At the end of this monologue the Jews are left asking how Jesus could come down from heaven (6:42). Now he ratchets up his claims. By the end of the second discourse they are left with a harder question, one arising directly out of his redefinition: How is it possible to eat of Jesus’ body (6:52)? Jesus collapses the spiritual (manna of a miracle) and political (barley loaf of the poor) meaning of bread into literal “flesh,” a word he repeats in this discourse, along with “eat,” until it becomes a chant.
Using the strategy of the first discourse on bread, John has Jesus make the same statement at its beginning and end (6:51, 58). A move he uses to dramatize its transformation. Jesus promises that “if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever,” radically redefining “bread” in the space of the discourse, wrenching it from the metaphoric into the literal.
Though each of the old meanings was rooted in the literal—manna fallen on the desert and bits of bread scattered on the grass—the new meaning in the future, which Jesus has pulled into the present, can only be literal. Calling himself the “bread of life” invites a metaphoric interpretation, just as when he later calls himself the “vine” (15:1). In this context, John does not link blood and wine because he wants to extend the metaphor of the vine. However, in the present context he refuses the link and eschews metaphor because he wants to open up space for the new language of bread. Jesus’ insisting that “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (6:53), makes a new invitation. One so unequivocally literal, some Roman contemporaries who grasped its fullest import accused Christians of cannibalism. It is an invitation that demands just such a radical interpretation. John pushes the literal to its breaking point: from the real loaf of bread to the real flesh.
His insistence on the literal here is shocking. Just when everyone had got comfortable with the metaphoric force of bread in the first discourse, Jesus turns the tables and insists that it’s not a metaphor. A shock made greater when he has been so dismissive of the people as being distracted by literal bread (6:26).
Jesus’ chant on the word “flesh” drives home the literal force of his command to “eat,” destroying any vestige of the metaphoric that the incredulous Jews may be clinging to. Nothing in Jewish tradition enables them to assimilate Jesus’ complete transformation of their own vocabulary, which he had inherited as well. As a result, his new way of talking can only be shocking, and we sympathize with the Jews in rejecting what can only seem to them a blasphemous invitation to practice the abhorrent rites of some alien cult.
The Swerve from the Word
Who would not agree with the disciples that Jesus’ insistence on eating his flesh and drinking his blood is a “hard saying”? John has already shifted our sympathy to the Jews in their reaction. We are not surprised, then, that at this juncture a number of the disciples leave Jesus (6:66). Likewise, even his own brothers refuse to believe (7:5). They all steer clear of what appears to be madness, something the Jews suspect, maintaining their distrust of Jesus throughout his discourses.
On the one hand, this eating-and-drinking-the-Jesus-body conundrum engages all our powers of knowing before understanding. On the other, it strains the timbers of our mental house. Pressure builds either to shore up or open up meaning, nailing it down into a single, more manageable interpretation or adding doors and escaping its literal force, as generations have done since. Or meaning can be suspended, as John ultimately does in coming to terms with the hardest saying of Jesus.
This swerve away from Jesus’ demand to eat his body and drink his blood has defined the understanding of his character ever since. The magma of Jesus’ language in these discourses on bread has solidified. Uncomfortably hot words about actual flesh and actual eating have cooled over the centuries. Conventions of their interpretation have hardened. His outrageous demand simply could not stand. Trying to live with this intractable word is like having Grendel at the supper table. So it was necessary to domesticate Jesus’ words in order to make his new vocabulary safe for society. And yet the Jews’ question, which assumes Jesus’ literal intention, their question about how to “eat” the “flesh” of Jesus (6:52), remains.
Such a hard question that even John blinks. He is, no doubt, briefly in the company of those disciples which he records as being offended by Jesus’ demand (6:61). This reaction causes Jesus to attempt a softening of his own words. He retreats and blunts their literal edge by introducing the categories of “spirit” and “flesh,” opening the possibility of a metaphoric interpretation of the words. And, as if he didn’t quite believe this tack himself, he concludes with a sigh, “But there are some of you that believe not” (6:64).
The spirit/flesh opposition rings hollow in face of Jesus’ insistent command to “eat,” given even greater weight by the oracular “Verily, verily” still pounding in his listeners’ ears. Four times, we remember, he demanded that they eat his flesh and drink his blood (6:53–56). And the sigh, merely admitting the obvious, is at best a plea for sympathy. At worst, in his follow up, “No man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father” (6:65), it is sour grapes. Jesus is desperate. Experiencing the loss of “many” disciples as well as his own brothers, he asserts that he knew many in his audience would never believe anyway. We hear the dry throat-clearing of rationalization here and shuffling feet in the background of disciples leaving. Unable to convince all his disciples, let alone his fellow Jews, he throws the argument for eating his flesh back in their face, saying it’s a given that they will not believe, and he knew this would be the result anyway.
Having felt the assault of Jesus’ words, we are not convinced by this back pedaling. His discourses still whirl in our head like swords.
•
Some of the disciples continue to follow unflinchingly; others take offense and desert Jesus. But John blazes a third path. Rocked by the full force of the new language that Jesus has unloosed in his monologues, John chooses to live on its edge. He suspends its meaning, not grasping after certainty. Familiar territory because it bears the mark of prophecy, an obscurity that “rouzes the faculties to act,” in William Blake’s phrase. Jesus’ outrageous demand to feast on himself, masquerading as an invitation, leaves John exhilarated and uneasy. Given the strangeness of this invitation—to participate in a feast in which the eater and the eaten literally become one—it couldn’t be otherwise. Even in expressing its strangeness with great power, John cannot escape a nagging sense of its absurdity.
This allows John commitment and distance simultaneously. He achieves a suspension of meaning, in short, evidenced by his parodying the feast of Jesus. The supper in the upper room with his disciples just before his crucifixion is not the feast itself but the traditional Passover meal. Its expanded meaning now includes the new lamb and new bread, of course, but their literal outworking must wait until after the crucifixion and resurrection. The true feast of Jesus, that is, held in abeyance. In this suspended moment, John uses Judas, whom Jesus had earlier fingered in his discourse on bread (6:64), to turn the supper into a parody. Referring again to the betrayal of Judas, Jesus now says to his disciples, “He that eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me” (13:18). Rather than becoming one with Jesus, that is, the act of eating effects the opposite. Because it releases pressure in his own mind, John welcomes the irony that the bread in this context, which alludes to the “true” bread of immortality according to Jesus’ redefinition, brings death.
Yet the question of how to “eat” Jesus’ “flesh” continues to haunt John. For in the last scene of his book he echoes the earlier scene on the grass by the sea with the 5000, the occasion of Jesus’ redefining “bread.” On the shore of Tiberias Jesus invites his disciples to join him in a meal of bread and fish. Given the charge that “bread” has acquired in Jesus’ discourse, his invitation here is disarmingly casual, “Come and dine” (21:12). This is the true last supper. John admits no irony, and we’re moved by the compassionate and extraordinarily vivid scene. Simple and beautiful, their meal seems to promise
