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Joe examines what many Protestant apologists get right (and wrong) about John 6. Yes, Jesus is using metaphor. And that’s why we should worship Him in the Eucharist.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And last week I did a three hour long Q&A with students at the Catholic Center at Fort Hayes State University, and some of their questions were preselected and they got to vote on them by popularity. The most popular question that they asked was this, “Why do Catholics take Jesus literally when he refers to himself as the bread of life, but not when he says that he is the vine and we are the branches or other metaphorical statements?” I’m really glad they asked a question, and I wanna give five arguments that I think will show why Catholics are right in their reading of John six. First, the bread of life is a metaphor. Now that might sound shocking to some people watching, but hear me out. It is common for people to say the Protestants take John six symbolically and Catholics take John six literally.
That is a bad way of understanding the two positions. And unfortunately, Protestants will themselves will often argue against the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist by simply trying to show that the bread of life is a metaphor.
CLIP:
Now, not in a literal sense. Clearly we get hungry and thirsty physically in a spiritual sense. So therefore, if this is not literal, it’s spiritual, then it makes sense that also him being the bread of life is not literal, but spiritual.
CLIP:
But he says you’ll never hunger, never thirst. This implies that it’s symbolic. I’m the bread of life. He comes to me, he’s never gonna hunger. It, it’s not physical bread here. He’s talking about spiritually speaking, I’m the bread of life.
Joe:
On the one hand, those guys are absolutely right. When Jesus says that he is the bread of life, that is a metaphor. We all recognize that. Neither Catholics nor Protestants believe that Jesus was literally made of bread like the gingerbread man. The entire question is not whether the bread of life is a metaphor or not. The entire question is what the bread of life metaphor means. And as Mike Winger rightly points out in the Gospel of John, when Jesus uses a metaphor and he’s misunderstood, he then clarifies the meaning of his metaphor.
CLIP:
This is consistent with all of the, all that Jesus says in John. In John in chapter three, he says to Nicodemus, “You gotta be born again.” He’s speaking of a spiritual birth, not a physical birth. And he has this long thing where he tries to get Nicodemus to realize it’s a spiritual thing. In John four, he tells the woman at the well, “I’ll give you living water.” And she’s like, “Oh, good. Tell, give me this water so I don’t have to come back here and fill up my bucket all the time.” And he goes, “No, I’m, I’m talking about spiritual truths.” You know, he’s trying to explain to her. And here in John six, he says he’s the bread of life and you come to him and he’ll, you’ll never hunger and you’ll never thirst. It’s all spiritual truths.
Joe:
Now, as we’re gonna see later, both Ryan and Mike are mistaken here in contrasting literal against spiritual. For example, the resurrection is both a literal event, it’s also a spiritual event. But what they’re trying to say I think is correct and, and completely uncontroversial. Jesus uses a lot of metaphors throughout the Gospel of John. People often misunderstand them and Jesus then has to clarify what they mean. So how does that go in John six? Well, originally, Jesus tells the crowd, Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. He then begins talking about the Father giving the true manna from heaven. Now remember, these are the same crowds which Jesus just literally and miraculously fed the day before with the multiplication of the loaves. And so they’re initially excited at the prospect of more free food.
So the crowd’s first understanding is that Jesus is going to give them literal bread. Jesus then clarifies saying that he is the bread from heaven. Now this time, the crowds think that he just means that he’s come from heaven. They kind of discard the bread part as just a symbol. That’s their second understanding. It’s also wrong. And it’s in response to this that Jesus lays everything else. Yes, the bread of life is a metaphor, but what is it a metaphor for? And here’s the kicker. The real difference between how Catholics and evangelicals understand the passage here is not that one side takes the bread of life literally and the other side takes it figuratively. It’s that Catholics believe that when Jesus says we need to eat the bread of life, that this means that we need to eat his flesh. And evangelicals typically believe that when Jesus says we need to eat his flesh, that this means we need to believe in his teachings.
CLIP:
And so when he talks about in John 6:53 – Yeah. That we’ve got to eat him, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Clearly that’s not literal either, that’s in a spiritual way – Right. That when you believe in him, you’re eating him, you’re consuming him. Yes. Because you’ve come to believe and you’ve got eternal life.
Joe:
So which side is right? Is the bread of life a reference to Jesus’ flesh or to his teachings? Again, both sides agree it’s a metaphor. What is it a metaphor for? And just as he did with Nicodemus and just as he did with the woman at the well, Jesus spells it out for us. And here in John 6:51, he says explicitly, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” So why do we think that the bread of life is a metaphor for Jesus’ flesh? Because Jesus Christ tells us that it is. With Nicodemus, with the woman at the well, when Jesus uses a misunderstood metaphor or image, he then gives a straightforward explanation and here he does that again.
It is a straightforward, granted shocking explanation. And the crowds themselves are shocked by it. They say, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” But this third time, Jesus doesn’t say, “Oh no, you still misunderstand.” This third time around, Jesus doubles down on what he’s just said. Now he talks about the need to not only eat his flesh, even says to gnaw his flesh and to drink his blood. He says that he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. He claims that his flesh is food indeed, that his blood is drink indeed. Now the attempt to explain all of this away is more metaphor. It doesn’t work and for two reasons. First, where else in scripture does Jesus interpret one metaphor with another metaphor? And second, how in the world does drink my blood a metaphor for believe me?
In Revelation 17, the whore of Babylon is described as being drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. Does that mean that she believed their teachings? No. It means she murdered them. So that’s the first of the five arguments. Yes, the bread of life discourse is a metaphor, but just like the other metaphors we find in scripture, the text tells us explicitly how to understand it properly this time because Jesus tells us that the bread of life is literally his flesh. The second argument is that the Eucharist is a symbol. Now, just as Protestants are often surprised to learn that Catholics realize that the bread of life is a metaphor, they’re often surprised to learn that we realize that the Eucharist is symbolic. That’s because many times on both sides, we assume that something must be either real or else symbolic, and that is a mistake.
Jesus’s miracles are symbolic. That’s why St. John can refer to Jesus’ miracles as signs. They point to deeper realities. For example, when Jesus heals somebody, that tells us something about Jesus himself, that he’s powerful, that he loves us, that he cares about us. One of the reasons that Jesus heals people’s bodies is to remind us that he can heal our souls. So you could look at any of Jesus’s miracles and ask, “Did that really happen?” And you could also ask, “Is it a symbol?” And the answer to both questions is going to be yes. Now that’s even true of Jesus’s own body. Remember, Jesus is the image of the invisible God as Saint Paul tells us. He’s a visible sign of the invisible God. But Jesus is also real and he has a real body. So is Jesus’ body physical? Yes. Is it a sign?
Also, yes. It’s not either or. And that’s true of the body of Christ whether we’re talking about the Eucharist or the incarnation. Now, Mike Winger gets really close to stumbling onto this point when he talks about the Eucharist in the context of the Passover, which is both real and heavily symbolic.
CLIP:
They would eat this lamb that had been burned, not boiled, burned, representing judgment. They would eat it because it had its blood spilled so that they would have be passed over and all this other stuff. They’d eat the bread, they’d take the cup, and everything was symbolic. Every aspect of it was symbolic.
Joe:
Again, Mike is absolutely right. Every part of the Passover meal was symbolic, but it was also real. The Passover lamb was literally a lamb. It also happens to be a symbol. In this case, it was a symbol for shadowing Jesus as the ultimate lamb who would sacrifice his flesh for us. The Passover, the bread of life discourse in John six, the last supper, all of Jesus’s miracles, they’re all symbolic, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean they’re not also real. None of them are just symbols. In one Corinthians 10, St. Paul describes the manna that the Israelites eat in the wilderness as spiritual food. Some translations have supernatural food, but the Greek literally says spiritual. So is the manna, the original bread from heaven, literal food? Yes. Was it also spiritual food? Also, yes. Remember, the manna was given to the Israelites to remind them that man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.
And Jesus tells the crowds that his flesh is the true manna. So it makes perfect sense to say that the Eucharist is literal and also symbolic. All right, the third argument I call Clark Kent is Superman and Superman is Clark Kent. It works like this. Many people miss that John six is actually just one part of the broader evidence. Within the New Testament, you’ve got these two sets of biblical passages. First, you’ve got these passages like John six in which Jesus says things about his flesh being food indeed and his blood being drink indeed. But there’s a second set of passages as well in which Jesus at the last supper takes bread and after blessing it declares it to be his body saying, “Take eat. This is my body.” Now here we have a Clarion red flag that something is different here from when Jesus talks about himself as the door or the good shepherd, because we don’t have Jesus in grabbing a door and saying, “This is me,” or picking up one of the shepherds and saying, “This is my body.” Think about it like this.
If you say, “That guy is Superman,” you might mean that literally, you know Superman’s secret identity, or you might just mean it metaphorically, “He’s an amazing guy.” Left in isolation, it’s hard to say for sure which interpretation is right. But if you then say, “Clark Kent is Superman and also Superman is Clark Kent,” well, now it sounds like you’re not just speaking metaphorically. This is what’s called a converse relationship, to say Clark Kent is Superman and Superman is Clark Kent, sounds like you’re actually trying to tell us the identity of Superman. Well, similarly, Jesus both seems to say that he is the Eucharist and the Eucharist is him. And I mention all of this because Protestants arguing that John six is just symbolic, are forced to make this really bizarre argument to avoid the converse relationship. They have to act as if when Jesus says that his body is the true bread of heaven in John six, that that has nothing to do with the fact that he then says that bread that has been blessed becomes his body at the last supper.
CLIP:
John six has got nothing to do with communion. Yeah. It’s nothing about the Eucharist. This is a discussion about, um, Jesus being the true sustenance we need. This is not the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper, the last supper would happen still years away.
Joe:
For context, remember here, John six happens at Passover, and John finds that detail worth mentioning in the text. And the next Passover that we hear of is the Last Supper. And it’s not just that both John six and The Last Supper happen at the same time of year, it’s that they both happen at Passover time. As St. Mark puts it, they take place at the time when they sacrifice the Passover lamb. Why does that matter? Because Jesus is our Passover lamb. As St. Paul says, the center of the Passover meal is lamb. And yet bizarrely, in none of the five accounts that we have of the last supper, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and one Corinthians, not one of them mentions anyone eating lamb or even of their being lamb at the meal. The clearest way I can explain this to you is for Americans watching, if you hear somebody talking about their Thanksgiving meal, they talk about the gravy, they talk about the stuffing, they talk about the green beans, and then they just kind of leave it there, you might be like, “Something is missing from the meal here.
Where’s the turkey?” Well, similarly, where’s the lamb at the last supper? Scripture tells us. St. Paul says, “Christ, our pascal lamb has been sacrificed.” The Passover sacrifice of the old covenant involved eating the body of the sacrificed lamb, and now Jesus gives us his own body to eat, and this replaces the Old Testament lamb. This is why Saint John the Baptist can say, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sense of the world.” In the Old Testament, eating the body of the Lamb was how you participated in the Passover sacrifice. In Deuteronomy 16, the eating of the Passover meal in the evening is explicitly described as part of the Passover sacrifice. This was the normal way that ordinary Israelites shared in the sacrifice. The priests were the ones who killed the lamb. So how was the blood of the lamb applied to you and to your family?
Well, by smearing the blood on the doorpost and by eating the flesh of the lamb so that none of the flesh was left over until morning. St. Paul takes for granted that his readers know this. He asks rhetorically, “Consider the practice of Israel. Are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?” And Israeli didn’t have the ability to go up to the altar on their own. They shared in the sacrifice of the altar by eating it. Now, with that in mind, what does it mean in a Jewish framework to declare that Jesus is now our Passover lamb? Well, it means that we’re to eat his body. St. Paul’s point is that how you become a sharer in the sacrifice happens explicitly when Paul is talking about the Eucharist. He’s making the point that when you eat the Eucharist, you share in the sacrifice of Christ and share in participation in the body and blood of Christ.
So on the one hand, you’ve got these texts explicitly about the Eucharist that connected it to eating the Passover and particularly to eating the Passover lamb, and then you’ve got Jesus at the New Passover declaring of the bread that he has blessed that it is his body. And on the other hand, you’ve got Jesus at Passover time a year before in John six saying that we need to eat his body and drink His blood. And we’re supposed to take these two sets of passages and somehow believe that –
CLIP:
John six has got nothing to do with communion.
Joe:
Ryan goes on to claim in that clip that this couldn’t be about the Eucharist because the Eucharist hasn’t happened yet. Like the last supper hasn’t happened yet. But by that logic, when Jesus says, “The bread which I shall give for the life of the world of my flesh,” then we’d have to say, “Well, that can’t be about Good Friday either because the crucifixion hasn’t happened yet.” The argument just doesn’t make sense. Jesus is allowed to speak about things that have not yet happened, and he actually does that a lot in the New Testament. Now, you might ask, “Well, why do Protestants like Ryan try to divorce John six from The Last Supper when you have such similar language and context and everything else?” In John six, Jesus says, “My flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed.” And people like Ryan take that to mean that his flesh is not food indeed.
It’s not literally food, and that instead it just means we should listen to Jesus’ teaching. But you don’t get to do that to the Last Supper. You can’t explain away the Last Supper in that way. When Jesus picks up the bread, blesses it and says, “This is my body,” there’s not really an obvious way you can twist his words into a vague believe in me explanation. So again, you might be able to explain away somebody saying Clark Kent is Superman to just say that we are really impressed with his reporting. But it’s a lot harder to explain that away if you hear that same person also tell you Superman is Clark Kent. Jesus’ flesh isn’t worthless. That’s the fourth argument. In John 6:63, when the crowds are having trouble accepting Jesus’ Eucharistic teaching, he tells them, “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.” The words that I’ve spoken to you are spirit and life.
Now in context, Jesus is talking about the fact that some of his listeners are unbelieving, that the reason they’re walking away is that they don’t believe. And the verse makes that perfectly clear. They’re not acting like spiritual men. But Protestants like Mike and like Ryan think that when Jesus tells us to listen to the spirit instead of the flesh, that that actually just means we should listen to metaphors instead of literal things.
CLIP:
And the end of the passage, John chapter six verse 63, he reiterates this in case you though he was speaking purely literally. “It is the spirit who gives life the flesh prophets nothing.
Joe:
“Now there are two problems here. The first one, you can actually hear Mike Winger doing this explicitly, is that he is contrasting literally verse spiritually as if spiritual was just another word for metaphorical. And that is a dangerous mistake. St. Paul says that Jesus’ resurrected body is a spiritual body, but Paul is not saying that Jesus only symbolically or metaphorically rose from the dead. That would be a denial of the resurrection. But the second mistake is that he doesn’t understand the meaning of flesh in spirit in John 6:63. And there’s actually a simple test that you can use to show this. Simply ask whose flesh is worthless? Whose flesh profits nothing in verse 63? Because the reading that Protestants like Mike Winger seem to take is that Jesus is declaring his own flesh to be worthless. Now Ryan of needgod.net is actually even more clear that he thinks Jesus is denying that his own flesh is any worth to it.
CLIP:
In verse 63, Jesus also tells us in the same context, it is the spirit who gives life. The flesh, notice the flesh is no help at all. Yes. The words that I’ve spoken to you are spirit and life. So he actually clarifies. I’m not speaking fleshly words like just physical things. I’m saying, I’m speaking spiritual truths. Yeah. So not literally eating my body or eating my flesh.
Joe:
Now if it’s not clear why that interpretation is so bad, consider this. John 6:63 comes at the end of Jesus saying the following five things. Number one, the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. So Jesus has announced he’s going to offer his flesh for the salvation of the world. Number two, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. So Jesus’ flesh is key to receiving divine life within us. Number three, he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up for the last day. So Jesus’ flesh, his body is the key to the resurrection of our own bodies. Number four, my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. Pretty self-explanatory. We are to be nourished by Jesus’ flesh and blood.
And number five, he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. So if you want Jesus abiding in you, you need his flesh. And we’re to hear those five things and think that just a few verses later, Jesus announces, no, actually wait, my flesh is worthless. If Jesus’ flesh is worthless, then his bodily death on the cross is worthless and we’re all dead in our sins. So hopefully you can see how terrible this bit of biblical exit Jesus is. But nevertheless, you can understand why people are confused. How should we make sense of this first? I will acknowledge it is a confusing verse at first. What Jesus is saying is not that his flesh is worthless, but that our flesh, meaning our flesh, the understanding of his words, is worthless without the aid of the Holy Spirit. And if you pay careful attention, you’ll see a couple details that point to this being the proper interpretation.
First, in each of the five cases that I mentioned, Jesus talks about how his flesh is needed for salvation. In every one of those five instances, he explicitly says either the flesh of the Son of Man or my flesh. But in John 6:63, he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say, “My flesh is of no avail.” He doesn’t say the flesh of the son of man is of no avail. He just says, “The flesh is of no avail.” In other words, he is shifting what he’s talking about. He’s not declaring his own body worthless. And this leads to the second key to understanding this properly, which is to look at how the flesh is used, particularly in juxtaposition with the spirit in the Bible. When the Bible contrasts thinking according to the flesh, with thinking according to the spirit, it doesn’t mean that your body is bad and your soul is good.
And it doesn’t mean that literal things are bad and metaphorical things are good. As St. Augustine pointed out back in the early days of the church, the devil doesn’t have a body, but he is evil. He’s not good. And in fact, he’s even guilty of the sins of the flesh mentioned by St. Paul, things like enmity, strife, anger and jealousy. That’s because those aren’t bodily sins. You don’t need a body to commit any of them, but they are sins of the flesh in the way the New Testament speaks of them because they’re the kind of things that we fleshly creatures get up to when we’re not led by the Holy Spirit. That’s why St. Paul can say that you are not in the flesh, you are in the spirit if the spirit of God really dwells in you. Now, if you take that to literally mean Christians don’t have bodies, you’ve obviously badly misunderstood what the Bible means by contrasting the flesh and the spirit.
So what Jesus is saying in John 6:63 is that your unaided human understanding of His teaching will lead you astray and it’s going to be worthless. And that is exactly what we see in these misunderstandings of His teaching. But I want to get to the final teaching now, which is that Jesus is a clear teacher and we should listen to His students. Now this final argument is a simple one. One of the ways we know what Jesus taught is by listening to the apostles, one of the ways that we know what they taught is by listening to this people who listened to them and knew them in person. And these earliest Christians, as far as we can tell, universally believed that the Eucharist was truly the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The Protestant scholar D.A. Carson concedes that St. Ignatius of Antioch probably knew the Apostle John.
He’s actually traditionally believed to have studied under him and been one of his disciples. And he’s writing just a few decades after the Gospel of John is written. And yet, he clearly speaks of the Eucharist in sacramental terms. He describes it as a medicine of immortality and as the antidote to death. Now, all of that makes perfect sense if the Eucharist is what Jesus is describing in John six, when he says that he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day. And Ignatius warns the Christians of Smyrna to avoid the Gnostics, saying that the Gnostics confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins in which the father of his goodness raised up again. As such, he warns that the Gnostics need to treat the Eucharist with respect if they want to rise from the dead again.
He even warns the Christians to watch out, to keep aloof from such people. That is, Ignatius isn’t just telling us his own private interpretation of John six. He takes for granted that the Christians to whom he’s writing believe the same thing, and that if they encounter somebody who doesn’t believe that, who doesn’t believe in the bodily reality of the Eucharist, that they are happy to just shun them and have nothing to do with them. And remember, these are the Christians of Smyrna, one of the churches that St. John wrote to directly. Now this is all just a critical point to remember. The Christians back then didn’t just know the meaning of John chapter six because they’d read the chapter. They knew the meaning because these were people who knew the Apostle John personally, and they all seem to have universally come away from this encounter with the belief that the Eucharist is the true flesh and blood of Jesus Christ.
And I would ask simply, how could all of them have misunderstood not only John six, but John himself so badly? Now look, despite everything I’ve said here, I’m really just scratching the surface. For more on how to properly understand the Bible’s teaching about the Eucharist, you can check out this fivefold test that I lay out right here. For shameless popourri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.