Current political campaigns are keeping a sharp watch for opportunities to make an opponent “eat his words.” That is, they are looking for embarrassing or damaging gaffes in speeches and interviews, like Todd Akin’s recent unfortunate remarks about rape or President Obama’s suggestion that small business owners did not build their businesses. The hope is to humiliate a candidate or force a retraction, making a person eat his words.
The disciples appear to have something like that in mind at the beginning of the new portion of this week’s text from John 6:56-69. In verse 60 they come to Jesus complaining about the difficult things He has been saying, presumably about coming down from heaven and eating His flesh and drinking His blood, and so on. Like a candidate who embarrasses and offends even his own party, Jesus’ words are hard for even His own followers.
Jesus’ response to the disciple’s difficulty seems obscure, but does in fact address their concerns. Verse 62 about seeing Him, the Son of Man, “ascending to where he was before,” implies that Jesus will prove that He has come down from heaven precisely by going back up to there.
Verse 63 is more difficult. It’s very hard to see how, after the previous talk in the synagogue, saying no less than four times that it is crucial for anyone who wants eternal life to eat His flesh and drink His blood, that Jesus can now say, “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.”
Unless we want to carve the text up with some critical move that makes it a patchwork of thoughts from different sources, and not really the words of Jesus, we probably need to understand “flesh” in verse 63 in some way different from the way it is used in verses 51-56. Given the presence of John 6:51-56, there is absolutely no way to make verse 63, ala Zwingli, into a program for a gnostic-like, purely spiritual, anti-sacramental understanding of Christian faith.
It’s back in John 3:6 that we find our solution. Jesus in much the same language contrasts for Nicodemus a “fleshly” understanding of birth with spiritual new birth. Both there and in 6:63, the “flesh” is what it is for Paul in Galatians 5:13-16 (“sinful nature” is a translation of the literal “flesh” for those reading the NIV). Jesus is talking not about the worthlessness of His flesh as an offering for sin and in Holy Communion, but about the worthlessness of human effort and striving apart from the work of the Holy Spirit and the life the Spirit brings. The opposition is focusing on purely physical desires (wanting the loaves and fishes) versus a spiritual life focused around the sacrificial death of Jesus.
Part of what is offensive to the disciples about what Jesus says in John 6 is the implication that Jesus will die, His flesh and blood will be “given.” Part of the “flesh” opposed in verse 63 is our fear of and opposition to any participation in the kind of suffering and death Jesus was anticipating. But Jesus wants us to see that the only road to life, to resurrection, is death.
Check out The Eucharist and the Hollow Place by Danny Yencich for some moving and deeper thoughts on the text than mine.