Eating Christ, Part 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

This Man

Jesus told a crowd of unbelievers, “The bread that I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The crowd responded with incredulity. They asked, “How is this man able to give us his flesh to eat?”

In context, the crowd would have understood the reference to Jesus’ flesh as a metaphor. From the beginning of His argument with the multitude, Jesus had used the eating of bread to symbolize belief in Him. He repeatedly challenged the crowd with significant claims. He claimed to be the bread that came down from heaven. He claimed to have authority to raise up the dead. He claimed to be sent from God, and He applied a Messianic title to Himself. Jesus insisted that anyone who believed on Him would be given eternal life.

The only element that Jesus now added to these claims was that His flesh or body would be the bread that He would give for the life of the world. In other words, Jesus averred that He was not merely a spiritual, divine savior, but also a very human, incarnate one. His body or flesh—His humanity—would be absolutely essential to our salvation.

If the crowd was following Jesus’ metaphor of eating as believing, then they should have understood this claim. They were supposed to believe on Jesus as one who would give His body as a sacrifice for their sins. Nevertheless, understanding the metaphor was no guarantee that they would necessarily accept Jesus’ claims.

In fact, they did not believe. Instead, they asked, “How is this man able to give us his flesh to eat?” The thrust of this question was consistent with other questions that the crowd had asked. They simply could not accept the notion that “this man,” Jesus, could actually deliver what He claimed to offer.

Jesus, however, refused to retreat. He replied, “I tell you the absolute truth: if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you do not have life in you. The one who crunches my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up in the last day. For my flesh is true eating, and my blood is true drink. The one who crunches my flesh and drinks my blood remains with me, and I with him. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, also the one who crunches me, that one shall live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not just as the bread that the fathers ate and died; the one who crunches this bread shall live forever.”

Rather than abandoning the metaphor of eating, Jesus intensifies it. Rather than using the generic term “eat,” He switches to the word “crunch,” a word that designates the act of chewing. Why did Jesus make this switch?

The answer is that the expression “to crunch someone’s bread” functioned as an idiom in the Greek of the first century. To “crunch bread” was to be a companion of the one whose bread was crunched. The expression is used in just this way in John 13:18. It designates companionship and fellowship.

Since Jesus had already said that His body was the bread that He would give for the life of the world, the application of the idiom is clear. The body that Jesus gave for us on the cross is the basis of our fellowship with Him. There is no companionship or fellowship with Christ apart from His body. We cannot believe on Christ while rejecting His true humanity, materiality, and incarnation.

Perhaps it is no accident that the first of the great Christological heresies—Gnosticism—attacked just this point. Both Docetists and Cerinthians believed in a divine Christ who was not the human Jesus. In their theology, the Christ could not have had a genuinely human body. His body was either a phantom (Docetism) or else the body of a completely different person temporarily inhabited by the Christ spirit (Cerinthianism).

On the contrary, Jesus Himself insisted emphatically that His material body was essential to our salvation. To believe on Him is exactly to believe in His humanity, His body, His incarnation, and His death. To “crunch bread” with Jesus necessarily has to involve “crunching” His body. To crunch the body of Jesus and to drink His blood means to believe on Him. This belief is more than a mere, intellectual acceptance of His claims. It is a trusting dependence in which we cast ourselves upon Him and look to Him alone for salvation. If we believe on Him (crunch His body and drink His blood), Jesus says that we will remain with Him and He with us—another idiom for companionship.

The discourse of John 6 is not about the Eucharist. It is about saving faith. In this discourse, Jesus asserts that He alone has the power to give us eternal life. His gift of life depends upon His body and blood. We cannot come to Him simply as the solution to our temporal needs. We must trust Him as the incarnate one who came down from heaven, as the one who gave His body and shed His blood for us. We must embrace Jesus in the fullness of His deity and in the fullness of His humanity. We must look to Him as the sacrifice for our sins. He is the one who gave his body, and He is the one with the right to administer forgiveness. Most of all, He is the one who can satisfy the eternal hunger of our souls.

Morning Hymn

Thomas Ken (1637-1711)

Awake, my Soul, and with the Sun
Thy daily stage of Duty run,
Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise,
To pay thy Morning sacrifice.

Thy precious Time misspent, redeem,
Each present Day thy last esteem,
Improve thy Talent with due care,
For the Great Day thyself prepare.

‘Wake, and lift up thyself, my Heart,
And with the Angels bear thy part,
Who all night long unwearied sing,
High Praise to the Eternal King.

May I like you in God delight,
Have all day long my God in sight,
Perform like you my Maker’s Will,
O may I never more do ill.

Had I your Wings, to Heaven I’d fly,
But God shall that defect supply,
And my Soul wing’d with warm desire,
Shall all day long to Heav’n aspire.

This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.