Eating the Flesh of Jesus

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Hey everyone,

 

Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.

 

I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.

 

There are three details that we’re going to focus on in the readings for this upcoming 5^th Sunday of Easter, Year B. One detail comes from the second reading, taken from 1 John 3:18-24. The relevant topic there is the role good works play in our salvation. The other two details are found in the Gospel reading, which taken from John 15:1-8. The apologetical topics that come to the fore are the Catholic interpretation of Jesus’ words “eat my flesh . . . drink my blood” in his Bread of Life Discourse in John 6 and the possibility for a Christian to lose the gift of salvation..

 

Let’s get started with the second reading, again, taken from 1 John 3:18-24. John writes,

 

Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth. Now this is how we shall know that we belong to the truth and reassure our hearts before him in whatever our hearts condemn, for God is greater than our hearts and knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence in God and receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And his commandment is this: we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us. Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them, and the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he gave us.

 

The detail that I want to highlight is John’s teaching in verse 24, “Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them.”

 

The first thing to note is that to be in Christ is not to be subject to condemnation. Paul writes in Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” In other words, to be in Christ is to be in friendship with God, or saved.

 

Now, John says in the above reading (v.24) that if we want to remain in Christ, and thereby remain free from condemnation, we must keep Jesus’ commandment. So, the question becomes, “What was Jesus’ commandment?” John told us in verse 23, “[T]his is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.” And, for John, this “love” is expressed in good works. He writes in verse 18, “Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.”

 

Why is this apologetically significant? Many Protestants reject the idea that our works of love have anything to do with our salvation. But John teaches in the above passage that our works do play a role in our salvation—namely, they preserve it.

 

This is exactly what the Council of Trent taught in its Decree on Justification concerning the role our good works play in our salvation. In Canon 24 of the decree, the Council teaches,

 

If anyone shall say, that the justice received is not preserved, and also increased in the sight of God through good works; but that the said works are merely the fruits and signs of justification received, but not a cause of the increase thereof; let him be anathema.^[1]

 

So, the second reading for this upcoming 5^th Sunday of Easter gives us an opportunity to reflect on the age-old debate among Catholics and Protestants concerning the relationship our good works have with our salvation.

 

Let’s now turn to the Gospel, taken from John 15:1-8. Jesus says to his disciples,

 

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.

He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit,

and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit.

You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you.

Remain in me, as I remain in you.

Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own

unless it remains on the vine,

so neither can you unless you remain in me.

I am the vine, you are the branches.

Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit,

because without me you can do nothing.

Anyone who does not remain in me

will be thrown out like a branch and wither;

people will gather them and throw them into a fire

and they will be burned.

If you remain in me and my words remain in you,

ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.

By this is my Father glorified,

that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

 

As I said in the introduction, there are two details that I want to focus on here. The first is Jesus’ teaching in verse 6, “If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.”

 

This is often a go-to passage for evidence from Jesus that Christians can lose their salvation. Obviously, that a branch can be cut off from the vine implies that it once was a part of the vine, living with the life of the vine. And when it’s cast forth, it dies.

 

Just as branches live with the life of the vine when united to it, so too Christians live with the life of Jesus when united to him. And just as branches can be separated from the vine and die, so too Christians can be separated from Jesus and die spiritually, since to be separated from Jesus is not to have salvation. Therefore, Jesus teaches that Christians can lose their salvation.

 

There aren’t many comebacks Protestants make to a Catholic’s appeal to John 15:5-6. John Calvin argued that Jesus speaks of those who merely appeared to be Christians but were not in reality.[i] Since this reading is so contrary to the plain sense of the text (Jesus says, “he who abides in me,” not “he who appears to abide in me”), most Protestants don’t use it.

 

There is one comeback, however, that some Protestants use: “Jesus is not talking about eternal punishment. Rather, he’s talking about temporal punishment.”

 

Protestant author and executive director of The Grave Evangelical Society Robert Wilkin counters by targeting the Catholic assumption that Jesus is talking about eternal judgment. He argues Jesus is speaking about temporal judgment. Wilkin supports his claim by appealing to what Jesus doesn’t say. In his article “The Gospel According to John,” in The Grace New Testament Commentary, Wilkin writes,

 

Since the Lord did not use the verb to be burned up, but rather the less intense verb to be burned, He is holding open the possibility that the unproductive believer may respond to the burning and return to fruitfulness.”[ii]

 

For Wilkin, the image of the branch burning up would have to be present if Jesus intended his teaching to mean that a Christian can be definitively separated from Jesus and receive eternal damnation. Since Jesus doesn’t use that image, but rather simply says the branch will burn, Wilkin concludes that Jesus isn’t talking about eternal judgment.

 

As I point out in my book Meeting the Protestant Response: Answering Common Comeback to Catholic Arguments, one glaring problem with this argument is that it doesn’t fit with the viticultural imagery.[iii] As Catholic Bible scholar Michael Barber argues in his response to Robert Wilkin, found in his contributory chapter in Four Views on the Role of Works at the Final Judgment, “Why would a vinedresser cut off and ‘burn’ a branch in order to restore it?”[iv] Burning a branch doesn’t restore the branch; it destroys it.[v]

 

A second problem is that the language “burned” doesn’t suggest something temporary. The same language jibes just as easily with the view that Jesus is talking about the Final Judgment and the everlasting burning that the someone separated from Jesus will experience. That person will be forever “burned.” Given this ambiguity, anyone using the “burned but not burned up” argument would have to provide further evidence to defend his claim that this is a temporary burning. Until he does, this counter-argument is an assertion without evidence.

Finally, consider the Greek. First, there’s nothing there to suggest that this is a temporary burning. Second, there’s only one other time in the New Testament where the Greek word translated as “burned” (kaiō) is Matthew 13:40. It’s used in relation to judgment, and it’s used for the Final Judgment, which implies an everlasting burning: “Just as the weeds are gathered and burned [Greek, kaietai] with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

 

The second detail is Jesus’ application to himself of the image of the vine: “I am the vine.” As I detail in my aforementioned book, some Protestants appeal to this passage as a counter response to a Christian who defends the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist with a literal interpretation of Jesus’ words in John 6, “eat my flesh . . . drink my blood.” If Catholics interpret Jesus’ command to eat his flesh and drink his blood literally in John 6, so it’s argued, then they have to take him literally here in John 15:5. As Geisler and MacKenzie write in their book Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences, Jesus “said, ‘I am the vine’ . . . and Roman Catholic scholars do not take [this] statement literally, even though they come from the same book that records ‘This is my body’!”[vi]

 

Protestant Pastor Todd Baker bolsters this argument by highlighting the fact that Jesus’ words in John 6 are part of a series of “I Am” statements in John’s Gospel.[vii] In John 10:9, Jesus says, “I am the door.” He says, “I am the vine” in John 15:5. In John 6:48, the beginning of Jesus’ Bread of Life Discourse, he says, “I am the bread of life.”

 

Baker argues that this “I Am” statement clues us in to how we’re to understand his words concerning the bread he will give, which he identifies as his “flesh,” and that we must eat it. Like in John 15:5, we should interpret him figuratively.

 

This comeback fails because the vine passage is disanalogous to the bread of life passage. The people in the audience in the vine passage don’t interpret Jesus literally, as they do in John 6. No one listening to the vine teaching says, “How can this man claim to be a plant?” Jesus’ audience recognized he was speaking metaphorically. So no further inquiry is needed.

 

This stands in stark contrast to the audience in John 6. Both the Jews and Jesus’ disciples understand Jesus to be speaking literally. This gives us reason to think something different is going on in John 6 from what’s happening in the door and vine passages. And the contextual evidence confirms this initial hunch.

 

Jesus affirms the literal thoughts of both the Jews and his disciples. He even lets the latter walk away in verse 66, and then turns to the apostles and says, “Do you also wish to go away?” This stands out as remarkably different from how Jesus handles teachings with hidden meanings elsewhere. For example, in Mark 4:33-34, we’re told, “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.”

 

Given the presence of the literal thoughts among Jesus’ audience in John 6 compared to the lack of such thoughts in the door and vine passages, and Jesus’ engagement with those literal thoughts by way of affirming them, we can conclude that the door and vine passages are meant to be read differently from how we should read Jesus’ teaching about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

 

Conclusion

 

Well, my friends, that does it for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. This upcoming 5^th Sunday of Easter, Year B provides with details that relate to three important apologetical topics,

 

• The relationship between our good works and salvation,
• The possibility for a Christian to lose salvation, and
• The literal interpretation of Jesus’ words “eat my flesh . . . drink my blood” in John 6.

 

As always, thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well at sundaycatholicword.com. You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Cy Kellet’s Catholic Answers Focus, Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, and Jimmy Akin’s A Daily Defense, all of which can be found at catholic.com.

 

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I hope you have a blessed 5^th Sunday of Easter, Year B. Until next time, God Bless!

 

^[1] Buckley, T. A. (1851). The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (p. 45). George Routledge and Co.

[i] See John Calvin, The Gospel according to St. John: Part Two, 11-21 and the First Epistle of John, trans. T.H.L. Parker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959), in loc.; cf. Michael P. Barber, “Response to Robert N. Wilkin,” in Four Views on the Role of Works at the Final Judgment, 68.

[ii] Robert Wilkin, “The Gospel According to John,” in The Grace New Testament Commentary, ed., R.N. Wilkin (Denton, TX: Grace Evangelical Society, 2010), 450.

[iii] I am grateful to Michael Barber for this line of argumentation. See Barber, “Response to Robert Wilkin,” 67.

[iv] Barber, “Response to Robert Wilkin,” 67.

[v] See Craig Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary Vol. 2 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 1003; cf. Thomas R. Schreiner, “Justification Apart from and By Works: At the Final Judgment Works will Confirm Justification,” in Four Views on the Role of Works at the Final Judgment, 93.

[vi] Geisler and MacKenzie, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, 262.

[vii] See Baker, Exodus from Rome, Chap. 10.