Friday May 5
Why did he want us to eat his body? A sensible question to ask after listening to Jesus in the synagogue of Capernaum: it sounds almost cannibalistic. However, Christ did not hesitate and continued talking about his flesh and blood as necessary to overcome death and enter into eternal life. It is not like any ordinary eating: just as the Son is intimately united with the Father, so the believer will enjoy the divine life if he is nourished by the body of Christ. Only at the Last Supper will he unveil the full sense of the word to raise the bread and say this is my body.
Alternative
St. John’s Gospel: makes effective use of misunderstanding as a method of teaching: ch. 3 (Nicodemus), ch. 4 (the woman at the well), and today’s passage.
The phrase “eat my flesh and drink my blood” was wide open to misunderstanding, especially, one must say, by his particular audience. There was an expression “to eat someone’s flesh”, meaning to slander a person; this could have put them on the wrong track for a start. In addition, their Scriptures had some rather ghoulish texts like Isaiah’s, “I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own blood as with wine” (Is 49:26). Such texts were about vengeance, not about intimacy and communion. There was also the more neutral expression “flesh and blood”, meaning just human life: as when Jesus said, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17).
Christians tended to see the separate mention of flesh and blood as a sign of the death of Jesus, but the more common view among scholars now is that it means: the whole living Christ.
But the fact is that his listeners were puzzled. And when they asked for an explanation, he didn’t offer one. There has been no shortage of people down the ages who were wholly eager to offer explanations: some in the terms of pagan philosophy. But what do we do with things we have “explained” (the word means “flattened out”)? We put them aside. The words of Jesus stand there, calling us to something deeper than the intellectual satisfaction that explanations give. We are hungry in deeper places than that.
