Striving
Who is Jesus? part 70 – John 6:49-59
Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of Thy peace.
Words from the poem The Brewing of Soma, by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 – 1892), the last of the 17 stanzas are better known as the hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. Whittier was a Quaker, and the poem takes the practice of Indian Vedic priests brewing soma, a drink with hallucinogenic properties. He used this imagery to mock certain contemporary Christian revivals that relied on loud, emotional displays rather than quiet reverence. Probably Methodism as his phrase “The sick man laughed away his pain, The cripple leaped and ran.” in Stanza 3 mimics “Ye blind, behold your Saviour come;And leap, ye lame, for joy!” in Charles Wesley’s O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.
Methodism must have been louder back then than what I have experienced. I wonder how many people who have sung Dear Lord and Father of Mankind realise they are singing satire?
Striving (translated disputed in the ESV) is important in this next portion of my look through John’s Gospel.
A. 48 I am the bread of life.
B. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.
C. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven.
D. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
E. 52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
X. 53 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.
E’. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.
D’. 57 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.
C’. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven,
B’. not like the bread the fathers ate and died.
A’. Whoever feeds on this bread will live for ever.”
59 Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.
John 6:48-59 ESV UK
There are many ways of looking at this passage. I’m going to look at two of them and maybe touch one another.
I have been fascinated by the poetic forms found in Scripture since I started looking at the Psalms in 2020, it amazes me how these forms crop up in what look like narrative passages. This passage, apart from the footnote saying Jesus was teaching in the synagogue, is in the form of a chiasmus. Chiasmus, meaning crossing over, is a form used in nearly all Psalms and often in the New Testament. It is a repetition of similar ideas in the reverse sequence. Where there is a central section it is often the main theme. The central theme here is about eating and drinking the flesh and blood of Jesus, which neatly fits in with one of the main themes in John’s Gospel, and the theme of this blog series, who is Jesus?
But through this part there is also what the people made of it. At first they searched for Jesus, then they murmured, now it has grown into striving, it’s now a full blown argument.
At the centre of this passage it says, “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.” Is he talking about Holy Communion? Theologians are divided here, even amongst the Evangelicals. Of the two commentaries I’m using, one says no, the other yes.
One says No, it’s not about Holy Communion because that event has not happened yet and that teaching was only given to the disciples, not in public.
The other says Yes, it is about Holy Communion because John’s Gospel is not given in order chronologically. John is revealing who Jesus is one bit at a time, slowly building on top of what he’s already written to reveal who Jesus is. He says as much at the end of his account. John does not have Jesus give the first communion in the upper room in Jerusalem not because he does not think that it is important, but because it is so important that it is the basis of all his teaching.
I think the last one makes more sense. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you” does point to Communion, as do the miracles of multiplying a child’s packed lunch earlier in this chapter and turning water into high quality wine in Chapter 2. Talking about communion within the narrative is a feature of John’s Gospel,
Looking at this section as a whole, John Chapters 5 to 10 take place over four Jewish festivals: The sabbath (Chapter 5), Passover (Chapter 6), A series of teachings at Booths or Tabernacles (Chapters 7 – 10a) and finally at Hanukkah (10b). As John sets feeding the 5,000 and the discussion afterwards at Passover and the Synoptic Gospels set Jesus’ Last Supper at Passover, there is a connection, and this is where you would expect the Passover teaching to be and therefore the Communion teaching. The problem is that the people who were already grumbling about Jesus were not listening carefully enough, and it escalated into quarrelling.
But yet again the people did not understand that Jesus was talking about spiritual matters, It happened before:
18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?
John 2:18–21; 3:4; 4:11.
The people listening to Jesus are like modern day social media warriors. The more they are confronted with truth the angrier they get. Unlike Nicodemus and the woman of Samaria, who got it wrong at first but believed, or the people of Jerusalem who argued with Jesus but believed in him because of the signs he did, these people in the Capernaum Synagogue are getting wound up and are looking for loopholes. They are Jews who know the law which forbids eating human flesh and eating any meat with blood still in it (Lev. 17:10–16). They are taking Jesus’ words too literally and about physical things only. They came wanting Jesus to repeat the miracle of multiplying physical food, and they won’t take no for an answer. They want Jesus to do what they want and will not listen to Jesus speaking about what he wants from them.
They cannot understand why Jesus would use this language. Language that speaks about eating Jesus flesh and blood as something you do once only. It is about a one off event. I spoke earlier about this teaching being a parallel with Holy Communion, so how does this one off event find its working out in something we do often? Communion is first and foremost a commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection, something that happened once. We are not re-sacrificing Jesus, nor are the elements of bread and wine the actual body and blood. But I have seen people transformed by taking Holy Communion in a church. There is something of the presence of Jesus in here that I cannot understand. I am trying to understand it, but for now I live in the mystery. I hope to understand it someday.
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Making an ass of myself 