Enter your search text in the box above

Select a result to preview

John 6 and the Lord's Supper

The argument in short

The bread of life discourse is about believing in Christ before it is about eating at a table: verse 54 runs exactly parallel to verse 40, Jesus uses sarx rather than the liturgical sōma, and a strictly sacramental reading makes the Supper necessary for salvation. But abandoning the literalist reading concedes nothing, because verse 63 does not deliver memorialism either, and because Augustine, Athanasius and Calvin all read this chapter figuratively while holding real presence firmly.

Table of Contents

  1. #The popular argument
  2. #The case against the sacramental reading
  3. #The lexical problem
  4. #The sacramental reading at its strongest
  5. #Where verse 63 actually lands
  6. #Green's connection, and why I keep it
  7. #The historical point that settles the worry
  8. #Where I land, and what changes
  9. #Sources

The apologetic runs like this. Jesus tells the crowd they must eat His flesh and drink His blood. Many of His followers find it so offensive that they walk away. He lets them go without softening a word. Therefore He meant it literally, and therefore the Supper is more than a symbol.

This argument is rhetorically strong, but is considerably weaker than it looks.

The case against the Sacramental Reading

Allison lays out the case in four steps:

  1. The parallelism. "Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day" (v. 54) stands in exact parallel to "everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day" (v. 40). The two verses have the same structure and the same promise attached, which suggests "the former is the metaphorical way of referring to the latter" (Allison, 2014).
  2. It makes the sacrament necessary for salvation. Taking the metaphor as a reference to the Eucharist "makes the sacrament necessary for salvation, thus contradicting Jesus' emphasis on faith in the earlier part of his discourse." If eating and drinking are literal sacramental acts, then verse 53 means no unbaptised or uncommunicated person has life, which is not a conclusion any Protestant is willing to draw.
  3. The resurrection promise cuts against the mechanism. That Jesus will resurrect those who consume Him on the last day "proves he does not think that eating the flesh and drinking the blood themselves immediately confer resurrection/immortality," which is what the Catholic language of the "medicine of immortality" maintains.
  4. Verse 63. "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all" is "a dismissal of all primarily sacramental interpretations" (Allison, 2014).

The Lexical Problem

Jesus uses sarx (flesh) throughout John 6, not sōma (body). Sōma was the word of the institution narratives and, as the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels notes, "presumably was the standard liturgical term as early as the mid-first century." If John wanted eucharistic reference in the foreground, the word choice is inexplicable. He had the liturgical vocabulary available and used a different word.

The better association is the one John himself set up in the prologue: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Allison's conclusion follows: "This is Jesus's sacrifice: not his body present in the bread of the Eucharist, but his incarnate self on the cross" (Allison, 2014).

Read that way, "eat my flesh" is a shocking way of saying that the incarnate, crucified Christ is what you must take into yourself to live. Which is offensive enough on its own to explain why people walked, without any reference to a sacrament that did not yet exist.

The Sacramental Reading at Its Strongest

Before landing this the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels supplies a great argument:

  1. John's later audience would have recognised the terms as eucharistic, whatever the crowd on the day heard.
  2. The bread of heaven shifts within the discourse from being given by the Father (6:32) to being given by Jesus (6:51c), which moves toward something Jesus hands over.
  3. The introduction of trōgō, "chew" or "gnaw," in place of phagō suggests concrete physical reality rather than metaphor.

The DJG records that "in recent decades commentators have been increasingly persuaded by both John 6:51-58's organic connection with John's Gospel as a whole and the merits of the christological reading," while concluding that the passage performs "a kind of double duty, illuminating first and foremost the nature of Jesus' death and secondarily at least certain aspects of the Eucharist" (DJG, 2013).

Köstenberger reaches a similar conclusion and adds a point about proportion. John's later audience "will no doubt detect eucharistic overtones," but "John's point is much more profound than metaphysical theories regarding the Lord's Supper: for him, Jesus' works reveal who Jesus essentially is, in the present case, the source and giver of all true spiritual life" (Köstenberger, 2013).

The honest conclusion

John 6 is not primarily about the Lord's Supper, and it will not bear the weight of a literalist argument for the presence of Christ in the elements.

Where Verse 63 Actually Lands

Verse 63 does not do what Zwingli needed it to do either. Zwingli argued that "the flesh profits nothing" proves the words of institution cannot be taken literally, since "the physical body of Christ would be of no benefit" (Zwingli, cited in Allison, 2012). But Allison's own reading of the verse points somewhere else entirely. "Flesh" in verse 63 cannot refer to the incarnation, "which does indeed avail for everything regarding eternal life," and the verse's positive answer is that the Spirit gives life (Allison, 2014).

Verse 63 is a redirection to the Spirit, not a denial that anything real occurs. It cuts against a crude sacramentalism, and it cuts just as hard against a theology of the Supper in which the Spirit does nothing. Both Transubstantiation and Memorialist Communion have a problem with this verse. The view it actually favours is Spiritual Presence, where the Spirit is the one doing the work.

Green's Connection, and why I Keep it

Green grants the christological priority openly: "The history of interpretation shows that most readers of John 6 agree that Jesus' teaching has to do first and foremost with life-shaping belief in Christ, so that even the metaphors of eating and drinking are, at the first level, anyway, theological code for spiritually receiving Christ and his benefits by faith."

Then the move: "because of the church's sacramental experience and the nature of the text of John's Gospel, it is entirely fitting to read these same references to eating and drinking as descriptions of the Lord's Supper" (Green, 2012).

His conclusion:

We cannot make a hard-and-fast separation between spiritual "feeding" on Christ and sacramental participation, even if some distinctions are drawn for the sake of study and explanation. Respecting the theology of the Fourth Gospel requires us to let the spiritual and the sacramental stand in the closest possible connection, each interpreting the other.
(Green, 2012)

Feeding on Christ by faith is what John 6 is about. Feeding on Christ by faith is also, exactly, what happens at the Table. The chapter illuminates the meal without being about the meal.

The Historical point that Settles the Worry

Augustine, whose sacramental theology shaped the entire West, "maintains the figurative character of the words of institution, and of the discourse of Jesus, on the eating and drinking of his flesh and blood in the sixth chapter of John," and yet "at the same time holds fast the real presence of Christ in the Supper" (Schaff, History, vol. III).

Athanasius likewise "recognized only a spiritual participation" in John 6, understanding by flesh and blood "not the earthly, human, but the heavenly, divine manifestation of Jesus, a spiritual nutriment coming down from above, which the Logos through the Holy Ghost communicates to believers" (Schaff, History, vol. III).

Calvin relied chiefly on John 6 for his eucharistic theology and derived from it a real feeding: "Just as bread and wine sustain physical life, so are souls fed by Christ" (Calvin, quoted in Allison, 2011).

Every one of those figures read John 6 non-literally and affirmed real presence. The literalist reading is not the only high view of the Supper, and the tradition that most strongly affirms Christ's presence in the meal has never needed it.

Where I Land, and what Changes

  1. John 6 is christological first. Its subject is Jesus as the source of life and the necessity of receiving Him by faith.
  2. It is legitimately eucharistic second. Green's "closest possible connection" is right. The chapter and the meal interpret each other, and preaching one alongside the other is fair.
  3. It is never the argument to lead with. The load-bearing case for real presence is koinonia in Koinonia - Participation in the Body and Blood, the covenantal sense of anamnesis in Anamnesis - Remembrance and the Lord's Supper, and the judgment of 1 Corinthians 11v17-34 - Discerning the Body. Those three hold without John 6. John 6 does not hold on its own.
  4. The "he let them walk away" argument should be retired. They walked because being told to eat a man's flesh is offensive language for taking the crucified Christ into yourself, not because they had correctly deduced a doctrine of the elements four decades before anyone wrote it down.

See also: Koinonia - Participation in the Body and Blood | Spiritual Presence | Holy Communion

Sources