The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
"How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?"
They grumbled with dissatisfaction at the bread Jesus desired to provide just as the crowds grumbled in the desert against Moses. They had remained somewhat patient with Jesus when he spoke of bread, allowing that this was simply a metaphor for wisdom with rich biblical precedent. They chaffed a bit when Jesus made himself central to this image, as if there were no way to attain wisdom that did not also even receiving Jesus. But they found intolerable this reference to consuming the Flesh of Jesus. It was simply too graphic, too physical.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood,
you do not have life within you.
The drinking of blood had been strongly prohibited by the Torah such that all animal sacrifices would need to be drained of blood before they could be consumed. The reason was that the life of the animal was in the blood and that life belonged to God (see Leviticus 17:14). But now it was precisely through the blood of his human body that Jesus desired to share his own divine life with the world. He was God, and this blood belonged to him to do with what he chose.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
The blood of bulls and goats could not take away sin (see Hebrews 4:10). The blood of the Paschal lamb in Egypt caused the angel of death not to slay the first born of the Israelites, but even marked by that blood they would all still die eventually. Only the blood of Jesus could truly take away sin and grant eternal life. There is so much we can learn from the deeply physical remedy Jesus provided to the problems of sin and death. Among them is how deeply ingrained into the material world that the problem of sin has become, affecting not just the souls of men and women, but also their bodies. But fortunately it also implies that the redemption Jesus desires for us is not merely to provide a Platonic escape route for disembodied souls. He desires to save bodies as well. The goodness of creation was compromised by sin, but not lost. It is in the Flesh and Blood of Jesus himself that it is restored. The further we distance ourselves from the reality of the Eucharist the more we also distance ourselves from the full reality, physical and spiritual, of our redemption.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
remains in me and I in him.
We might have imagined that Jesus would have desired to establish a communion with us that was entirely spiritual, something utterly untethered to our material circumstances, available to us at any moment and in any place. But in just the same way that Jesus made himself the necessary locus of obtaining wisdom, so too did he make his Flesh and Blood the locus of the true communion. Widely available though it was to be it was nevertheless not going to be up to us to seek it anywhere we felt like seeking it. It was the oddly specific particularity of his offer that defined where salvation was to be found. To receive salvation and grow in communion we must learn to accept this offer, which no one would have guessed in advance, which sometimes seems strange even to those with faith in Jesus. Receiving his teaching requires thinking in a higher mode than the merely empirical and material perspectives that usually guide us. It requires, as he insisted, being drawn by the Father in the darkness of faith. The words Jesus spoke were Spirit and life, and only by the gift of the Spirit can we truly receive them.
Saul, my brother, the Lord has sent me,
Jesus who appeared to you on the way by which you came,
that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.
There is a real way in which we are blind to the things of faith until the Lord removes the scales from our eyes. In order to draw more deeply into the mystery of his life and love let us ask him to illuminate us, just as he did for Saul in Damascus. After he has done so we too may eat and truly recovery our spiritual strength. Then we too will be made strong as witnesses to proclaim Jesus, "that he is the Son of God".
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