Flesh and Blood John 6:53-59

[HKHaugan]

As we approach Holy Week the Cross looms on the horizon of our daily experience. The claims of Jesus come in the context of Jesus’ declaration that He is the bread of life. It starts early in John as Jesus declares He is life and gives life and intends to share that life through faith. The Feeding of the 5000 builds on the idea of a spiritual feeding.

The abundance of bread and fish point to a deeper feeding available in the Word.

He reprimands the crowds that follow Him because they misread the miracle as a possibility of gaining physical satisfaction, worldly power and security. The entire Gospel however, points to Jesus as the only possible means to not only being truly fed in this world but the avenue to life forever.

The Gospel builds to a kind of mini-crescendo in this chapter.

It peaks here where His followers have to make a real choice as to whether or not they can trust what He says and promises. He makes it quite clear that He is the One who is to be fed upon and gives them a starkly vivid picture of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. The mental images evoked in His teaching were startling to say the least. The Scripture was clear that eating of human flesh and drinking blood were prohibited.

Why this gruesome illustration?

Jesus clarifies the issue in vs.60-69. The reaction of those hearing, including some of His disciples, was to reject it as a hard saying. Then Jesus confronts many of His disciples by asking them if they were offended by this image. His eye-opening teaching then follows.

“What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where He was before? The Spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.”

What if you see Jesus rising to where He came from? In other words He came spiritually and leaves spiritually. His presence is spiritual and therefore His feeding is spiritual. The question is what was the process of His coming and leaving? He became incarnate by the Holy Spirit. He was crucified and died in faith submitting to His Father’s will and saying, “Into your hands I commit my Spirit”. He was resurrected by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Herein lies the key to Jesus’ teaching about eating His Body and drinking His blood.
He feeds us the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
It is the Holy Spirit who works in our hearts and rebuilds the image of God in us.

Three things we want to see in this picture.

First, it is a feeding, a spiritual feeding, a feeding that involves the nutrition of the flooding indwelling Holy Spirit.

Let’s look at this in how we relate in general. There is always that common experience with friends we make. We associate with them because there is something about them that makes us feel comfortable. We can express ourselves with them without fear of judgment and pickiness. There is a peace when you have a good friend, moments of pleasurable sharing about experiences, people and the ideas in general. You get to talk about just anything you want. If there are common interests you share them. In essence what you are doing is feeding on them and they on you.

What Jesus is doing here is challenging the kind of feeding people do. They may feed on others for what they can get out of them as Jesus points out when he tells those who followed Him from the Feeding of the 5000. They may be feeding on others for ideas, for opinions, for support, for backing, for justification. Whatever the reason we have to sort out what we are feeding on and why. What is the motivation behind our saying and doing the things we do in relationships?

Jesus is saying that there is a spiritual feeding that transcends all others and is the real food that images of God need to live, survive, have purpose and to reach out. Jesus is the bread of life itself, the life that is eternal, the life that goes beyond the life we are born into this world with. It is spiritual life. Jesus was born in what town? Yes, Bethlehem, which means ‘house of bread.’

When Jesus identifies how He feeds He refers to feeding on ‘every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ He further says, ‘ my food is to do the will of Him who sent me.’ Jesus spent 40 days and nights in the wilderness without food or water feeding on His relationship with His Father.

Ps.41:9 He who shared my bread lifted his heel against me.
Ob.1:7 those who eat your bread will set a trap for you.
Ps.30:8 daily bread
Mt.7:9 which of you if your son asks for bread…
Eccl.11:1 Cast your bread upon the waters…

It is the growing pains of the Holy Spirit changing our heart’s attitudes and responses.
When Jesus says in John 4 to the woman at the well that He could give her water from a spring that never ends He was talking about the Holy Spirit.
When He speaks of being bread He is talking about the Holy Spirit.
When He speaks about being the good shepherd He is referring to the pasture of the Spirit in the Word.
When He speaks about being the light He is feeding the need for insight.
When He speaks about being the truth His mind supplies the need for understanding in our minds, an intellectual feeding.
When He speaks about being the way He is talking about following the way He travels spiritually, obedient to His Fathers’ will.
Life?
That is Jesus speaking about the Holy Spirit whom Paul calls the Lord of life.

Second, it is a process, a spiritual process.

Here we are really talking about the process Jesus undertakes to show the way to the Father. It is the way He describes being in John 14 when He says He is the way.
He is born into the flesh by the Spirit from above.
He lives each day in the Word.
He seeks to do only what His Father wills.
He prays to His Father, walks with His Father, lives for His Father and brings the Kingdom to earth in every word and action of His earthly life.
He then bears the Cross telling us that the Cross is what we are to take up every day.
He lives as an example for each of us.
He sets the pattern for daily living.

In fact it is the Cross that is the way, the process. For us the way of the Cross, the process of living the Cross begins with self-crucifixion which is repentance, then submission and obedience to the Word, then the action that is our response to the Spirit directing us in the Word. This is why we have the Lord’s Supper as our worship focus.

Third, it is faith, a spiritual faith, in the Lord’s forgiveness, His teaching and His presence.

It is believing in Him and trusting Him. The whole of Jesus’ earthly life was lived faithfully towards His Father. He lived in faith and died in faith and was raised because He was perfectly faithful. As God the Son it was His faith that carried Him through the entire ordeal of being human. It was and is the Father’s will that we be born again in order to partake in the actual spiritual nature of God which begins with His gift of faith. God is faithful and that is what we are called to be and are enabled to be through a relationship with the perfectly faithful One, Christ Jesus. Jesus says in John, As the Father has sent me that is the way I am sending you.

When we feed on Jesus what we are really doing is denying our sinful self and allowing His Spirit to replace the sin and fear in us. This is why we ask the Father—give us this day our daily bread---since it is this request that He promises He will answer. As the demand for that feeding arises He responds just like the Israelites needed food and He supplied manna.

Just what is that feeding then?

Again it is like a banquet that has been prepared for us. We have been given the invitation. We stand at the door and knock. That is our repentance.
He opens the door and we are forgiven.
A great cloud of witnesses who have been servants of God over the centuries surrounds us.
We see the buffet prepared for us. It starts with large cups of humility, praise and thanksgiving. We are in the presence of a loving God, our true Father, our older brother, the Lord Jesus and the heart touching Holy Spirit.
We are handed an intellectual appetizer, the Scripture. In it we gain the principles of relationship with God and others and the Spirit takes the words and fills them with insight.
We find the line takes us down a row of opportunities to witness and a large helping of faith and trust are given us.
As we look for places to sit we find instead the moving power to relate to the stream of people we run into and the fruit of the Spirit is continually available to fill them and us.
There are special courses to help us in those relationships and we are filled with the gifts of the Spirit.
In that experience we find that the food on one plate is exactly what those who don’t have that particular food need and we supply it for them. That is our sharing with them. This is where find it is more blessed to give than to receive.

But what we find is even more astounding.

The banquet table never ends because as long as this world exists the banquet table is there. All along the way as we face the overwhelming challenges of life there is always exactly what we need to face the moments of our lives. The choices and decisions we have to make seem endless but, always there, along the way, is the right food at the right time.

So the growing intensity of Jesus’ teaching about Himself being the bread and the wine can be seen in the myriad situations of life that each of us face. This is why there is a feeding of the 5000 and the 4000, the progressive teaching about the bread and the miracles of the storm and walking on the water.