“So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, “And they will all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me – not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 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.’”

The Greatness of the Bread of Life

Two of the most commonly used expressions concerning truth have got to be, “the truth hurts,” and “the truth will set you free.” While both are often spouted off as worldly proverbs, only one is Biblical. Jesus explains what it means to be freed in the truth in John 8:31-38,

“So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, ‘If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ They answered him, ‘We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, “You will become free”?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.’”

This clarification also helps us see why, “the truth hurts” is such a common and relevant worldly expression. Truth is not perspective, it’s not subjective or moldable to the individual. There is one reality, one truth, and it exists in and is defined by God. If we answer the call of the Father, if we open the door at which Christ knocks, then we are brought in line with the Truth, we abide in the Word, and we are freed from the snare of sin. If we reject these things and remain in step with the world, then the rightness and accountability of the Truth clashes with our aims, resulting in discord and pain.

1. The Bread of Life is Greater than Perception

“So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’”

The crowd sought Jesus initially for His miracles, then as a political spearhead, then as a source of physical provision. But when He offers them something far greater, an everlasting gift in the Spirit, He no longer fits the mold they want Him in. Just as their ancestors did in the wilderness when their wants differed from God’s generous provisions, they grumble. If the people were to look at Jesus with open eyes, setting aside their own desires and agendas, they would see the truth of His words. They would see how His miracles display power, and more importantly, how they perfectly complement His teaching on the spirit and aim of the Law. But this isn’t what they want, it’s not in keeping with their aims. Rather than look to the truth that’s in front of them, they look for what validates what they want to believe.

“They said, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’”

This isn’t just a lie, it’s the lie. This is a representation of what drove the fall of man in the beginning: the notion that truth is subjective, and that God can be trivialized.

Genesis 3:1-5,

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden”?’ And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.”’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’”

This is the same temptation that Satan tries to throw before Jesus in Matthew 4, when he twists scripture to suggest a free pass on sin. The aim of the world is to make the Truth, the deity of Christ, seem arbitrary and unnecessary, and the easiest way to do this is to cherry-pick the parts that are most tolerable, but deny accepting Truth in it’s entirety.

“Jesus answered them, ‘Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”

We can lean on worldly perceptions all we want, what we see with our eyes and “know” in our flesh. But whether we deny or accept Christ, whether we embrace a relationship with our God or reject Him in favor of worldly desires, it does nothing to diminish the truth of who He is. There’s no purpose to the crowd’s grumbling and dissent. The verse, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” Is powerful, but also a point of unease for some. This is used in conversations around predestination and the Calvinist principle of “irresistible grace.” True, we cannot approach God by our own power or in our non-existent righteousness. But Romans 1:18–25 says,

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”

I read this and see that the truth of God has been shown to the world, which seems to say that the invitation to Christ, the draw of the Father to the Son is extended to all. This doesn’t mean it’s accepted by all, but that the opportunity is there. We’re free to reject, to choose worldly things, to lean on our own knowledge and perceptions and be given over to futile thinking and darkened hearts. But this doesn’t mean the invitation wasn’t real, this doesn’t mean the opportunity for salvation or the power to save wasn’t there, but that we chose our own understanding instead.

“And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, “And they will all be taught by God.’”

Jeremiah 31:33–34,

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

God doesn’t desire for us to lean on our own perceptions and worldly lies, but offers to teach us at his own hand. We are given freedom to deny Him, to reject His mercy and grace and in essence, cut off our nose to spite our face. But whether we yield to wisdom or embrace foolishness, The Father is the Father, the Son is the Son, and the Spirit is the Spirit – God is in no way dependent on us. If we grumble and speak against Him, or rejoice and worship Him, whether our actions are pleasing or wrong in His eyes, nothing detracts from the reality, from the Truth that is offered in the Bread of Life.

2. The Bread of Life is Greater than Tradition

“Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me – not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father.”

God’s Truth may be self-evident, but there is a difference between hearing the Word and receiving the Word. Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, has the proper response of coming to the Son. God’s existence announces itself, the truth of His Word supersedes the perceptions and assumptions of humanity, but this doesn’t mean we’re forced to accept it. We’re free to suffer in the ignorance of our own delusions, but this means that whatever we’ve cherry-picked without accepting the whole truth won’t provide a relationship with the Son. We also see here the intimate representation that Jesus provides of the Father, and how he overcomes traditional understandings. There is a recuring theme and tradition held in the Old Testament that to look upon God would mean death. This is affirmed multiple times – when Moses approaches the burning bush, he hides his face, afraid to look at God. In the book of Judges, both Gideon and the parents of Samson believe they will die for having seen an angel of the Lord face to face. Even the seraphim are shown covering their faces with their wings in the presence of God. But while Moses covered his face at this first meeting, Exodus 33:9–11 says,

“When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the LORD would speak with Moses. And when all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would rise up and worship, each at his tent door. Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend…”

While Gidion and the parents of Samson may have feared death, they did not die for coming face to face with the angel of the Lord. The tradition holds through the Old Testament example that God is not to be seen by the eyes of men except in very specific instances, and even then, He is often cloaked in some capacity. Jesus however, as God in human form, is visible to all. His miracles are worked on the masses, His teachings and wisdom offered up to the crowd. The glory of His ministry and His glory on the cross were visible to those even outside of the Jewish community. Jesus is able to stand as God in flesh, the Son representing the Father because He has seen and knows the Father. But there is a deeper element at play than just physically observing God through Christ, because to see is to know. Isaiah 55:6-9 says,

“Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

We cannot fully see God, and we cannot fully know God. But Christ, the Son, the only one who has seen and knows the depth and nature of divine and all-powerful God, offers us from His position an opportunity to know God more intimately than ever before. Jesus took teachings and principles that were too deep or vast for many to understand, and delivered them without barrier. God is unknowable, but in Christ we’re given a personification of the Father that we may come to know in a closer, more intimate way. It is by His sacrifice that we’re able to approach the throne in confidence.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 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 path to eternity, to a relationship with the Living God is not found in the meticulous following of rules and laws, but in obeying the will of the Father. We see that the Jews take great pride in their heritage and traditions. They are a people set apart as God’s, thinking themselves clean and morally righteous in the Law. They take pride and draw security from their lineage as sons of Abraham. This is a point that both John the Baptist and Jesus shoot down, with John reminding them that God can raise up sons for Abraham from the rocks themselves, and Jesus calling them in their disobedience, sons, not of Abraham, but of the Devil. The Sanhedrin asserts it’s power as speaking from the seat of Moses, and while Jesus acknowledges the significance of this position in Matthew 23, He also points to the wickedness of their deeds. The people look to their ancestors, who ate the manna from heaven and seek a comparable sign and something to benefit them in a worldly sense. They are blind to the fact that they’re honoring the Law for the sake of the Law and tradition for the sake of tradition. Jesus does not cast aside either of these things, but goes beyond them, offering those who clamor for perishable food that which endures to eternity. And the food that He offers, that fulfills and goes beyond the old ways is His flesh, the fiber and essence of His very being.

3. The Bread of Life is Greater than the World

“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.’”

So far, I’ve taken a shot at a core principle of Calvinism, and spoken about the pitfall of setting too much store in tradition, which could presumably ruffle the feathers of anyone in the Orthodox Church. It seems only fitting that this next section would lend itself to speaking out against Catholicism. This text is often used to support the Catholic (and Orthodox) belief in transubstantiation. To put it as simply as I can, transubstantiation is the belief the bread and wine (or grape juice for all my fellow, non-Lutheran Protestants), that is consumed during communion (or “the Eucharist” as it’s called in Catholicism and the Orthodoxy), literally becomes the flesh and blood of Christ inside the body of the believer. To be blunt and a little insensitive, it’s weird. Also, the text used to support it doesn’t seem to hold water. In researching the concept, I found an article written by Daniel Campbell with St. John Vianney Theological Seminary titled, “Three Proofs for Transubstantiation in John 6.” As I read the piece, I became more confused, as the points seemed to invalidate transubstantiation more than they prop it up. Before I dive too deeply into what Campbell had to say, I’d like to flesh out a few thoughts that will help tie back into his article. Firstly, what all can we take away from flesh and blood? Jesus is fully God, but He’s also fully man, meaning that while His body and blood are holy, they’re also human. There is nothing in the Old or New Testaments that says anything that we should take to mean that the consumption of human flesh or blood is permissible. While there is no law expressly forbidding cannibalism, it is consistently painted in a horrific and disgusting light in the Bible. Consuming blood on the other hand is expressly forbidden multiple times in the Old Testament, and this was just animal blood, not human, which would be considerably worse. Moreover, what are we to imagine we gain by literally consuming Christ’s flesh and blood? How does this glorify God or bring us closer to our savior? Why should we take this as a literal directive and not look for symbolic meaning? While it can be very dangerous to play loosely with what is metaphorical and what is literal Biblically, there are some things that based on context can be safely taken as symbolic. Matthew 16:24 says,

“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’”

To be clear, this is a call to embrace the truth of Christ, to not yield to worldly desires or shy away from suffering for righteousness sake. It is not required to literally take up and carry a physical cross to have a relationship with Jesus. In Matthew 26:26-29, we see the institution of the Lord’s Supper,

“Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.’”

Mark’s account is almost identical, but Luke’s gospel has one verse that helps see everything in a symbolic light, if we didn’t already. Luke 22:19,

“And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’”

“Do this in remembrance of me.” Communion isn’t some transmutation of earthly foods into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus. It’s a sober and reverent remembrance of the sacrifice that was made for us to erase a debt we could never pay. So turning away from the mysticism of transubstantiation, what can we take away from Jesus’s insistence that we are to consume His flesh and blood, that which is true food and true drink? What is flesh? It is literally what we are made of. It is the physical form by which we exist. What is blood? It’s life and in it’s absence, it’s death. The wages of sin is death, and blood, life spilled out is the only thing that can atone for it. If flesh is the form by which we exist, then blood is the life that exists inside of the form. What all this points to is that God has never desired a casual, distant relationship with His people. Jesus did not come and heal and teach and die and rise again, just for us to dip a toe in the water and call it good. What you eat and drink nourishes you, sustains you and becomes a part of you. This is what we are to do with Christ. We are to take the Way, the Truth, and the Life willingly and gladly into ourselves. We are to cling to our Father that we might decrease as He increases in our lives. If we take Jesus’s words as some literal direction, we miss the significance of an invitation to enter into a personal relationship with Him, be remade and right before God.

Something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately is possession – don’t worry, I’m going somewhere with this, I promise. Not demonic possession, which those who have been saved by Christ and indwelled with the Holy Spirit are not susceptible to, but possession of attitudes and ideas. We have Christ as our Lord, Master and Teacher, but when we experience lust or anger or cravings for things that are destructive to us and we yield to these things in our flesh, we give ourselves over and they seem to take possession of us for a time. We will neglect Truth in favor of self-justification to now pursue the desire that has possessed us. To circle back to Daniel Campbell’s article, his first argument for transubstantiation involves a change in the Greek. Prior to verse 54 the word used for eat is “esthio,” where as from 54 on it becomes “trogo.” According to Campbell, esthio is a more formal use, while trogo is more akin to munching or crunching. The word shift isn’t absent from our English translations. Prior to 54 my ESV says “eat” and from 54 on the word “feed” is used. While these words have different connotations, that doesn’t seem to be enough to take this as a literal directive and step over the powerfully symbolic instruction. However, according to Campbell there’s one other place in John’s gospel that trogo is used. To quote directly from the article,

“However, such objections ignore that esthio is used elsewhere in John without any appearance of trogo, while trogo only occurs in Eucharistic contexts, both in the Bread of Life discourse’s Eucharistic overtones and in the Septuagint citation itself, used by John to describe Judas’s eating at the Eucharistic Last Supper.”

I will say, in my limited research, I was unable to find that this is the same Greek word used in the Bread of Life passage. But given that I’m far from a Biblical scholar, I won’t argue that point to strongly.

The passage in question is John 13:26–27

“Jesus answered, ‘It is he to whom I will give this morsel of bread when I have dipped it.’ So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after he had taken the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’”

Now firstly, I have never read this and taken that passage to be Judas receiving the Lord’s Supper. Whether or not Judas received the Lord’s supper aside, to take this specific passage from John and just assume that this is Judas taking part, when none of the context support that or parallels to the other gospels seems ridiculous. But if John 6 and John 13 are tied together by the use of the same Greek it only, underpins the spiritual nature of what is being established. Jesus tells the Jews that His flesh and blood are true food and drink, that to take in these things leads to the Father, to eternal life, toward never hungering in our souls again. What Christ offers possesses and fulfils us, that we might know eternal rightness in Him. But what we see when Judas takes the morsel of bread from Jesus is that he is given over fully to the wicked plan that John 13:2 says Satan had already planted in his heart. The original lie, that the will of God can be watered down or disregarded has taken root in him. This isn’t about the literal consumption of a piece of bread, but the possession and domination of a sinful pursuit. We can take heart from the fact that Jesus has overcome the world, and that in Him we have an invitation to do the same. But in embracing Christ we can’t take in our Lord and Savior in a passive or casual way, as we would a meal that sustains us day to day. He is the Bread of Life, the One who is greater than the world and offers us life enduring to eternity – if we accept it.

Pastor Chris’s sermon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HspAyvBPqmQ