Jesus’ Flesh and Blood

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism from John 6:25-58.

It’s a remarkable fact that in our relatively prosperous, industrialized, urban cities today we entertain ideas about food that no culture has ever entertained before and which millions in the so-called Two-Thirds World would find remarkably alien. Ask any 5-year-old in Sydney, “Where does food come from?” and he or she is likely to say, “Coles,” or whatever your local grocery store is and not likely to say, “From plants and animals.” Because we’re so urban, we think food grows in plastic if we’re 5 years old.

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Ask someone from a very agrarian part of the Two-Thirds World, “What do you think the staple diet is of Australia?” The staple diet of Australia? Give me a break. You have so many different communities here the result is you have Greek restaurants and Indian restaurants. You have Korean restaurants and Japanese restaurants. Staple diet just doesn’t make sense as a category in a country like Australia or in a city like Sydney, but in many parts of the world the answer is unequivocal. Rice or yams. In some places you reply with two words: rice and fish.

Ask yourself the question, “What happens to our food if there is a catastrophic drought or a ravaging flood?” The prices go up. It depends a bit on where the flood is, perhaps. Maybe our citrus fruits have to be flown in from somewhere else, and as a result, it’s a bit more expensive, but in many parts of the world and throughout most of history, the answer would be, “Well, you starve.”

Again, “Why do we work?” A necessary evil in order to make money. To buy things. Until fairly recent times on the historical scale for the vast majority of humankind, about 70 or 80 percent of your work effort was compensated for in food. In other words, it took 70 or 80 percent of your income, however paid to you, just to buy the food for you and your family to live. In that kind of world, you say, “Why do you work?” and the answer is, “To eat.” We just don’t even think in those categories.

One more question. What’s your favorite snack food? “Snack food?” For billions of people today the notion is totally unfamiliar, and if they understood it, they would think it vaguely grotesque. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting our foods are wrong, or still less, morally inappropriate. By and large, they’re appropriate to our industrialized society.

But we’re not going to understand this passage before us unless we come to terms with the fact that, in the first century when this was written, there were assumptions about food everywhere that are entirely alien to us. In fact, there are three different things we have to absorb about the background of the culture and about this passage before we’re going to understand what Jesus conceivably meant when he said things like, “You have to eat my flesh and drink my blood.”

The first is the set of associations. Food, in the ancient world, was what you worked for. Bread was what sustained you. It was the staple diet. We have to understood what was mentioned by Phil as he introduced the passage, namely that just before this in the Bible Jesus has performed a miracle. That is, he has actually provided food for 5,000 or more people miraculously. From their point of view, it doesn’t just mean another meal. From their point of view, it indicates someone who has the power immediately to increase their income by 70 or 80 percent. This is wealth untold.

There is another element in the background we have to appreciate, and that is part of Jewish history that anybody in the crowd would have understood. When the Jews had first escaped slavery in Egypt and were on the backside of the desert heading for what became their homeland, God, according to the Bible, at one point began to provide them with something called manna. What is it? It was a bread-like thing that sustained them. It provided them with enough to live on while they were traversing this desert.

That went on for a long time, and it was so bound up with their understanding of their origins (God helping them escape from slavery and providing them with enough to eat with this manna) that they envisaged a time again when God would provide them with enough to eat. That’s all part of the background before we come to the text itself. I think it will be easiest if we run through this passage and catch its flow along the lines of these four points.

1. Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he is God’s manna.

We pick up, then, at the beginning of the text, verse 25. These numbers were added only about 300 years or so ago into the text in order to make it a little easier for us to refer to it, and I’ll refer to these numbers as we go through just so you can see where I am.

Jesus has come to the west side of Lake Galilee, and they don’t know how he got there, so they ask him, “Rabbi, teacher, when did you get here?” Jesus replies not to their question but by challenging their motives. He says (verse 26), “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs …” That is, he’s referring to the miracle of the day before where he fed them.

“You are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” Of course, on one level, they did see the miraculous sign (that was the whole point), but they saw it as something which provided them with something that was just too good to be true. They didn’t see the significance. They didn’t see what it pointed to.

They saw it as that which gave them not only full bellies, but if it could be reduplicated and reduplicated and become standard policy, then this was unbelievable! It would just about double their income. It would change the whole purpose of work. It would resolve any fears of famine and poverty, and it would make them amongst the surrounding nations a wonderfully rich culture.

From their point of view, too, they start wondering if this was, therefore, the long-promised King of old ancient Jewish tradition, a Messiah, a Savior, a King who was coming. In fact, in verses just before, some of them had tried to make him King the day before and tried to make him take on the mantle of a promised Messiah because he could do this kind of thing.

Jesus questions their motives. “You don’t really understand what that miracle signified, what sign was bound up with it, what it pointed to. You just are looking for me because you had your tummies full.” He adds, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”

In other words, he is trying to say, “Think through carefully what you saw. What you saw points to who I am. You have to come to grips with who I am and what I’m claiming.” He’s trying to get away from their filled stomachs and their potential increased income to reflecting on who he is altogether, but they have just picked up the word work. “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life.” They pick up that word, and they say, “Okay. What must be do to do the works God requires?”

There are a lot of people who think religion is like that. They say religion is a question of some leader or other saying, “Do the following things, obey the following rules, submit yourself to the following seat of discipline, do the following works and then you’ll know God or you’ll be enlightened or you’ll be on an inside track to the heavenlies or you will be absorbed into the universe,” or whatever it is in the particular religion that is promised. “Just tell us what to do and we’ll do it.” That is the way a lot of people view religion, and it goes further.

Religion is seen as a kind of balancing act. We all do some negative thing and we all do some nice things. Religion comes along and tells you what nice things to do, and if you do enough of those, then on balance it works out so that on the last day you meet God or you enter nirvana or whatever it is, and it’s going to tilt in your favor. Today we go further and say, “If there’s a God, not only will it tilt in your favor, but if perhaps it doesn’t quite tilt in your favor, God is so kind he’ll make the books balance out in any case.”

I remember a number of years ago I was studying in Germany, and I got to know a young French West African, a gifted student who was studying there at the same time. Both of us were trying to improve our German, he to do engineering, and as I got to know him a little better, we used to go out to have a meal together once or twice a week just so we could get away from German. So far as his education was concerned, he was brought up French and so was I, so we would go out and talk a civilized language for an evening.

As I got to know him I found out more about him and discovered his wife was in London doing medicine at the time. I got to know him a little better and discovered that he would trot off once or twice a week to the red light district of town, pay his money, and have his woman. By this time I got to know him well enough to say, “What would you say if you discovered your wife were doing something similar in London?”

“Oh,” he said, “I’d kill her.” I said, “Wait a minute. Isn’t that a bit of a double standard?” He said, “Not really. In my tribe, the men are allowed to sleep around and the women aren’t. If she slept around, I’d have to kill her. It would be a question of honor for me.” I said, “Wait a minute. You told me you were brought up in a school that believed the Bible. You were brought up in a center where you learned God doesn’t grade on the curve depending on gender.”

He said, “Ah, le bon Dieu; il doit nous pardonner; c’est son mÈtier. God is good. He’s bound to forgive us. That’s his job.” That’s the way religion sort of pans out today, isn’t it? You do a lot of stuff and you hope it works out on balance, and if it doesn’t, “God is good, and he’s bound to forgive us in any case. That’s his job.”

But Jesus won’t have any of it. His response is pretty cutting. He says, “This is the work of God: to believe in the one he has sent.” In other words, the work God demands is not having enough brownie points to squeak in. He says, “What God demands is that you believe in the one he has sent, namely Jesus himself.” (Verse 29)

Let me just say in passing the kind of man who says that sort of thing is not simply a good man. I mean, if I came to you this morning and started saying, “Your only hope of eternal life and of knowing God is to believe in me, Don Carson,” I don’t imagine I’d be allowed many minutes up here before some people in white coats were ushering me out. In addition, you would have to say that whatever else I am, I’m not a sort of nice, average, good man. I’ve either lost my rocker, or maybe it’s the American side of me, but there’s something funny going on here, isn’t there?

So also with Jesus. The kind of claims Jesus makes (this is just one of them; we’ll find many more of them during the week) exclude the possibility that Jesus is just a good man. Sooner or later, if you’re going to come to terms with the historical Jesus, you have to come to terms with his extraordinary claims. He’s the sort of man before whom you ultimately bow and say, “Yes, Lord,” or whom you have to write off as a nutter. There really is no in-between ground.

That is what he demands here, in effect, but as soon as he starts saying, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent, namely me,” they say, in effect, “Well, if you demand that we trust you, if you demand that we believe you, you must do something to validate yourself. You must do something to give us confidence that we should trust you.” So they say, “What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? We’ll give you a hint. Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert.”

They’re coming back to their tummies again. “ ‘Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written: “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” ’ Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven …’ ” That is, it wasn’t their historical leader at the time who was finally the source of this gift, but it was God himself. Don’t idolize these human heroes. In any case, he says, “The real bread from heaven …” Verse 33. “… is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

He’s talking about himself, of course. This is very strange language. I acknowledge it. Very strange. They didn’t understand at the time, and it will take us a few minutes to sort it out as we run through the argument, but it is part of a whole piece of the way Jesus reads the older Scriptures.

The Bible is made up of two big parts. The first two-thirds deal with the time before Jesus. It stretches back about a millennium and a half and refers back all the way to creation. The second part, the last third, the New Testament, starts with Jesus’ birth or just before and goes on for about a century. That’s it.

In that part, Jesus is constantly drawing on the Bible they had so far, the Old Testament. He’s drawing on it, and these people knew their Bibles so he could make allusions to it and they would pick up on it right away. If we’re not steeped in the Bible, we sometimes don’t have a clue what he’s talking about.

One of the things Jesus does as he refers to their Bible, the Bible he shares with them, again and again and again is say that Old Testament institutions and rites and events are not just discrete bits of history, but they have the habit of weaving forward into a story that actually points to him. If you see how the whole thing is put together properly, these things actually point forward to him. It would take me a while to unpack that, but Jesus is doing that all the time, and I’ll give you some more illustrations of it later in the week.

Here he’s doing it with respect to manna. He’s saying, “It’s not just a question of God having provided this funny stuff called manna in the Old Testament. If you really understand how that fits in the whole stream of that story, you’ll discover it’s pointing forward to me. I’m the real manna, and I don’t just sustain your physical life on the backside of a desert. I give you real life.” That’s his claim. In other words, his first claim as he interacts with his interlocutors here is that he himself is God’s manna. That’s why he can give eternal life.

2. Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he does his Father’s will.

Verses 34 and following. They hear him talking about this bread from heaven, and they say (verse 34), “Sir, from now on give us this bread.” Of course, what they’re thinking of is the bread they had the day before, because that will solve any economic uncertainty. That will make them rich. That will make them powerful. “From now on, give us this. This is what we do want.”

Jesus now declares with fewer ambiguities, about as bluntly as he can while still retaining the metaphor, “I am the bread of life.” In other words, it’s not just that he provided them with some bread the day before; he’s claiming not that he provides bread but that he is the Bread. In other words, the significance of the bread the day before is that it pointed to him, who is the real Bread.

They were supposed to think through what was going on in the light of antecedent Scripture and come to some conclusions about who he himself is. Now he says it unambiguously. “I’m not just providing the kind of stuff I gave you yesterday. I am the bread of life.” Then he shows he is dealing in the metaphorical world by going back and forth between the metaphor and the non-metaphorical world.

He says, “He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” That’s not what you do with bread. Normally, you chew it and swallow it. You don’t come to it and believe in it. You don’t go to your Coles and buy some bread and say, “I believe in it.” You eat it.

What he’s trying to do, of course, by putting it this way is showing that he’s dealing in the metaphorical world. He’s not really suggesting you take a chunk of Jesus and chew him, but when he unpacks what he means by this, he says in effect, “If you come to terms with the fact that I am the Bread of Life, if you receive this life from me, you will come to me as the source of real, eternal life. You will come to me. You will believe in me. You will trust me. You will abandon yourself to me.”

Moreover, there is another point he wants to clear up with them. They have said (verse 34), “From now on give us this bread,” because they’re still thinking in terms of yesterday’s miracle, so what they want him to do is to do it again and again and again and again. “Do it nationally. Set this up as a whole campaign for providing bread for the whole nation so that now work can provide a lot of wealth. Do it again and again and again!”

He says, “It’s not really quite like that either. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” There is a sense in which, once you close with Jesus, once you take him as the Bread of Life in a sense still to be explained (we’re getting to it as we press on in the passage), you don’t go back to him again for another chunk tomorrow.

There is a sense in which he gives you the life so dramatically, so tellingly, so conclusively that you pass over from death to life. It transforms your whole orientation. It’s not just that such a person is changed, but changed so decisively that you can’t repeat that change. To use the later term for such a person, the Christian still has to grow, of course. We’ll come back to that later.

Nevertheless, the change is so dramatic that it’s not as if you take this eternal life from Jesus today and then you die by tonight. Then you go back to him and get another bite tomorrow and have life again. Then you forget it the next day and go back to him the day after that and get another chunk of spiritual life from Jesus. He’s saying that’s not the way it is.

He is saying, “All the other sources that promise spiritual life, and so forth, all turn out to be short term or they all turn out to be defective. Even that miracle bread in the Old Testament.… It just fed you for today or tomorrow. It didn’t solve the problem.” He is saying, “But you come to me and it so revolutionizes your life, it so changes things around, you stop being hungry in this arena again. You stop being thirsty.” That has often been the testimony of Christians across the centuries. One poet puts it this way:

I tried the broken cisterns, Lord,

But, ah, the waters failed;

Even as I stooped to drink they fled,

And mocked me as I wailed.

Now none but Christ can satisfy,

None other name for me!

I don’t know you, but I imagine some of you have been on spiritual journeys for a long time, and you’ve tried this or that or the other and it has helped. It has genuinely helped! You found it useful for some period of time. Then it just sort of petered out. It sort of proved empty, either not intellectually satisfying or a bit artificial, ascetic but not fulfilling, or rich but not disciplined. Let me tell you, Jesus provides a kind of life that is transforming. That’s what he’s on about here. When you come to terms with that kind of life you don’t hunger again.

Now he explains the matrix in which he mediates this life. He says, “Look. I told you. You’ve seen me. You’ve seen the sign from yesterday. You still don’t believe, but let me tell you …” He says in verse 37, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.”

We need to understand very carefully what he means. He’s saying, “Just because you people don’t respond positively doesn’t mean my mission is a failure. It doesn’t work like that. The fact of the matter is God himself is in charge of this lot, and he has ensured that some will come to me, and those who come to me, when they come to me I’m not going to throw them out. I’m going to keep them in. I will satisfy them. I will give them life, for this is the very purpose of my coming. I came down from heaven …”

Now he’s hinting at something that recurs again and again in this book. He’s not just an ordinary man. His origins are in heaven itself. He is one with God. He has come to us to do his Father’s will, and his Father’s will is, of all those whom the Father has given him he shouldn’t lose one. Then he repeats the point in verses 39 to 40 to make it very clear he doesn’t view his mission as a failure just because some people don’t believe in him.

No. Those the Father gives to him, they will genuinely come to him, and he will retain them because that’s what he came from heaven to do, to do his Father’s will. In other words, it is no more possible for someone whom the Father has given to the Son ultimately to fall away than it is for the Son to fail to obey his Father in keeping him. In fact, that’s what it would take. It would mean the Son was a failure. Jesus does not view that as even thinkable.

In other words, Jesus presents his whole mission in giving people life as one, first of all, of obeying his Father. He came down to obey his Father, and he will do it. He obeys his Father all through his life, and he obeys his Father, finally, in going to the cross. We’ll come to that in a moment. He obeys his Father, likewise, in taking people like you and me and transforming them and keeping them and changing them.

I’m not so foolish as to think that I can talk to you for 40 minutes and somehow your life is changed. As if by my words or my poor efforts to try to explain the Bible, somehow by an intellectual discussion I can get you into the kingdom somehow. At the end of the day, it requires an act of God. That’s what it requires. Christian conversion is not simply a question of changing your mind, although it involves changing your mind. It involves an act of God actually giving life and holding you, transforming you, and changing you.

That’s what Jesus envisages here. He wants these people to raise their horizons beyond more bread and beyond evaluating Jesus into a whole vision of what is really required, and what is required is for God himself to do something spectacular that changes men and women. He says, “That’s why I came from heaven, to do exactly that!” Then he pushes this point a little farther.

3. Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he reveals God to us.

Verses 41 to 48. By this point, they’re getting a bit upset. Verse 41: “They began to grumble about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I came down from heaven” ’?”

In other words, they are more than happy to make him king and to honor him provided he is giving them all they want, but he is claiming something more than that. He is claiming (I don’t know what else to call it) a revelatory stance. If he is just like they are only a more souped-up version who can do wonderful things like give them bread, they’re happy with him.

But if he claims he stands over them or that he has an authority over them or that he reveals something they can’t otherwise know, then they’re affronted, because they can no longer stand in judgment of him; he’s now standing in judgment of them. It’s all a bit much! As far as they’re concerned, they know his background. They know where he was brought up. They know the family background. “How dare he put on such pretensions?”

That, too, is part of a major theme in John’s gospel. The most stunning example of this sort of thing I can think of took place in the 60s. A friend of mine told me about it. He was studying in Paris at the time, and he got to know one of the curators at the Louvre. In this fabulous museum where you find some of the world’s best paintings and so on, this curator came up behind a couple of young Americans who were doing Europe. They were making slightly cynical remarks about some of the paintings they saw.

This curator was just steaming. This was the Louvre. You don’t criticize Frenchmen anyway, but you certainly don’t criticize the Louvre, and you don’t criticize paintings in the Louvre by people like Rembrandt. You just don’t do things like that. He heard them making their smart-mouth remarks until he came up behind them and finally said, in his thick French accent, “Gentlemen, in this museum it is not the paintings that are being judged.” Then he turned and walked away.

That’s the kind of stance John’s gospel has. It says, in effect, when people come up and start evaluating Jesus, it is not Jesus who is being judged. Don’t misunderstand. It’s not that Christianity doesn’t open itself to evaluation. Christianity, in this respect, is very different from Buddhism.

If you could prove to me that Gautama the Buddha never lived, you wouldn’t affect the credibility or otherwise of Buddhism one iota because Buddhism doesn’t claim a historical revelation. It’s a philosophical structure. It’s a system, and it doesn’t finally depend on the existence or otherwise of Gautama the Buddha.

But the Bible insists all Christianity depends not on a philosophical structure from which you can abstract Jesus but it depends on Jesus himself who not only taught certain things but actually died a certain death and actually rose from the dead, so much so that if these things did not take place, if you could somehow show that Jesus never lived or he never rose from the dead, you destroy Christianity completely. It’s gone. Bye-bye.

Because New Testament Christianity is a revelatory religion. That is, it’s a revelatory historical religion. It depends absolutely on God having disclosed himself in real history, in real time-space history, and because these things take place in real time-space history, you can approach these matters of Christian claims by examining the witnesses and examining the sources and seeing if they make sense and seeing what coherence there is.

There is a lot of evidence that you can adduce for Christianity (on historical grounds, on archaeological grounds, on the grounds of ancient historiography). You can do that, but at the end of the day, if biblical Christianity is true, you don’t come up against this Jesus and stand in judgment of him. He stands in judgment of you, and your response to him actually ends up saying less about him and more about you.

That is the assumption in John’s gospel everywhere. If, indeed, God has made us and we owe him because he has made us, then for us to take the stance, for example, “Quite frankly, Don, I don’t mind if you want to do this Christianity bit and hang out with Campus Fellowship. If it helps you, I’m pleased for you. It enables you to write books and travel here and there. It obviously gives you some comfort. That’s fine for you, but I don’t need it. I don’t need your Jesus. I don’t need your God. Just leave me alone.”

The Christian’s response to that must be, “You don’t really understand. This God made you, and you owe him. The very fact that you don’t think so is already a measure of how lost you are. Your whole orientation is so self-focused and so bound up with your own assessment of things that you go and stand over against him and you make your judgments of him when the reality is exactly the reverse. He stands in judgment of you.” That’s the nature of the Christian claim from revelation. It can be examined. It’s in the historical arena.

If you have problems in these sorts of areas, there are all kinds of books to read and discussions to get into, but at the end of the day, sooner or later you do not come to this Jesus and say, “On balance, I think there probably is some historical plausibility to these claims. I suppose I could try to be a Christian for a while and see how it works out.” You can’t do that. Sooner or later, it involves a principial submission to the one who made you, or you’re in rebellion against him. It’s as blunt as that. Those are the alternatives.

When he hears these people begin to be upset with him, that is the basis of his response. He says, “Stop grumbling among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” That is, “You’re so lost in your own world you’re not going to make a proper evaluation just by yourself. No, no. Listen.”

Now he quotes Scripture, Scripture they know giving a sort of paraphrase of something that was written about seven centuries before him. “It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father.” He’s claiming this unique revelatory claim for himself. “I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. I am the bread of life.”

Let me tell you a bit more about my wife, if I may. She’s English, as I said. We met at Cambridge University. I was doing a PhD. She was doing a graduate degree in education at the time. She wasn’t from a Christian home at all. She was a sort of nominal Anglican who had sort of a vague Church of England background but never darkened the door of a church from one year’s end to the next except for the odd funeral that might come along or wedding.

The poor woman was dragged along to a meeting at which I was speaking by a Christian friend, her roommate, in fact, who was a lovely girl by the name of Carol. Carol dragged along the woman who became my wife, Joy, and lo and behold, I was speaking. Let the record show she was impressed neither by the message nor the messenger.

Carol, her friend, was constantly arranging graduate students’ meeting here and there and everywhere, and one night she arranged some graduate students to meet me in the digs that Joy and Carol were sharing. All evening long I was trying to explain what the Bible says in large-scale terms and answer questions and so on.

Joy sat there. She just sat there like a log. She didn’t say anything. Nothing. I mean, nothing. At the end of the evening, they were all winding out. University students love to talk. They just talk and talk and talk. We talked till midnight or 1:00. It was more of a residential university than New South Wales so there was more talk yet going on. Nobody has to go home. Eventually, the others were winding their way out, and I said to Joy, “What do you make of this?”

“Nothing.”

“Wait a minute. You can’t say, ‘Nothing.’ Here is this chap named Jesus who is making all of these outrageous claims. Sooner or later, you have to say, ‘I think he’s a ditz. I just can’t believe this stuff. This is rubbish. This is sort of mythical. It’s a fairytale. It helps the simpleminded.’ Or you have to come to terms with him. You just can’t go around saying, ‘I don’t think anything.’ You must think something, don’t you?”

“No.” I pushed so hard, I didn’t get anywhere with her. Nowhere. I said, “Will you read a book if I give it to you?” She said, “Is it written by a Baptist?” She must have something in her background there somewhere. I don’t know where this is coming from. I said, “I’ll choose a book written by a nice, decent, respectable Church of England clergyman. You can’t get safer than that.”

She said, “I don’t have much time.” I said, “I didn’t ask you if you had much time. I asked you if you’d read it. I don’t care whether you read it now or six months from now. If you won’t read it, I won’t give it to you. If you will read it …” I married a feisty woman! She brought out all the worst in me, right from the very beginning.

She promised to read it, so I bicycled around the next night and dropped off a copy of a book. It doesn’t matter now which one it was. I didn’t see her then for months. Then I bumped into her in Cambridge one day, and I said, “Joy, did you read that book I gave you? What did you make of it?”

“It took me a long time to read it. I looked up a lot of the references.” This was a book by John Stott called Basic Christianity, and it has scads and scads and scads of biblical references, and she had looked up a whole lot of them. I said, “What do you make of the whole thing?” She said, “I decided this Christianity stuff is okay for good people like you and Carol, but it’s not for me.”

You have to understand that’s not what Christianity is about. Christianity isn’t for good people; it’s for sinners. Jesus openly says again and again and again, “I didn’t come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” A physician doesn’t come for good people and well people. He comes for the sick. It’s what the gospel says again and again and again.

John Stott doesn’t get it wrong. He has it right. It’s clear in the book again and again and again. He makes the point that Christianity is not for good people, and my wife hadn’t a clue. Well, the woman who became my wife. Let me tell you, my wife is not a twit. I mean, you don’t get into education in graduate school in Cambridge if you still have an IQ of 36. You have to have some brains somewhere, and she surely was reading this book somewhere, but she hadn’t got a clue.

We went for a long walk by the Cam, and I tried again to explain what the gospel really was. Do you know what she needed? I’m sure the book did some good. I’d like to think my explanations did some good. I believe Carol, this girlfriend, did some good. Carol was bringing her along to a church nearby where she was hearing some good explanation of Scripture week after week. I like to think that did some good. It all did some good, but at the end of the day it took something inside her that can only be called a miracle.

It took something inside her that was nothing less than the Spirit of God transforming her. That’s what it took. That’s what Jesus is explaining here. He says, “They shall all be taught by God.” You see, this kind of drawing the Father does is not the savage constraint of a rapist but the wonderful wooing of a lover. God goes after you.

I’d venture to say there are some of you here in this room today, who you know God is after you. Some of you have been down this path far enough now that you understand the structures of Christianity; you just don’t want them. You don’t want Jesus. You want it your own way. For some of you, there are some blocks that are just so painful you can’t get by them, but you know God is after you, and he will work with you and in you in a kind of strange way that woos you and draws you and transforms you, and ultimately, changes you.

He draws you to belief in his Son, makes you see how ugly rebellion is, makes you come to terms with this notion of sin that is more than merely a socially defined evil but is bound up, finally, with rebellion against himself. You begin to see just how ugly it is. Now Jesus is the kind of Bread from heaven that transforms people along those lines.

4. Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he gives his life on our behalf.

He lives so we die. That, in fact, is where the metaphor comes from. When you read these verses from 49 down to the end, they’re pretty grotesque to our way of thinking, aren’t they? All this emphasis on eating my flesh and drinking my blood sounds vaguely cannibalistic, doesn’t it? An ancient Mayan rite perhaps?

Others have thought this isn’t really talking about Jesus at all because there’s a rite in the Christian church that is variously called in different denominations the Eucharist or Holy Communion or the sacrament of Communion or the like in which Christians together take some bread, and in most denominations, some wine as well and claim to be remembering Jesus or somehow to be participating in Jesus’ death.

Some people have thought, “Maybe that’s what he’s really talking about. He’s talking about this later Christian rite.” No. That doesn’t make any sense, because at this point the rite hadn’t been invented. The rite was invented, was begun, was initiated just the night before Jesus was arrested, before that first Easter Friday and Easter Sunday when he died and he rose again. The night before he met with his disciples. “Then he broke some bread and he took some wine, and he said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ ” That was the beginning of the rite.

You’re still a long way before that. If he were introducing something of its symbolism here, they wouldn’t have a clue what he was talking about. No. What he means is much more straightforward than that. Even the particular language that is used here just doesn’t have the echoes of what is called the Lord’s Table or Holy Communion. What he’s talking about is something more fundamental than this.

Suppose after this meeting you go out and go to McDonald’s, that great icon of American culture, and you order a Big Mac. What will you eat? You will eat, in fact, dead cow, dead barley, dead lettuce, dead tomatoes, and dead pickles. You will eat dead peppers. Everything you eat in there is dead except for a few minerals like salt, of which there is too much. That’s what you will eat.

The person brought up on the farm, the person brought up in an agrarian society knows the only reason we stay alive is because something else living dies. Either the carrots die or I do. If you don’t like carrots, make it cows or rabbits or chickens. Either they die or I do. I can’t live on silicon. I can’t live on sea water. I live on living things. Either they die or I do.

Within this context of the first century, Jews had a staple diet: bread and fish, the very things Jesus multiplied the day before. Now he says, “I am the bread of life.” If my wife hurriedly leaves a note saying, “Don, on your way home today make sure you pick up some bread,” and I go into the store in metro Chicago, I look at these racks of bread (about 200 brands … purple packages and green packages and striped packages).

There’s one set of packages. I know they’re the right color, and I get out my reading glasses and put them on. It’s seven-grain, lightly browned bread. Then seven-grain with augmented vitamin C nourishment added. I don’t have a clue which one I’m supposed to get. I grab one and take it home. I don’t think this is the staff of life. I just don’t think in those terms. I don’t think, “If I don’t have this bread, I’m going to starve,” but that’s the way they thought in the first century.

When Jesus comes in this agrarian, first-century society and he says, “I am the bread of life; you either eat me or you’re dead,” the metaphor has power. Either he dies or we do. We live because he dies. That’s the way it is. In that sense, you see, he is the antitype, the picture, the fulfillment of the Old Testament manna.

God gave them a kind of bread, but he is the ultimate Bread, and he dies so that we live. That is the real significance of the miracle the day before. He provided them with bread, but they’re going to need some more tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that, but he himself gives his life in a way in which they gain a life that transcends that entirely.

What is it? The assumption throughout this whole passage is that we deserve death. We have run from God, we have shaken our puny fists in his face, and we are destined to die, but Jesus keeps saying things like, “I will not only give him eternal life, but the one who believes in me will have eternal life, but I will raise him up at the last day.”

What he’s promising is not simply some kind of immortality beyond death here. He’s claiming in light with the whole sweeping message of the Scripture that, finally, God by Jesus Christ gives us not only eternal life now so that we already begin to partake of the life of the age to come but at the very end, he gives us a new heaven and a new earth, a renovated universe, new bodies, a resurrection life, all because he dies in our place. He takes our death.

We deserve to die, but instead he dies and takes our death. He takes our shame. He takes our punishment. We deserve to be cut off from this God against whom we rebelled, but God himself gives this Bread, and when we trust him, when we come to him, he gives us life because he dies. It’s merely a powerful metaphorical way of saying our eternal life gained now and consummated in the age to come is achieved because Jesus gives his life on our behalf. Either he dies or we do, so that if we will not come to him and take the life he provides because he died, we die.

In a few moments, I’m going to pray. For some of you who have come to this meeting, I’m sure these categories are new and strange. In the bulletin that was passed out, there is a little tear-off sheet, and in the second box it says, “I would like some information on Christianity explained.” If the kinds of things I’ve talked about are so alien to you that they just really seem strange but you would like to know some more, then tick that. Somebody will get in touch with you.

There’s a short course you can follow to begin to study the Bible for yourself and find out just what the Bible says about these things. It would be good if everybody filled this out so that nobody is embarrassed. You might be someone who attends regularly. Same advice: tick the bottom box. Maybe you’re just visiting from elsewhere. That top box, if you just want to say something else that isn’t ticked there, that’s fine, too. In a few moments, these things will be picked up.

There may be some of you who are so sure now, precisely because God’s Spirit is at work within you, that you want this eternal life. You are ready to trust him. You are ready to commit yourself to him. As I pray, in the words printed on the bottom of the bulletin, you pray these words in your own heart and mind. God hears you. He knows what your mind is saying. If this is your prayer, you pray it to him. Let us pray.

Dear God, I know that I am not worthy to be accepted by you. I don’t deserve your gift of eternal life. I am guilty of rebelling against you and ignoring you. I need forgiveness. Thank you for sending your Son to die for me that I might be forgiven. Thank you that he rose from the dead to give me new life. Please forgive me and change me that I may live with Jesus as my ruler. Amen.