NOTES for Joh 6:48-54
It is not surprising that Jesus’ words about His blood and His flesh, which He would give those who believed in Him to eat, caused bewilderment among His listeners that turned into murmuring. They saw Jesus as an ordinary man, for traditional Jewish ideas not only about prophets but also about the Messiah assume that these are perfectly ordinary people whom God calls to a special ministry at some point in their lives; after the call, a person becomes what God wants him to be, whether a prophet or the Messiah. Human flesh and human blood were associated for them not even with murder, but with something far worse: human sacrifice, which from the Torah’s point of view is not only murder and defilement, but also the worst form of idolatry. Yet when Jesus addresses His listeners, He speaks about something they should have understood, at least on the level of symbol or allegory. Flesh and blood were, in both Hebrew and Aramaic, symbols of life, of the vital force that every person bore within as long as he lived. Of course, if this were an ordinary man, such a statement, even understood allegorically, would leave many questions: how can one person distribute his life among many people, perhaps even an entire nation? How is that possible? And what would remain for the one giving it away? But if we remember the fullness of God that Jesus bears within Himself, the fullness of the life of the Kingdom by which He lives, everything falls into place and becomes clear. He truly can give His life to everyone without being diminished, for the life of the Kingdom is as infinite as the fullness of God, whose projection into the created world it is. 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 lives of those who seek it. And so that at the end of time it will enter the world completely and be revealed there in all its fullness, cleansing the world from sin and transfiguring it.