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Joe Heschmeyer addresses one of the most common verses cited in arguments against the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist.
Transcription:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. At the end of the Bread of Life Discourse. Jesus says, it is the spirit that gives life. The flesh is of no avail. The words that I’ve spoken to you are spirit and life. Okay? Does that mean that everything Jesus had just said about eating his flesh and drinking his blood is just a metaphor? In this episode, I’m going to show that reading John six in that way doesn’t just undermine the Eucharist, it undermines Christianity itself. While properly understanding this verse actually refutes the most visceral discomfort many of us might feel towards the Eucharist. So let’s start with dangerously misreading John six. This contrast between the spirit on one hand and the flesh on the other can be misinterpreted in several ways, partly because spirit and flesh have different meanings throughout the New Testament as any qualified biblical scholar will acknowledge.
But the two most obvious ways we’re going to misunderstand this juxtaposition of spirit and flesh are number one, the opposition between body and soul, which you get with things like gnosticism or number two, an interpretive bifurcation. That flesh is like literal and spirit is like metaphorical, and that’s not what Jesus is saying. He’s not saying, my words to you are metaphors. He says they’re spiritual, but that’s how we can misinterpret him if we’re not careful. So when he says earlier, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. This is one of those passages that we look to is Catholic. Somebody say that looks like pretty clear evidence of the Eucharist. The Protestant website got questions, points this out. They say Roman Catholics tend to interpret that passage literally and apply it to the Lord’s supper or the mass, the Eucharist.
But they say those who reject the idea of transubstantiation, this includes them, interpret Jesus’ words here, figuratively or symbolically, and then they ask, how can we know which interpretation is correct? Thankfully, Jesus made it exceedingly obvious what he meant. Now, it’s not his repeated clarifications where he doubles down on the literal language. No, rather, they view the only verse. You need to interpret this as John 6:63 where he says the spirit gives life in the flesh, prophets nothing. They explain. Jesus specifically stated that his words are spirit. Jesus was using physical concepts, eating and drinking to teach spiritual truth. Notice here they seem to think that Jesus saying that his words are spirit in life means that he’s saying they’re figurative or symbolic. So they’re falling into the mistake that spiritual means metaphorical or symbolic. That’s a problem like not literal. Why is that a problem? Well, let’s think of four reasons. Number one, it renders John six incoherent. St. Augustine points this out that if you take that kind of interpretation of the difference between spirit and flesh and John six, you’re going to run into problems with the fact that Jesus
Just said, accept a man, eat my flesh and drink my blood. He shall not have life in him. Augustine points that in his track tapes on John Jesus just said this, so look at John six. The verse in question is right here in John 6:63, but go back just a little before one paragraph earlier in verse 53, Jesus says, 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. If spirit means metaphor, what does flesh mean here? And so if you take this to literally mean the flesh prophets nothing, meaning don’t take any of this literally, what do you make of verse 53 where he speaks of the flesh positively or the very next verse where he says, he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I’ll raise him up the last day.
And then in the very next verse for my flesh is food. Indeed in my blood is drink. Indeed, that doesn’t sound like he’s saying this is all a big metaphor or the very next verse, verse 56, he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. My point is for successive verses, Jesus speaks of the flesh in a positive way, specifically his own flesh. So if you get down here and say the flesh is of no avail, means this isn’t really Jesus’s flesh, then you’ve just discounted what he’s spent several verses saying, he says His flesh is of great avail as we’re going to see it’s our flesh, our unaided human reasoning that’s of no avail. But if you take this to mean Jesus can’t be talking about his own flesh because he says the flesh is of no avail.
You have to ignore the entire preceding teaching in the bread of life discourse where he speaks of his flesh explicitly as being of great avail, as being key to eternal life and bodily resurrection and everything else. So hopefully you can see that interpreting one verse in a way that contradicts four proceeding verses is a bad interpretation, but it’s more than that because the second problem is that it strips across of its meaning. This isn’t just a bad interpretation, it’s theologically disastrous. I’m going to stay in John six for a minute. In John six verse 51, Jesus declares that he’s the living bread which comes down from heaven. Now, Catholics and Protestants agree, he’s speaking metaphorically here. He’s using the image of the manna. What we disagree about is what that image means. Protestants will often think eating this bread means something like listening to Jesus’s teaching. Jesus says, no, the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. That the bread is a metaphor for his flesh and his flesh is out. He offers on the cross. So Jesus is the bread come down from heaven because we’re to receive him bodily as the Israelites received the manna. But the fulfillment of that isn’t just pondering his teaching, it’s receiving his flesh. You cannot say Jesus’s flesh,
Prophets nothing. When his flesh saves us, that strips across of its meaning, John 6:63 cannot be denying the efficacy or importance of Jesus’s flesh. Third problem, this logically denies bodily resurrection. Now, I want to be really clear this distinction, flesh and spirit. The two ways it gets commonly misunderstood are the gnostic way of body verse soul, where your body is bad and your soul is good. un-Christian, that’s the heresy of gnosticism. Originally it was like dualism. I’ll explain that in another video if you all are interested. And then the related misunderstanding is literal verse metaphorical. In first Corinthians 15, we find this same juxtaposition when St. Paul segment the resurrection of the dead and speaking of the body, he says, what is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it’s raised in power.
It is sown a physical body. It is raised a spiritual body. And then he explains if there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written. The first man, Adam became a living being the last Adam. He means here Jesus became a life-giving spirit. So if your understanding of spirit is metaphorical, then this would mean you literally have a body, it’s buried and metaphorically you rise from the dead, which is to say you don’t rise from the dead, right? If someone said, I think Jesus is resurrected symbolically, not literally, not physically, but spiritually, metaphorically resurrected from the dead, that’d be a disaster, right? That spiritual resurrection or the spiritual body does not mean disembodied. Spiritual body doesn’t mean disembodied. The spirit is not a rejection of bodis, right? This is again, the heresy of gnosticism, this idea of dualism that the body is bad and the spirit is good.
And if you buy that, then you run into real problems in first Corinthians 15 where St. Paul distinguishes between the physical body and the spiritual body, because it sounds like he’s saying there’s not really a physical resurrection from the dead. And if that’s true, you’ve just denied the central principle of Christianity. Now, as I say, if you want me to talk more about this idea of gnostic roots that have made their way into Protestantism, I’m not saying all Protestants are gnostics, but there is ag gnostic strain that views the body as bad and the spirit as good, and it impacts the misunderstanding of the Eucharist. And you see it in people like 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon. If you’re interested in that, I’m happy to do a deep dive today. I’m just going to say watch out for that. If you find yourself thinking body, bad, spirit good, that’s not Christianity.
That’s much more like the ancient heresy of gnosticism, which St. John calls antichrist. So to see this really clearly and to see how we ought to understand John 6:63, I want to contrast the devil, the Eucharist and cannibalism. I’m going to start by turning into Galatians five, which has another of these spirit flesh distinctions. St. Paul’s going to compare the works of the flesh with the fruit of the spirit. But if you look at his list of the works of the flesh, the things that those who do won’t inherit the kingdom of God, it includes both bodily sins like drunkenness and carousing, but it also includes spiritual sins like jealousy. Saint Augustine points this out in city of God, he makes a point that the devil is guilty of several of these sins, hatred, variance, emulation, strife, and envying. And to use Augustine’s translation are the works of the flesh even though the devil doesn’t have a body.
So if your understanding of flesh versus spirit is body versus soul or bodis versus non bodis, that’s not the correct understanding of this contrast. That’s not what’s actually going on here. Instead, as Augustine points out, we’re acting according to the flesh when we live according to man as opposed to according to God. And when we do that, we’re acting like the devil because even angels can’t just live according to themselves. In other words, the proper contrast between flesh and spirit in places like John 6:63 or Galatians five or one Corinthians 15 is that the flesh is a reference to our unaided humanity. Flesh is a shorthand for the human experience, if you will. Spirit refers to the divine assistant. So someone who’s led by the Spirit is being led by grace. They’re being led by God, they’re being led by the Holy Spirit, someone led by the flesh is being led by their own passions, their own desires, their own unaided humanity with this fallen nature and everything else.
And so when we talk about the dishonor of the body and then it being elevated that you have a mortal body that will die and rotten the grave, that’s the unaided nature of your humanity, not sinfully there just it’s unaided. It doesn’t have the supernatural preservation that it will have when it rises again. And then it’s a spiritual body, meaning it has this special divine assistance. So you’ll notice Augustine’s interpretation there makes total sense of Galatians five. When are we acting according to our own whims and desires and when are we acting according to what the Holy Spirit’s leading us into? It also makes sense of Francis Corinthians 15 between the physical body and the spiritual body. And it also makes sense of John 6:63, a augustin’s going to explain that directly that Jesus is not negating the bread of life discourse when he says that the flesh prophets nothing. Rather he says the flesh prophets nothing only in the
Manner which they understood it, meaning his listeners, they indeed understood the flesh just as when cut to pieces in a carcass are sold in the shambles, not as when it’s quickened to buy the spirit. And he gives the example. When St. Paul says knowledge puffs up, he’s not actually saying knowledge is evil because he then says that you need charity. That knowledge by itself is a problem. Likewise here, the flesh by itself is the problem, not the body of itself, not literalness of itself. But if we have a merely human understanding of Jesus’s words unaided by the spirit, we’re going to end up with something like cannibalism. How can this man give us his flesh to eat? That’s exactly what the crowd in John six is questioning. And this is in fact what many people, non-Christian, but even Christian will struggle with that this teaching Jesus is giving about the need to eat his flesh sounds like cannibalism.
And so that’s what it is to interpret Jesus here in a human fleshly sort of way, our unaided, unenlightened interpretation of Jesus’ words would be something like cannibalism. Well, if we’re going to receive his flesh, we have to hack him to pieces and chop up his body. And I’ve heard plenty of people object to the Eucharist saying, oh, well, in the course of your life, how many parts of his body have you eaten? All of that is a fleshly, unspiritual understanding of what Jesus is doing here, but led by the spirit, the spiritual man can appreciate Jesus can give himself to us bodily in a sacramental sort of way. It doesn’t have to be the barbarism of cannibalism where you rip someone to shreds. It can instead be receiving Jesus bodily in the Eucharist where he gives himself holy to us in a miraculous way spiritually through the power of the Holy Spirit.
That’s what it is to interpret Jesus here spiritually. Spiritual does not mean metaphorical. Spiritual does not mean disembodied. When St. Paul in Romans 12 talks about our spiritual worship, he says, it’s worship in the body. So spiritual does not mean disembodied. It doesn’t mean metaphorical. It rather means guided by God, guided by the Spirit, aided by God, rather than our unassisted, unaided misunderstandings. So if you think John 6:63 is a slam dunk against the Eucharist, I would suggest you’ve misread what Jesus means. And if you think Catholics believe in cannibalistic kind of destruction of Jesus and their belief in the Eucharist, one of the oldest arguments against Christianity, if you go back to the early days, I would suggest you’ve fallen into the very trap Jesus is actually warned against in John 6:63 for Speaker (00:00):Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.