will live because of Me.”

Remember what St. John said before, the Father has life in Himself, so he’s given to the Son to have life in Himself, right? God is the living God, so Christ is living, and he can give that life to us.

“This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.”

These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum.

That’s a nice thing to drop in there at the end, right at the very end, St. John tells us where all this has been happening. We were told at the beginning just that they caught up with Jesus in Capernaum. Here we find out the place they caught up with Him was in the synagogue. And so, Jesus has been… this has not just been just a conversation with some people, but this has been Him essentially preaching in the synagogue to them. And so he’s taking the manna that they brought up and applying it in a very different way.

Interlocutor: So he’s not per se against religion…

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is a rabbinic argument that they used, from the lesser to the greater, where you take an example, Jesus uses this a lot. An easy example of this is when Jesus will say, “Look at the lilies of the field. They don’t work, they don’t labor. They’re here today, tomorrow they’re dead. But look how beautifully they’re adorned. So why should you, as a human who’s maybe the image of God, who’s so much more precious to God, why should you worry about what clothes you’re going to wear?” That’s from the lesser to the greater. If this is true, then how much more is this true? And so Jesus is saying, “Well, look, God provided for your ancestors with bread for them to eat in the wilderness because they trusted. How much more now that His Son has come into the world, if you trust in Me, will he give you eternal life? I’ll just give you a life for another day with bread, but give you true life forever.”

Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, “This is a hard saying; who can understand it?”

Notice, this isn’t many of the crowd, maybe his disciples. These are people who have committed to following Him here. What is this? Right? They’re not following the sacrificial images. Who could understand it? They’re talking about… any of you get what he’s talking about? Can you explain it to the rest of us?

When Jesus knew in Himself that His disciples complained about this,

Once again, Jesus knows exactly what’s going on.

He said to them, “Does this offend you? What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where He was before?”

What’s going to happen… He’s not just referring to his ascension, but he’s referring to his death, his resurrection, ascension. If you have a problem with this, what are you going to do when all these things unfold?

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.

So he’s saying, the problem is, as we’ve seen, Jesus tries to explain these things to people and they respond in this very human, fleshy, literal way. Jesus talks about eating. “He wants us to eat Him?!” Or “Yeah, Give us some of this bread and keep giving it to us so we don’t have to work for a living”. And he’s saying, “What I’ve said to you is spiritual”. And spiritual, this is important everywhere in the New Testament. Spiritual… We tend to think of spiritual like people say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” We think of spiritual as sort of mystical…

Spiritual, and that’s why it’s capitalized here, at least the Orthodox study Bible, spiritual in the New Testament always refers to the Holy Spirit. And so what he’s saying is, if you had the Holy Spirit this is related to what he said about the Father. “If you were seeking after the Father, if you were seeking after God, if you had the Holy Spirit, you would understand the level at which I’m speaking to you.” Trying to understand this by just human reasoning, trying to understand what it is that’s not going to get you anywhere. That means I’ve been to nothing. That’s not going to get you anywhere. Trying to understand it on that level, you have to understand this on another level.

Interlocutor: Which is precisely what everybody does today. They try to understand it in a literal and physical and scientific and all of the ways that we normally use to understand things, we apply here, and they don’t apply.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and I’ll use the Eucharist as an example. This is one of the differences between the way that the Eastern churches and the West differ in their theological approach. When you look at… the Eucharistic debates in the West actually start in the 7th century. Before the split. In the 7th century, there were two fellows named Ratramnus and Radbertus. It was actually Pascalius Radbertus, great names, [Laughter] who had a huge theological debate about whether Jesus’ body and blood in the Eucharist was his crucified body and blood, or his resurrected body and blood. And then it went on from there and you get into transubstantiation. What’s the exact moment when it becomes Christ’s body and blood? Once it becomes Christ’s body and blood, how does that work with the substance and the accidents after it becomes Christ’s body and blood, is there any bread or wine left? Or is it now all body and blood, right? And on and on and on and on and on, defining and defining and defining and debating and debating. And you get to the Protestant Reformation, and you have Luther, who says, “No, I have a different view,” and Calvin, who says, “No, I have a different view,” and Swedenborg, “No, I have a different view” to all try and define this.

When you read the Church Fathers, you don’t find any of them talking about any of that when they talk about the Eucharist. What the Church Fathers all talk about when they talk about the Eucharist is what the Eucharist does. They talk about, as St. John does here, through the Eucharist, Christ comes to abide in us, and we come to abide in him. Through the Eucharist, we receive forgiveness of sin. Through the Eucharist, we’re transformed. Through the Eucharist… they talk about what it does. Not how it works. “We need to explain how this works. We need to take it apart and see what makes it tick.” They never go in that direction. And I think that’s part of what Jesus is saying here. If we try and approach it from that human, rational, mathematical level, “Let’s break this apart and see how it ticks,” we’re going to lose the point. We’re going to lose the point. If you dissect something, you kill it.

Interlocutor: We’re still trying to do this today. The Eucharist comes from the heart.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so that’s what Jesus is saying to his disciples. You need to stop trying to figure this out at a rational level. You need to hear it. You need to hear it and you need to believe it not in the sense of checking the box that it’s true, but it needs to come shape who you are and how you act, even though you can’t explain it. And that’s a difference in how mystery is used in the East. We talk about mystery in the East. They talk about in the West, too. But what happens in the West tends to be we reason and we reason and we reason. And then when we run into trouble there, we go as far as we can go and we’re stuck. Then we say, “Well, there’s a mystery.”

Interlocutor: That’s what the scholastic project was, to rationally go as far as reason can take you.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And then after that you say, there’s an old cartoon where it’s a math student and he’s got this really complicated equation on one side of the board, and then he’s got the answer over on the other side of the board, and then in the middle he just wrote, “A Miracle Happens.” [Laughter]

And it’s that sort of thing with mystery in the West. Whereas in the East we talk about mystery in order to say, we don’t need to go there to work it all out. The Eucharist is a mystery. Here’s what it does. Here’s what Christ has told us about it. He said, this is my body and this is my blood. So we pray beforehand, “I believe that this is truly your body this is truly your precious blood.” And we don’t need to go further than that, right? How and when and how much, we don’t need any of that, right? You told us that this is what it is. We believe that that is true, and so we hold on to that as a promise. We don’t need to go further.

“But there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who would betray Him.

So again, for Saint John, Jesus knows what’s going on. And so Jesus is not duped. Jesus doesn’t think he has this great following going and these great disciples, and then they turn on Him and, “Oh, no, what happened?” Jesus knows who these people are. He knows who believes and who doesn’t. He knows who’s going to betray Him. He knows who’s going to turn his back on Him. But notice he still doesn’t reject them and send them away, even though he knows. He still speaks to them, even though he knows what’s going to happen.

And He said, “Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father.”

From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.

And for some of them, this is just it, right? This is just it. And so they leave.

Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?”

I kind of like the King James translation is, “Will you now also leave?”  Jesus turns them and says, “Are you on your way out too?”

But Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

So St. Peter says, “Look, are we going to leave? Where are we going to go if we leave? Where do we have to go? You have the words of life.” Peter, at least to some extent, now is getting it. He’s saying, “Look, you’re the only one who can give us this life that you’re offering?”

Interlocutor: Is this St. John’s version of what’s often called Peter’s confession?

Fr. Stephen: Roughly, yeah, roughly. And he in addition to “Where would we go if we left? We’ve come to believe and know, notice both of those. It’s not just an opinion I have, that I think, because I know you. Now I’ve come to know you. I know that you are the Christ, the son of living God.”

Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” He spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for it was he who would betray Him, being one of the twelve.

So St. John isn’t big on spoiler warnings, but as I mentioned, I think in the introduction, St. John has no use for Judas at any point. Every time Judas remember when he listed the twelve disciples, what they were called? He said Judas Iscariot, who would betray him. So every time Jesus’s name comes up quick to remind us this is the no good, he’s a devil. But again, Jesus knows who Judas is. He knows what Judas is going to do. He does not send him away. Right? He does not reject him. Judas rejects Jesus. Jesus does not reject Judas.

And so again, that’s important to remember because some folks, some of our Calvinist Protestant friends have misinterpreted the things in these passages when he talks about no one can come to me unless the Father draws. They say, “Oh, well, that means the Father chooses who’s going to be saved and who’s going to come to Jesus and who doesn’t.” But that’s belied again by the whole passage here, which is that Jesus again and again knows… We’re told by St. John, who’s going to betray him. Who’s not going to believe, who Judas is. He never sends one of them away. So he says, he who comes to me, I will not cast out. He doesn’t just mean some group of safe people, he means anyone who comes to him. He will not cast out. But they, some of them, will reject Jesus. He does not reject them. Remember, Jesus is our revelation of who God is. And so what that tells us is God doesn’t reject anyone. People reject God. That’s a very important point. There’s not people out there who God hates and rejects or who try to come to God, and he sends them away because they’re not worthy. But there are people who reject God, reject God’s ways, reject what he has to say to them, and go their own way and turn away from him.

Well, we’re at a chapter break again, so that’s probably a good place to finish for tonight. And Lord willing, next week after liturgy, we’ll pick up here in chapter 7.