A couple years ago on Christmas day our family was hanging out together when my brother started talking about this TV show that featured a family of Louisiana rednecks who had gotten rich selling duck calls. Now I’m at least a little bit redneck – not enough to be a NASCAR fan – but still at least a bit of a redneck. I just can’t get too excited about watching a bunch of cars that are covered with advertisements drive around in circles. But even though my brother said the show was funny and actually featured the family praying to Jesus, I just have never been a big fan of any of these so-called “reality” shows. So I didn’t give it much more thought.
Several months later I was flipping through the guide on our TV and recognized the name of the show my brother had been talking about so I thought I’d just go ahead and record an episode and take a quick look when I had some time. A few days later there really wasn’t anything Mary and I wanted to watch, but I noticed that there were a few episodes of this show recorded on our DVR. After watching 3 or 4 episodes of Duck Dynasty back to back, we were hooked. My preconceptions about what that reality show was going to be like had kept me from experiencing a really encouraging and enjoyable entertainment experience.
On a much more significant level, we see in the gospel accounts how people’s preconceptions about the Messiah kept them from fully experiencing a relationship with Jesus. John’s gospel account, in particular, records how even those who were closest to Jesus often let their preconceived ideas get in the way of a fresh encounter with the Word of God who became flesh.
So Jesus often resorted to saying some very shocking things in order to jolt people into thinking outside the box when it came to the kind of Messiah that he truly was. We’ve been looking at some of those things He said in this sermon series where we’re dealing with the hard sayings of Jesus. This morning we’ll come to what may very well be the hardest of all these sayings. In fact, after Jesus spoke these words, the people who heard them responded like this:
When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”
(John 6:60 ESV)
So exactly what had Jesus said to elicit such a response? Go ahead and open your Bibles to John 6 since we’re going to be looking at a lot of this chapter in order to be able to understand what Jesus meant when He spoke the words we find in verse 53:
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
(John 6:53 ESV)
Even on this side of the cross, we can understand why this was a hard saying for those that heard it. But for those who had not yet experienced the death and resurrection of Jesus these words would have been all the more shocking.
Before we address what Jesus meant by these words, I want to take a moment to explain what He did not mean, because I think that is equally important for us today.
There are some that believe Jesus was speaking about here was the Lord’s Supper and they use these words to support a doctrine known as transubstantiation. According to that doctrine, the bread and the wine used in the observance of the Lord’s Supper literally become the body and blood of Jesus, so that those who take those elements literally eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus.
There are several reasons why it is clear Jesus is not referring to what we call the Lord’s Supper or Communion here:
1) Although the Jews observed the Passover, the new meaning that Jesus gave to that meal the night before He died on the was not yet in place.
2) Jesus is speaking here primarily to unbelievers who, as we will see this morning, He is calling to become His disciples by believing in Him. The Lord’s Supper, as Paul explains clearly in 1 Corinthians 11, is only for those who are already Jesus’ disciples.
3) As we’re going to see this morning, the eating and drinking that Jesus speaks of here is for the purpose of receiving eternal life. The Lord’s Supper is for those who have already received eternal life.
4) The Lord’s Supper does not produce the results that Jesus speaks of here. If Jesus’ words here speak of the Lord’s Supper then He would be teaching that participating in a ritual, the Lord’s Supper, results in salvation. That would contradict the clear teaching of the rest of Scripture that salvation is through faith in Jesus alone and it would also, as we will see, contradict Jesus’ own words right here in John 6.
As one commentator put it:
John 6 is not about the Lord’s Supper; rather, the Lord’s Supper is about what is described in John 6.
As always, we need to consider the context in order to understand what Jesus meant by these words. So let me explain the overall context before we look at some specific passages here in John 6 that will help us understand what Jesus meant.
The Jewish feast of Passover was approaching. Jesus had great crowds following Him because they had seen the miracles He was doing. So Jesus went up on a mountain along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and began to teach. After He is done teaching Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish and feeds the entire crowd. The people are so impressed that they are ready to come and make Him king because that was their preconceived idea about what the Messiah should be. But Jesus, knowing what they intend to do and knowing that was not the kind of Messiah the Father had sent Him to be, retreated to be by Himself.
So after Jesus walked across the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum that night, the crowds followed Jesus to the synagogue there where Jesus began to teach. After Jesus claims that He is the bread of life, the people want to see Jesus do some more miracles to prove that He is who He claims to be, and they recount how God had miraculously provided manna to their ancestors in the wilderness.
When Jesus tells them that He is the bread of life who has come to give life to the world, the Jews grumbled. Let’s pick up the account in verse 51. You can follow along as I read through verse 58:
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
(John 6:51-58 ESV)
In general, the crowds were looking for a Messiah who would conform to their idea of who they wanted Him to be. Some were merely looking for a Messiah who was going to do miracles that would satisfy their desires. Jesus addressed those people in verse 26 when He called them out for following Him, not because the signs He did identified Him as the Son of God who was worthy of their allegiance but because of what they could get from Him.
Some were looking for a political Messiah who would come and free them from the oppressive rule of the Romans and usher in a time of prosperity for the Jews.
Some viewed the Messiah as simply someone who could just be added into their present life without the need to make any kind of significant changes to their lives.
But with these words, Jesus completely destroyed all those preconceptions about the Messiah and called them to a radically different way of life:
• They wanted Jesus to give them bread. He wanted to give them Himself.
• They wanted blessings. He wanted them to be free to live a whole new way.
• They wanted Jesus to be a nice part of their lives. He wanted to be their life.
With these words, Jesus called the crowds, and He calls us, to abandon our preconceptions, to give up Christianity on our own terms and to embrace the person of Jesus so that He can save us from those blinding preconceptions that prevent us from experiencing true fellowship with Him. With these radical words, He is calling the crowds and calling us, not to settle for a shadow of who He is but to embrace the radical nature of who He is and what He has done for us and the radically transformed life that accompanies that embrace.
So what exactly does it mean to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink His blood? Fortunately we don’t have to guess at that because Jesus gives us the answer to that question right here in chapter 6. First of all…
To eat Jesus’ flesh and to drink His blood means to
• believe in Jesus…
Let me call your attention to verse 54 again:
Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
(John 6:54 ESV)
Earlier in this chapter, Jesus spoke some similar words that help us understand what He means here:
For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
(John 6:40 ESV)
Notice the common phrases that Jesus uses in both verses. Both verses are about what it takes to receive eternal life so that Jesus will raise that person up on the last day. The phrase “the last day” is a reference to the second coming of Jesus when our bodies with be raised up and transformed into the new physical resurrection bodies we will receive. That is the ultimate culmination of what it means to have eternal life.
And Jesus tells the crowds here how they can personally obtain that kind of eternal life. In verse 54 He says that that do that by feeding on His flesh and drinking His blood. He had already explained that obscure metaphorical language earlier with the clear teaching that eternal life is obtained by looking on the Son and believing in Him.
But the metaphor that Jesus uses here when He talks about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, is important because it tells us something more about the kind of belief that is required.
To eat Jesus’ flesh and to drink His blood means to
• believe in Jesus…
• by personally appropriating His sacrificial death…
When I eat food or drink a beverage, I move beyond merely having some intellectual knowledge of that food and drink. I actually physically appropriate it and take it into my body. By using the flesh and blood metaphor, Jesus was making the point that the kind of belief He had talked about earlier in verse 40 involved more than just intellectual assent to a bunch of facts. It meant actually relying upon his death on the cross as the only hope for eternal life.
And by using the graphic language about eating flesh and drinking blood, Jesus was also putting the offense of the cross in full view. Eating or drinking blood was high offensive to the Jews because God had commanded them not to do that (Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 7:26-27). So the idea that the Messiah would shed His own blood for them and that they had to rely upon that as their only way to God was completely foreign to their own preconceptions about how the Messiah was going to save them from their sins.
What Jesus was saying to these Jews, and to us, is that the only way a person can come to God is by personally accepting and appropriating Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross. That was a tremendous stumbling block to those Jews because the idea of a dead, blood-spattered Messiah went against everything they thought they knew about the Messiah. And frankly in many ways that idea is no less offensive in our culture today. But as the writer of Hebrews reminds us, that is the only way our sins could have been forgiven:
Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
(Hebrews 9:22 ESV)
Before we leave this point, let’s go back to verse 53 one more time:
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
The form of the verbs “eat” and “drink” in this verse indicate that this is a single decisive past action. In other words, in order to receive the life Jesus is speaking of here there is a need to make a decision to believe in Jesus the way we have been discussing – by personally appropriating His sacrificial death. This is not a decision that keeps needing to be made over and over again, although as we’ll see in just a moment, that decision does impact our everyday lives.
To eat Jesus’ flesh and to drink His blood means to
• believe in Jesus…
• by personally appropriating His sacrificial death…
• and by continually partaking of His life
Although it may not be quite as apparent in our English translations, there is a change in verb tenses between verses 53 and 54. We just saw that in verse 53, Jesus spoke of a one-time decision to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink His blood. Now let’s look at verse 54:
Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
Jesus now uses present tense verbs, which indicate continuing action. We could literally translate this verse like this:
Whoever keeps on feeding on my flesh and keeps on drinking my blood continues to have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day
Those present tense verses are really significant here for a number of reasons:
1) The present tense of the verb “to have” makes it clear that eternal life has a present as well as a future aspect. As we have often said before, eternal life is not just a quantity of life, it is also a quality of life, which means it is something to be experienced right now.
2) The present tense of the verbs “to feed” and “to drink” indicate that whatever Jesus means to communicate with this metaphor, the action to be performed is something that needs to be done on a continual basis.
3) As the ESV translations shows clearly Jesus uses a different verb in verse 54 than he used in verse. In verse 53, the verb is accurately translated “eat”. The underlying Greek verb means to eat or to consume. But in verse 54, Jesus uses a different verb, which is also accurately translated in the ESV as “feeds on”. That particular verb literally means “to gnaw” or “to chew” so it focuses more on the slow process of feeding.
When we put all this together, the implications for our everyday life are pretty clear. If we want to be able to experience eternal life right here and now, it requires us to continually feed on Jesus. Jesus goes on to further explain what this ought to look like in our everyday lives in verses 55-56:
Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.
Notice that Jesus continues to use present tense verbs here. The one who feeds on Jesus’ flesh and drinks of His blood also “abides” in Him. Hopefully you’ll remember that the verb “abide” can also mean “to dwell”. It is the verb that Jesus later uses in John 14 to describe how the Father dwells in Him and how He and His Father dwell in His disciples.
So the overall picture here is that of an intimate love relationship in which I continually feed on Jesus by constantly partaking of Him in every area of my life. When I eat food, it literally becomes a part of me. When I partake of Jesus in a spiritual sense, He becomes a part of me and the more I do that the more I become less and less like me and more and more like Him.
Obviously the most important way I continually partake of Jesus is by feeding on Him in His Word. But what Jesus is asking us to do here goes well beyond that. If I want to experience eternal life in its fullness right now, I need to make Jesus the central part of every area of my life. I need to think about Him constantly. I need to continually give Him access to every area of my life so He can shine His light there to reveal sin. And then I must confess that sin, and with His help remove it from my life. That’s the only way I can ever become more like Him each day.
To eat Jesus’ flesh and to drink His blood means to
• believe in Jesus…
• by personally appropriating His sacrificial death…
• and by continually partaking of His life
So the question I’d like all of us to answer this morning is this:
What are you eating?
I’m not speaking here of what goes into your mouth and stomach, but rather what’s going into your soul. And the old adage “You are what you eat” is certainly true when it comes to our relationship with Jesus. Are you constantly feeding on a meal of God’s Word or are you settling for a sugary devotional or verse of the day that you grab on the run like you grab an Egg McMuffin from the drive-through on your way to work? Are you consistently incorporating Jesus into every area life or is your intake limited to a one hour snack once a week on Sunday mornings?
Our bodies certainly wouldn’t survive very long if all we did is snack once a week and the same thing is true with our souls. So I’m going to ask you to join me this week in making one practical application from this message. Every time you eat something or drink something this week I want to encourage you to partake of Jesus in some way. Perhaps by reading some Scripture if you’re somewhere you can do that. Maybe it will be to mediate on some Scripture you’ve memorized. Maybe it will be to pray. Maybe it’s eating dinner as a family and talking about your relationships with Jesus.
My preconceptions about Duck Dynasty kept me from enjoying that TV show for quite some time. But even if I had never watched that show, my life would not have been harmed irreparably.
But if our preconceptions about Jesus keep us from believing in Him, from personally appropriating His sacrificial death and from continually partaking of His life, we will experience both current and long term consequences. So let’s make sure we heed his words and feed on His flesh and drink His blood.
[Prayer]
Earlier I shared these words with you:
John 6 is not about the Lord’s Supper; rather, the Lord’s Supper is about what is described in John 6.
Normally we don’t observe the Lord’s Supper every week and when we do that on a quarterly basis, we make that the entire focus of our service. But it seems appropriate this morning to participate in that observance as our response to God’s Word. As we do that, we do it as an act of remembrance in which we express our gratitude for what Jesus has done for us.
Before we do that, let me share a brief word of instruction and warning. If you have made the decision to believe in Jesus in the way we have discussed this morning, by personally appropriating His sacrificial death, then we encourage you to participate in the taking of the bread and the cup regardless of whether you are a member or regular attender. But if you haven’t yet made that decision, you need to heed these words of Paul:
Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.
(1 Corinthians 11:27-29 ESV)
The Bible reveals that there are serious consequences to taking the bread and the cup if you are not a disciple of Jesus, so we ask that you refrain from that part of our worship this morning.
Finally, let me just remind all of us one last time, that the bread and the juice we eat and drink today do not physically become the body and blood of Jesus. They are merely symbols that we use to help us remember His great sacrifice on our behalf.
