It starts off with this beautiful and almost poetic language about how there is a bread of God that comes down from Heaven and gives life to the world. And so, as a someone who is just being introduced to this concept, you’re thinking, oh OK, he’s warming up for one of those parables or allegories that he likes to tell. Go on then Jesus.
And so he does. He says, “I am this bread of life. If you come to me, you will never go hungry or thirsty.” And then he talks about how he came down from heaven and you need to believe in him to have eternal life.
Ok, so there’s the allegory. Bread brings us life and Jesus is like bread that brings us eternal life.
And then things get a bit weirder. He says that whoever eats this bread will live forever and that this bread is his flesh. At this point, you’re probably thinking, OK, well, we’re still blending a lot of allegorical language here so maybe I’m just confusing the metaphor or something.
But if you’re hoping to hold on to that, Jesus suddenly turns a corner, and just blurts it out, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. My flesh is REAL food and my blood is REAL drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”
If you’re like most people there, you’re probably thinking, “Well, that’s it for me. You had a good run Jesus. This is a bridge too far. Good luck with the whole feeding yourself to people.”
What’s clear about this passage in the Bible is that Jesus’ language goes from somewhat metaphorical to straight up literal and his audience understood it like that. They got super offended and left because of it and Jesus never stops them to clarify that this wasn’t supposed to be taken like that. He just turns to the few remaining and says, are you gonna go too? Almost as if to say, “‘cause I meant what I said there.”
This is one of those topics that is one of the most contentious among Christian denominations and factions. Some believe Jesus meant what he said and that when the bread and wine are blessed, they are substantially changed into his body and blood under the appearance of bread and wine.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are groups that say Jesus was just giving us a ritual to re-enact as a memorial for his sacrifice and that it only symbolically represents his body and blood.
In considering that, the questions that I think are most relevant to making a conclusion are:
Is there any good reason to think that it’s a symbol? What did the people listening to Jesus himself think it meant? What did the early Church believe? What fits the progressing narrative of salvation in the bible best?
Looking at that first question, the support for the idea that it’s only a symbol seems to be based on the moral objection to cannibalism.
I can sympathize with this a bit, but where I get lost is in the idea that symbolic cannibalism is an acceptable substitute for actual cannibalism.
Regarding the early Church, when we look at the writings of the Church fathers, we find an understanding that tends to line up with a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox understanding. In one of the earliest Christian writings, Justin Martyr, writing to the Roman emperor in about 150 AD, says this:
“Not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh."
Lastly, on the question of the what fits the biblical narrative of salvation I think we should look into how this evolved out of a tradition of sacrificing animals, in the Old Testament, for the forgiveness of sins. Obviously, this wasn’t done in a symbolic way. An actual sacrificial death had to pay for life and in the context of the Passover, which is what Jesus and the disciples were celebrating together at the last supper, you had to sacrifice an unblemished lamb and eat it.
If Jesus is the sacrificial lamb who takes away the sins of the world, as John the Baptist described him, then it would make a lot of sense that his sacrifice would involve eating him as well.
So as I focused my attention on this topic as I was trying to resolve the competing claims of different denominations, it seemed to me that the ancient Catholic and Eastern Orthodox beliefs about this were much stronger and that is what inched me closer to eventually becoming Catholic.
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7 июн 2018
