Main news for 24 June 2026

King James Version (en)

John, Chapter 6, verse 53

³² declareth himself to be the Bread of life to believers

⁵³Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.

NOTES

Christ called Himself bread, and that alone was hard for His listeners to understand. But for those who remembered the unusual images characteristic of prophetic speeches, it would not have been hard to take the words about bread as one of those parables. Jesus says that...

Reading the Gospel according to John, a normal person should almost constantly be in existential shock. Who is this Man? A violent madman? A maniac? Who is He to proclaim such a thing as the norm of life?...

It is no surprise that Jesus' words about His blood and His flesh, which He would give those who believe in Him to eat, left His listeners bewildered and then grumbling. They saw Jesus as an ordinary man, since traditional Jewish ideas not only about prophets but also about the Messiah assume that the matter concerns ordinary people whom God calls at some point in their lives to a special ministry; after that calling, the person becomes what God wants him to be, whether a prophet or the Messiah. And human flesh and human blood were associated for them not even with murder, but with something far worse: human sacrifice, which from the point of view of the Torah is not only murder and defilement, but also the worst kind of idolatry.

Meanwhile, when Jesus addresses His listeners, He speaks of something that should have been clear to them, at least on the level of symbol or allegory. Flesh and blood were, in both Hebrew and Aramaic, symbols of life, of the life force every person carried within himself while he was alive. Of course, if this had concerned an ordinary person, such a statement, even understood allegorically, would have left many questions. How can one person give his life to many people, perhaps even to an entire nation? How is that possible? And what will remain for the one who gives it away?

But if we remember the fullness of God that Jesus bears in Himself, the fullness of the life of the Kingdom by which He lives, everything falls into place and becomes clear. He can truly give each person His life, and nothing is diminished in Him by doing so: the life of the Kingdom is as infinite as the fullness of God, of which it is a projection into the created world. And everyone who enters the Kingdom truly shares with Jesus His life, which He willingly and joyfully shares with each person. He shares it so that the Kingdom will not remain His possession alone, but will truly enter the life of those who seek it. And so that at the end of time it will enter the world completely and be revealed in it in all its fullness, cleansing the world from sin and transforming it.

FAQ

What should be understood by the form of resurrection, described both in the Gospel (Christ's words that on the Day of Judgment He will resurrect those who live according to His word) and in the Apocalypse (the description of the judgment of the dead)? What will be the form, including the physical one, of the life of a resurrected person? When the risen Christ appeared before the disciples, in order to dispel their fear, He asked them for food and ate with them. Furthermore, knowing of Thomas's unbelief, He Himself asked him to touch the wounds from the crucifixion. Does it follow from this that the resurrected will also have a material form? Is this so, and what then will the spiritual component be?

Yes, you are right, the resurrected will also have a material component, and the body, judging by the wounds on the Body of the Risen Christ, will be the very same. In this lies the radical difference between the Christian faith and spiritualism, which considers that after the death of the flesh only the soul will live, as well as the belief in the reincarnation of souls. The ancient Apostles' Creed states that we believe in "the resurrection of the body", and our current Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed states that we "look for the resurrection of the dead" also in the flesh. This is fundamentally important, because Christianity considers a human being to be a creature consisting of an immaterial soul and a material body. The flesh alone, just like the soul alone, is remarkable, but it is not a human being. God desires specifically human beings, and it is precisely them that He came to save.

At the same time, the flesh of the Risen Christ differed from our flesh; in particular, it was not subject to the laws of this world. The Apostle Paul, speaking of the end of the world, says: "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed" ( 15:51-53). On this basis, Christians believe that in the resurrection of the dead our flesh will become as it was intended by God prior to the Fall, and they call it transfigured. This resurrection of us in our own, yet transfigured flesh, in its union with our own soul, accomplished by God, will become the beginning of the general transfiguration of creation.

The spiritual component, therefore, will not disappear either, and the resurrected person will be a human being, not a soul with little wings from ancient pagan myths. What will this spiritual component be? This will apparently be determined by our life here. If you were dead to sin and alive to God, and already here became a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, then your transfigured life has already begun here, and at the general resurrection it will unfold in all its fullness. But if you were dead to God and alive to sin…

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