Today, I am reading and commenting on John 6-7.

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Today’s passage contains the justification for the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation.  Transubstantiation is the idea that when the priest blesses the bread and wine during Communion, or the Lord’s Supper, they become literally the flesh and blood of Jesus.  I think that today’s passage provides support for that idea, although I think that the Catholic Church takes it too far.  I don’t want to really go down that line.  The reason that the various controversies and disagreements over what this passage means when combined with the passages about the Lord’s Supper results from our no longer understanding what happened with sacrifices in the Ancient World, and where the meaning existed.  We view sacrifices as something given up to propitiate God, or the gods, for going against the will of the Divine.  While that was an element of those sacrifices, a greater portion of the symbolism was the community sharing a feast with the gods, or with God.  Jesus is the bread of life, He is the sacrificial feast which God has provided for us.  Unless we partake in that feast, we cannot enter into community with God’s people and with God.  So, just as previously you could not be part of the people of Israel if you did not eat the meat of the sacrifice which you brought to the various feasts prescribed for them, now you cannot be part of the people of God if you do not eat of the meat of the sacrifice which God brought to this final feast.  Or another comparison, God had sent manna down from heaven to the children of Israel while they were in the wilderness and in order to have life in the wilderness they ate the manna.  In the same way God sent Jesus down to the earth to His people today and we need to eat Jesus flesh and drink His blood in order to have eternal life.

There is a saying, “You are what you eat.”  That saying applies to this teaching by Jesus.  We need to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink His blood so that we become like unto Him.  Finally, I want to look back at what Jesus said to His disciples when they offered Him food after they found Him speaking to the Samaritan woman.  He said,  “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish His work.”  In the same way we symbolically eat Jesus flesh and drink His blood when we partake of the Lord’s Supper while literally eating His flesh and drinking His blood when we do His will on this earth.  

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.