What happens to food … like this piece of bread [eat piece of bread] … when you eat it? Well … it goes to our stomach where it is broken down by hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes so that it can be absorbed into my body. That piece of bread that I just ate will eventually become a part of body at the cellular and molecular level. Pretty amazing, don’t you think? How the body can take a piece of food, break it down, absorb what it needs, and discard or eliminate what it doesn’t need?
Jesus described Himself as a type of “food” … a very special kind of “food.” He said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35).
Let’s back up a little here. This discourse … this encounter … came at the tail-end of a miracle where Jesus fed 5,000 people with a boy’s lunch of five barley loaves and two fishes. Then they follow Jesus around to the other side of the lake the next day where Jesus accuses them of only wanting to get something to eat … to take care of their immediate physical needs … but what He tries to explain to them is that He is here to give them a special kind of food… food that “endures for eternal life” (John 6:51). Like the woman at the well, they ask Jesus what they must do to get this special food … this “living bread” from Heaven. “If God has set His seal upon you as you say,” they demand, “then give us bread from Heaven like God did when our ancestors roamed through the wilderness.” Jesus responds by reminding them that their ancestors who ate the bread of Heaven … manna … had to eat it everyday … like regular bread … and they all eventually died. In other words, like regular bread, it sustained them for a day or two … but what Jesus had to offer them was something completely different. Like the manna that came from Heaven, so too Jesus … the Living Bread” (John 6:35) … came down from Heaven … whereas the bread that came down from Heaven could only last … could only sustain them for a day or two … Jesus, the Bread from Heaven, could sustain them forever (John 6:49).
Now … as I pointed out … in order for this bread to sustain me, I have to eat it. [Eat another piece of bread.] I have to ‘take it in’ to me’ where it will be absorbed … become a part of me.
Jesus said that we must do the same thing with Him … we must “eat” Him … take Him into us … in order for Him to become a part of us. “I am the living bread that came down from Heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh (John 6:51; emphasis mine). … “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat this flesh of the son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in You. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (John 6:53-56).
Now … let’s pause here for a moment …
When I “eat” this bread [eat another piece of bread] it becomes a part of me … at the cellular and molecular level. For the Jews, blood was not only a metaphor or a symbol of life, they believed it was equivalent to life itself. The life of the animal … our lives … was, in their minds, logically in the blood … which on some level is true. To remove the blood was to terminate life. If we bleed enough, guess what? We die, right? So, the idea of “drinking” Jesus’ blood meant that we when we “drink” His blood we are “drinking” His life into us … His “life becomes part of us … part of our lives.
Jews were forbidden to touch blood, so Jesus’ command to “drink” His blood was quite shocking, to say the least. When Jesus says that they had to “eat” His flesh and “drink” His blood, He means that we are to “take” Him in … we are to “absorb” Him at a cellular and molecular level. If we don’t, we have “life” … just as the Jews in the wilderness had life … but we don’t have Christ’s life … which is eternal … in us … a part of us.
There is something very telling and very significant in this passage that we miss … that we don’t get … because we don’t know or read Greek. When Jesus speaks of their ancestors “eating” manna in the wilderness, He uses the word “esthio” (s-theo). It literally means the physical action of eating … you know, putting something in your mouth, chewing it, and swallowing it. This is “esthio” [eat another piece of bread].
When Jesus speaks about “eating” His flesh … which sounds gross enough … it is even more gross in the Greek. He uses the word “trogo” … which means “to chew” … like a cow chews its cud … or “to gnaw” … like a dog gnaws on a bone. Their ancestors “esthio” … they “ate” … the manna in the wilderness … like I just ate this piece of bread [eat another piece of bread]. They put it in their mouths, tasted it, chewed it, and then swallow it like you would a regular piece of food … even if it weren’t just another piece of “regular” food.
Jesus wants us to “gnaw” … to “chew” … on His flesh. Gross, right? So we can understand how this freaked out the people in the crowd. “How can this man give us His flesh to eat? What is He going to do? Cut off hunks of Himself and feed it to us? What does He think we are? A bunch of cannibals?” John said that many of Jesus’ disciples found what He was sang not only hard to understand but to accept, and so they turned their backs on Him and no longer followed Him (John 6:60).
But it really isn’t too difficult to understand or accept once you understand what Jesus is saying. How do you “take in” Jesus’ teachings? How do you “trogo” … “gnaw” Jesus’ words? How do you “trogo” … “chew” … on Jesus’ reason for coming down from Heaven? How do we “trogo” His wisdom?
Well, we all know how to “take in” food, right? [Eat a piece of bread.] We put it in our m mouths, we chew it up, we swallow it, and it goes to the stomach where it is broken down and then distributed throughout the body.
So, how do we “esthio” or “trogo” Jesus’ words … Jesus’ teachings? The way that we all “take in” and process everything in the world around us … is with our eyes … with our ears … with our brains … or, in the minds of the ancient Jews … with our hearts. For them, the heart was our spiritual, emotional, and intellectual “stomach.” The heart was not only the seat of all emotion but it was also the vessel of both our feelings and our wisdom. According to rabbinic teaching and understanding, a person needs to have an understanding heart in order to “absorb” Torah … which is exactly what Jesus was trying to say … that we need to have an accepting heart … an understanding heart … a hungry heart … a heart that has a desire to see and to hear and to understand everything that Jesus says … a heart that wants to absorb everything that Jesus is trying so hard to explain to us … even if, as we are learning today, it is hard to “chew” or to “swallow.”
One can mechanically learn Torah and live by its precepts in much the same way that we can eat a bag of chips or giant bowl of ice cream. The same could be said about the Bible. But according to the ancient rabbis … and according to Jesus … a person really has to have a “heart” … a “stomach” … a “hunger” for the wisdom of Torah … for the Word. You have to “take it in” … you have to “trogo” … not just “esthio” … you have to chew on it … gnaw on it … think about it before you just “swallow” it … before it can become absorbed into you at the cellular and molecular level. If we hear, if we learn, if we study the Word with an open heart … a heart that hungers for the Word … we will embrace not only the words of the Bible but the very heart and spirit of the Bible. We won’t just understand it and embrace it with our minds but with our hearts and souls as well. A hungry heart changes our learning from memorization of Biblical facts and obligations to a love and appreciation of the Bible that makes us want to “absorb” more and more … to make it the basis of our lives … to make it apart of us at the cellular and molecular level. Our hearts need … our hearts crave … the wisdom and teaching of the Bible as our bodies need food to flourish and survive.
It is interesting that it was the crowd that mentioned the manna that God provided in the wilderness. According to rabbinic teaching and tradition, the manna represents a beautiful, divine connection between Heaven and earth … between body and soul. They see and think of manna as a substance … a “food” … that bridges the chasm between the divine … God and Heaven … and the mundane … the physical world.
Manna was no ordinary “bread.” It was the bread of angels that fell miraculously from Heaven at God’s command … to be “esthio” … to be consumed … to be eaten … and absorbed into the bodies of the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. It was meant to sustain them physically but it was meant to do so much more than just meet their physical need for food. Rabbinic tradition holds that the manna contained “wisdom” which entered the body of the person who consumed it. According to the Zohar … a book of Jewish mysticism … the consumption of manna was a way of internalizing divine wisdom … transmuting or changing holiness into corporeality (Manna and Mystical Eating – TheTorah.com) … in other words, changing the divine into something physical so that it could be “esthio” … eaten … and absorbed into the very bodies of those whom God had chosen and was going to make into a great nation … just as Jesus, who was divine, took on flesh so that we could “trogo” … “chew” or “gnaw” … on His wisdom and absorb His teaching, absorb His wisdom into our hearts and souls. Just as manna in the wilderness was the perfect, divine connection between Heaven and earth … between body and soul … Jesus is the perfect divine connection between Heaven and earth, body and soul.
The physical food that we eat … even if it is organic … is not pure. The body has to sort out or separate what is good and useful for the body and then discard or eliminate what is useless or harmful to the body. Because manna came down from Heaven, manna was pure. The bodies of the Israelites could absorb all of it (Manna and Mystical Eating - TheTorah.com). There was no waste … nothing to eliminate. Jesus … the “Living Bread” … like the manna … came down from Heaven and His “flesh” … His “being” … His teaching … His mission … His purpose … He Himself .. was pure. There was no “waste” … nothing useless or harmful … nothing false or misleading … nothing to “eliminate” spiritually and intellectually speaking for those who listen to and absorb His teaching. The same could be said about the Torah and about the Bible. The Jews look at Torah … and we look at the Bible … as “bread” from Heaven because it nourishes our spirit, our souls, our essence.
Like the manna in the wilderness, Torah is available to every Jew … even us, really … it is literally the first five books of our Bible … and the same can be said about the Bible as a whole for us. It is available to every person alive on this planet today. Not just in this form [hold up Bible] but on-line, on our cell phones … in every possible language and translation … so there is no reason for anyone to be starving spiritually or for the lack of divine wisdom. No matter where a person is spiritually, if you offer them the spiritual food found in the Word and you teach them to “trogo” … to chew it and gnaw on it … to wrestle with it and really “take it in” and not just “esthio” … swallow it … in time it will surely satisfy their hearts and souls in a way that they could never imagine … in a way that the world never could provide.
It is with great toil and effort and it sometimes requires divine help for us to acquire the knowledge and wisdom that makes up the heart and soul of the Bible. In order to acquire and then absorb its wisdom, we have to “trogo” with it. Even when we understand a part or parts of it well, it still contains spiritual wisdom … like Jesus’ teaching today about “eating” His flesh and “drinking” His blood … that can be hard to understand and “digest.”
We can only get spiritual nourishment if we what? “trogo” … if we chew and gnaw on it. If we don’t “take it in” it does nothing for us. If we don’t go out and gather up our “omar” of manna … our daily bread from Heaven … or if we leave it on the nightstand or on a bookshelf … we get nothing from it … no nourishment … no food for our hearts and souls. You can have a refrigerator or a pantry full of food but it won’t do you a bit of good unless you at least “esthio” … eat it, amen?
One of the reasons that both rabbis and Jesus spoke in parables was to get us to “trogo” … to gnaw and chew … certain important wisdom. It has been said that a parable is an earthly story with a Heavenly meaning. Again … we hear the “Heaven and earth” connection. Jesus frequently used parables as a means of getting us to “trogo” … to think … to mentally chew and gnaw on the parable until we unlock its meaning and its knowledge … its wisdom ... and it becomes a part of us at the intellectual and spiritual level.
Before a certain point in Jesus’ ministry, He used many simple analogies that involved using ordinary, familiar things like salt … bread … sheep … coins … et cetera. On the surface, their meaning was clear but as we “trogo” … as we chew on them … gnaw on them … think about them … analyze them … we discover that they aren’t so simple. As simple as they seem on the surface, their true meaning … their deeper significance … is much harder to see and understand. Often the crowds didn’t get it … like in today’s scripture reading … and the meaning of most of them had to be explained to His disciples and, in explaining them to His disciples, explaining them to us. At one point in His ministry, Jesus began to teach almost exclusively using parables.
Here’s something to think about. Jesus may have explained the meaning of His parables to the disciples but He usually did in private, away from the crowd which means that many people left Jesus’ teaching having to figure out the meaning of His parables on their own. Why would Jesus let people wonder about the meaning of His parables? Was it to deliberately keep them in the dark? Was it to hide the truth? That doesn’t make a lot of sense when you stop and think about it. I mean, why present a group of people with a parable that they have no way of figuring out? Seems pretty useless from a teaching point of view, amen? I mean, you can tell that Jesus desperately wanted the people to get His message and the purpose of His mission.
At one point, Jesus quotes the Prophet Isaiah: “Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, and seeing you will not perceive” (Matthew 13:14). Is that the fault of Jesus or a failure on the part of the people? Is Jesus trying to hide the truth from them? Why? Or are they unwilling to “trogo” … to put any effort into trying to understand what Jesus is saying and what He is trying to teach them … and the failure to “trogo” … to chew … to gnaw … to wrestle with Jesus’ teaching means that they will never experience or arrive at the spiritual truth that Jesus is trying to feed them … “for this people’s hearts” … their what? … “their HEARTS has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes” … you know, the heart, the ears, the eyes … all the ways that we take in spiritual nourishment … “so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their hearts” … HEARTS … “and turn – and I would heal them” (Matthew 13:15).
How do we take in Jesus Jesus’ teaching … Jesus’ wisdom … divine wisdom … His truth … His divine truth? With our eyes … with our ears … but our hearts but the hearts of His people … God’s people … have grown dull … meaning they are too spiritually or intellectually lazy or are not interested enough to “trogo” … to wrestle with … with His teaching … His wisdom … or they give up because His teachings are just too difficult to understand.
But those who are truly hungry … hungry for spiritual nourishment … spiritual wisdom … divine truth … they are the ones who are willing to “trogo” … to gnaw and chew on the Word. Those who truly want to not only understand Jesus’ wisdom … Jesus’ truth … who truly want to internalize it … make it a part of themselves at the cellular or molecular level … those are the one who will chew … those are the ones who will gnaw … those are the ones who will put effort into it and wrestle with Jeasus’ teaching … and, as Jesus points out … they are the ones who will reap tremendous benefits. Those who each His flesh … those who take Him in with their eyes, with their ears and understand with their hearts, says Jesus, “those I will heal.”
Those who put in the effort will be given more … which is true of anything that you study, amen? The more you “trogo” … the more you gnaw … the more you chew … the more you study … the more you wrestle with the things that you don’t understand … the more you will come to understand … which should make you want to gnaw more … chew more … study more.
When Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, He was tempted by the devil. Hmm… the wilderness. When the Hebrew people wandered through the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land, what did God provide for them again? Manna? Bread from Heaven, right? What was one of the ways that the devil tried to “tempt” Jesus? By pointing out His physical need … His need for food. “If you are the Son of God, tell them stones to become bread” (Matthew 4:3).
How stupid when you think about it … you know, “trogo” or chew on it. To begin with, God could have turned the stones into bread for the Israelites … but He didn’t. Instead He covered the ground with manna … bread from Heaven … so Jesus had no doubt that God … His Father … would provide for His daily physical needs but … just as Jesus was trying to teach the crowd that followed Him around the lake … physical bread, physical food would only take care of their physical needs … temporarily … but Jesus … the Manna … the Bread of Heaven … the Bread of Eternal life … the Living Water … knew that God could permanently and forever satisfy our most deepest spiritual needs. Jesus pointed out to the devil that there was a greater hunger … a greater need than just our physical needs … one that neither the devil nor the world could ever take care of … could ever satisfy … one that only God could take care of … that only God could satisfy: “For it is written, ‘man shall not live on bread alone” but on what? “… every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). And what comes out of Jesus’ mouth? And where does His teaching, His truth come from? From Heaven … from God. “For I do not speak on my own,” Jesus explains, “but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken” (John 12:49). “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. That words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63).
On the night in which Jesus gave Himself up for us, He took what? … bread! … gave thanks to His Father where? … in Heaven. He broke the bread … gave it to His disciples, and said: “Take eat; this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
When the supper was over, He took the cup, gave thanks to His Father where? … in Heaven … gave it to His disciples and said: “Drink from this all of you; this is my” what? “my blood” … this is my life … “poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me” (United Methodist Hymnal, p. 10). “I am the Living Bread that came down from Heaven … whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give the world is my flesh. Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you don’t have my life in you (John 6:51, 53).
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up in the last day … for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (John 6:56).
Let us pray:
Bread of life … Living Water … Pour out Your Holy Spirit on us gathered here and on these gifts of bread and wine. Make them be for us Your body and blood so that You may abide in us … abide in our bodies … abide in our hearts … abide in our souls.
We humbly ask this in Your holy, mysterious, and all-powerful name. Amen.
Now ... please come and “esthio” … eat … true food and drink true drink and remember that through Jesus we are never spiritually hungry and never spiritually thirsty and “trogo” … chew and gnaw on the divine spiritual truth that because of the sacrifice of His body and blood we have eternal life through Him.
