The pelican has long been an emblem of Christ. The connection comes from a mythical notion arising in the middle ages that when food was scarce a mother pelican would stab her own breast with her bill and feed her children with her own blood. She was seen as a symbol of our Savior shedding His blood for us. Thomas Aquinas included a reference to Jesus as the “Good Pelican” in his hymn Adora te devote (I devoutly adore you), reflecting on Christ’s presence in the sacrament of Communion.
Perhaps the pelican myth (pelicans do not actually feed their children with their blood) helped Christians come to terms with what is actually a more disturbing image in our text for this Sunday, John 6:51-59. In a clear evocation of Holy Communion, Jesus says in verse 53, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
Some Protestant exegetes following Zwingli have gone to great machinations to argue that this text has nothing to do with the Lord’s Table. But that is plainly nonsense because John wrote at a time when the practice of Communion would have been well established and Jesus’ words would have immediately been connected with the bread and cup of the sacrament.
For non-sacramental Protestants who insist on a supposed strict literalism of interpretation, I always find it amusing to point out that it is the Roman Catholic tradition which has maintained and insisted upon the absolutely literal understanding of our text. For them, the reception of Communion is literally and actually the eating of Christ’s body and blood.
But rather than try to decide between the extremes of a Catholic literalism versus an anti-sacramental metaphorical interpretation of the text, why not admit both sorts of meaning to be present? For any Christian the literal flesh and blood of Jesus is the necessary sacrifice for our sins and the accomplishment of our salvation and new life. But for any Christian this is no assertion of cannibalism. What Jesus says about His body and blood is full of mystery which we must not hasten to explain away in order to relieve our discomfort with it.
So Jesus’ invitation to eat His flesh and drink His blood may be understood as a call to constantly feast on Christ as spiritual food and drink in love and devotion, as well as a call to physically consume food and drink in the sacrament of Communion. Both are in view here.
Which is all to keep constantly before us the truth that we are not Gnostics. Both our lives and the life of Christ by which we are saved are inextricably bound up with the physical, with flesh and blood. We were not saved by a purely “spiritual,” that is, non-material, atonement, nor is our day to day experience of Christian life and salvation only a matter of spirit. We live our salvation out in our bodies and the end of our salvation is the resurrection of these bodies.
So as squeamish as we might feel about the literal sense of Jesus’ call to eat Him, we ought not try to escape it all together. And that’s good news, because it confirms the importance of the truth which begins John’s Gospel, that “the Word became flesh,” and the truth that our Lord loves us a whole persons, body and spirit.