NOTES for Joh 6:52-59

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?

Or let us admit for a minute that all His words are true and that He is God and Savior. What kind of God is this, calling people to cannibalism, offering Himself to be eaten, saying that the condition of salvation is His blood, which must be drunk? If He is a man, He is sick. If He is God, how are we to understand His words? What does He want from us?

Always one thing, and the comparison with cannibalism can help us. A person begins to eat his own kind when hunger has already driven him mad, when the thirst for life in him is such that nothing can stop him. Jesus tells us that this is exactly how we must thirst for union with God, filling ourselves completely with Him alone and forgetting everything else. From the outside this will, of course, look like madness, like something strange and improper. But God, who came to die for us, says that life is possible only if this insatiable hunger is satisfied.

If we were not so used to these words of the Lord Jesus, we would probably repeat after the bewildered disciples: "What strange, frightening words!" He had just been speaking about the heavenly bread that comes down from heaven and satisfies everyone who partakes of it, and now it turns out that this bread is Jesus Himself, and that believers are to "chew His flesh" - these frightening, harsh words are softened by the Russian translation. And immediately the Lord tells the troubled disciples that His words are spirit and life, that it is the Spirit who gives life, and that "the flesh is no help at all" (63).

We already know that the central message of John's Gospel is that "the Word became flesh," and that faith in the bodily coming of God's Son gives people eternal life. On the other hand, the very description of the breaking of the loaves - "having given thanks, He broke and distributed," and the gathering of the leftovers from the meal - connects the reader with the breaking of bread at the Last Supper. In this way the evangelist binds together faith in the flesh of the Son of God, the eternal life given by the Spirit, and the eucharistic meal that nourishes the faithful.

What do the Savior's words mean about the impossibility of coming to Him unless the Father draws a person? Absolute predestination? The futility of any human effort when it comes to the Christian life? Or something else?

Of course, there is no question of absolute predestination when it comes to a person's destiny. After all, Jesus tells us nothing about what guides the Father when He brings one person or another to Jesus, or how far He takes that person's intentions and desires into account. And the whole biblical context compels us to think that God still takes a person's free choice into account, so that He will not drag anyone to Christ or after Christ by force. But He can certainly make use of the sincere desire of a seeker to find the living truth.

But the point may not be at all what criteria guide God as He directs a person along one spiritual path or another. Jesus Himself appears to be speaking about something else. People do not understand Him; many leave, troubled by His words. A minority remains. These people cannot leave because they have nowhere to go. In Christ they have found that very living truth, the very meaning of their own life without which this life is no longer needed by them, without which it is simply unthinkable for them.

This vividly felt and experienced uniqueness of the only possible spiritual path, this impossibility of leaving not because someone or something is holding them from outside, but because spiritually there is nowhere else to go - this is the action of God. Such a result cannot be achieved by human effort; human nature is not inclined to drive itself into a trap, into a psychological dead end from which there is only one exit. By nature, a person always tries to leave an alternative open. When it disappears, we are almost always facing the result of an external spiritual influence on the situation or on the human soul. A dark influence, if the absence of alternatives becomes hopelessness that dooms to death. A light-filled influence, if it points to the only path leading into the Kingdom.

Christ's word about Himself as the Bread of Heaven, given by the Father, is so incredible that even some of the disciples choose to leave the Teacher. There is nothing surprising in this: when we look at ourselves and at the history of humanity, we see that we very often turn away from Christ precisely because His Word surpasses our understanding. Learning to be faithful to God, whose ways and thoughts infinitely surpass our ways and thoughts, is not simple at all.

And therefore the words of the apostle Peter at the end of today's passage sound like such a victory, such a bright flash of truth: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." We may prefer a God who is more understandable, rational, and, dare I say, primitive, but there is no other. So our choice is the one the Lord Himself spoke of in Deuteronomy 30: "I have set before you today life and death, blessing and curse." What matters, however, is that without these mysterious and difficult words of Christ, we would not have had a choice, but only a curse.

Every person seeks joy and seeks happiness. He searches wherever he can. And he even finds something. But what he finds is not yet true happiness. It comes and goes without giving a person an answer to what God alone can reach. This “happiness” disappears, leaving behind an even greater thirst: a thirst for something genuine, something that will never pass away but will “abide forever.” In today’s passage from John’s Gospel, Christ points out that only the food He gives us is eternal: His Flesh and Blood (see John 6:56–58). And although the disciples have not yet tasted this food, they can already say that they do not want to seek anything else: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). They understand that they have found what they may have been seeking all their lives until then, and that turning aside or returning to what came before makes absolutely no sense for them. In the same way, the centurion Cornelius feels that God is calling him, and here is the fulfillment of everything for which he has waited so long. And so that the apostle Peter will not hinder the growth of the Kingdom of God through his stereotypes, the Lord first has to do some formative work with him, so that those who seek God may finally come to Him.

How can He give us His Flesh to eat? This question, put to Christ by the Jews, can serve as a measure of how incredible and incomprehensible the miracle of the Eucharist is. Of course, it is impossible within the bounds of human logic. Impossible because these words cannot be understood literally. Impossible because this contradicts the letter of the law. Most importantly, it is impossible because, if we are to eat Christ's Flesh, He will have to die. All these “impossibilities” are what astonish both the Jews and all the rest of humanity.

But by His will God brings into being whatever He desires. “Let there be light,” God says—and light comes into being. “Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven”—and the lights come into being. It is important to accept that Christ's words, “This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day,” and “Take, eat...” are words of the same kind: they express the will of the Creator, which nothing has the power to resist.

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.

The whole practical life of a Christian is founded upon the words of Christ that we read today: “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” This is the center, the focal point of spiritual life. It is an encounter with Jesus face to face, continually granted to us. Moreover, the flesh and blood of Christ are more than an encounter: they are a mutual indwelling, for He Himself said, “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” And His flesh and blood are also the resurrection granted to us today.

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 His teaching, and He Himself, are as necessary as daily food - why not agree with this?

Such an understanding cannot be called wrong, and yet it is clearly insufficient. For twenty centuries already, for many people who accept Christ only as a sage and moral teacher, His words about Flesh and Blood have remained closed and incomprehensible - just as they were for many of His listeners then. It is enough to imagine a Jew who had firmly learned that the law of Moses not only forbids the eating of blood, but also regards everything connected with bleeding as defiling and requiring rites of purification. And suddenly he hears about the necessity of drinking blood, and human blood at that, and moreover the Blood of this strange preacher. Even for prophetic allegory such a call sounds excessively scandalous!

For us, reading the Gospel many centuries later, it is easier to see that Christ is speaking here about the Eucharist; but we should not stop there. The meaning of the Eucharist is deep and incomprehensible in its fullness. At times it is useful to remember how shaken the ancient Jews were when they first heard Jesus' call to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood. Perhaps this will help us feel anew what the Last Supper was for the first generation of Christ's disciples. Unlike the other evangelists, John does not mention the disciples' partaking of the Body and Blood at the Last Supper. But the words of the Savior that he has preserved for us are just as important for understanding the essence of what was taking place then.