Body And Blood

The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink. 

Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” These things he said while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. (John 6:52-59)

The Gospel reading is a continuation of yesterday’s reading from John who elaborates on his use of Flesh, but now adds a reference to drinking Jesus’ Blood for eternal life.  “True food and true drink” are powerful elixirs for followers of Jesus.  

According to John, Jesus talked about himself this way while teaching in the Capernaum synagogue.  It is no wonder this Jew’s Jewish listeners quarreled among themselves.  Some believed Jesus while many others considered his claims contrary to Jewish beliefs.  

This Body and Blood of Christ is our Eucharist.  Consider the following letter from Snakebite [the Devil] to his nephew Braintwister [from Peter Kreeft’s The Snakebite Letters: Devilishly Devious Secrets for Subverting Society as Taught in Tempter's Training School. 1991; parody of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape and Wormwood]:

"My dear Braintwister,

Here are two reasons why the Eucharist is such a danger to us, in addition to the obvious ones. First it teaches them to walk by faith, not by sight. They can't see the Enemy's Son there, so they have to believe it on the authority of the Church--another idea too deadly for us to endure. There are awful things around them all the time: the Enemy, and His Son, and His Spirit, and the saints and the angels. 

We must persuade them to reduce Reality to Appearance. Once they begin to do that with the Eucharist, the door is open to doing the same with those other awful things. Second, we've been making subjectivists out of them for centuries now, but the Eucharist stands in our way, for it teaches them to worship the real, objective Presence. It turns them outward. 

We need to turn them inward, give them ingrown eyeballs, confuse faith with feeling, objective fact with subjective interpretation. We've popularized slyly subjective slogan words like 'nuancing' and 'contextualizing' and 'contemporary hermeneutics' because they'll fall for almost any four-syllable fudge-words if only they come from theologians. 

Your affectionate uncle, Snakebite

Snakes can bite; the Devil always tempts and sows doubt.  Indeed, our belief in the Eucharist is a real danger to evil in all its many forms.

Deacon David Pierce