The Bible on the Eucharist: Strange, Sacrificial, Serious, Sacramental, and Shocking

You are listening to Shameless Popery, with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today, I want to explore a fivefold test for Eucharistic theology. Because when you look at what the Bible has to say about the Eucharist, when you delve deep on it, you find five things are true. First, the biblical teaching on the Eucharist is strange. Second, it’s sacrificial. Third, it’s serious. Fourth, it’s sacramental. And fifth, it’s shocking. So if those aren’t five good adjectives to describe your own view of the Eucharist, it’s a big red flag that you don’t believe what Jesus taught or what the disciples believed.

So I’ll tell you at the outset, I’m adapting all of this from a book that I wrote recently called The Eucharist Is Really Jesus: How Christ’s Body and Blood Are the Key to Everything We Believe. You can get that book anywhere good Catholic books are sold, Amazon.com, your local Catholic bookstore. But if you get it at the Catholic Answers shop, shop.catholic.com, and as a Shameless Popery listener, put in SP33 as a promo code. You can get it 33% discount on the individual paperback or on the ebook. We also have really serious discounts for bulk rates. So if you want to buy it for your Bible study or for your parish, copies for as cheap as, I think, $3.50 if you get sets of 20 or more. So if you’re interested in this and you want to go deeper, you can check it out there.

With that said, let’s turn to the fivefold test. First, that Christ’s Eucharistic teaching is strange. What he’s talking about in John 6 is really unusual, and we should understand that, because look, a lot of times people say, “Oh yeah, sure, Jesus says ‘I’m the bread of life.'” But he also says things like, “I’m the door for the sheep.” And no one says Jesus is literally a door, so why would we take him literally here when there’s so many other places when nobody takes him literally? That’s a good question. And I think part of the answer to that question comes from taking a closer look at the text. Because when Jesus speaks in figures of speech, we see a couple of things happen. The first is that nobody takes him literally. When he says, “I’m a door for the sheep,” everybody gets it.

The second is that the crowd misunderstands him, and they think that he’s speaking literally when he’s speaking figuratively or symbolically. So for instance in John chapter 2, he says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days, I’ll rebuild it.” Well, what happens when the crowd misunderstands Jesus is that either Jesus or the evangelist writing the account gives some clue that this is a misunderstanding. So in that instance in John 2, John quickly tells us, he spoke of the temple of his body. In other instances, as when Nicodemus in John 3 misunderstands Jesus, Jesus quickly corrects him.

Now in John 6, you find Jesus correcting the misunderstandings of the crowd all over the place, but he’s not saying, “You’re taking me too literally.” He seems to be telling them, they’re not taking him literally enough. And we get this if you take a very close careful look. Instead of just pulling a verse out of context, go through the chapter and look at the back and forth, look at the conversation between Jesus and his listeners. And now to get a full sense, you need to know that this conversation really is built on a prior event. In the beginning of John 6, Jesus has the multiplication of the loaves, the feeding of the 5,000. And then he crosses the sea miraculously and he gets to the other side. And he does this at night, but the crowds quickly realize where he is and they come and they follow him. They go around the water, they can’t cross the water miraculously.

But Jesus calls them out, and he says in verse 26, “You seek me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Here’s Jesus. He’s just done the multiplication of the loaves. And now the crowd wants to be with him. Now, one reason that they could want to be with him is, this guy’s a miracle worker. But Jesus says, “That’s not it. You’re just after free food.” And he says instead, in verse 29, “This is the work of God. You believe in him whom he has sent.” So he’s calling them from just receiving the good stuff of the miracles, to believing in the one working the miracles. That’s the work of God they need to be doing.

And in response, the crowd says, in verse 30 to 31, “Then what sign do you do that we may see and believe you?” If he’s saying look to the signs, not to the free food, what signs are you going to do? What work do you perform? Now this is, let’s just point out, an outrageous request because he’s just done the multiplication of the loaves. But they say, “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'” In other words, they’re saying, “Why not give us more free food to prove that you really are the person you claim to be?” It’s just like a helpful head like, “Hey, if you want to do a miracle, we can think of one. Moses gave us manna, heavenly bread.” And Jesus says, “Well, truly, truly I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven. My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

So that’s going to be the really critical kind of line here. “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” And how does the crowd respond? Well, they say, “Lord, give us this bread always.” So as we’re going through how the crowd is responding, their first guess is, this is just bread. They’re wanting something like an ordinary loaf of bread, or something like the manna. So the manna is this heavenly bread the Israelites received in the desert, but it’s still like a physical thing that you eat and is primarily intended to nourish you.

Now the point of the manna was that God is providing for them in this obviously supernatural way, to teach them to rely on him, but the way he’s doing that is by physically feeding them. And so they’re thinking, “Yeah, that sounds pretty good. If we’re going to get heavenly…” I mean, imagine if, as a Christian, you just went out every morning and hey, there’s your food for the day, and it’s amazing, and it was given to you miraculously by God, this is to teach you to trust him. You’d think, “Oh, that’s pretty good. That’s a pretty good deal.” This is what the disciples of Jesus are hearing and saying, “Yeah, we want that.” So notice, they’re not listening to Jesus’s teaching and saying, “Oh, you called yourself the bread from heaven, therefore you must be teaching something like the Eucharist.” They’re not anywhere near that. They’re just thinking free food.

Jesus corrects this. In John 6:35, he says, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger and he who believes in me shall never thirst.” So okay, you were thinking something like the manna. No, I’m the bread of life. And in verse 41 to 42, we’re told the Jews then murmured at him because he said, “I’m the bread which came down from heaven.” But what is their objection this time? They said, “Is not this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” So notice now, their second guess is something like the incarnation. First, they hear bread from heaven and they thought, “Okay, great. It’s like the manna.” Then they hear bread from heaven and they’re like, “Oh, Jesus is talking about himself. He’s saying he came from heaven.”

Now, this is remarkably close to how many Protestants interpret the passage, that when Jesus calls himself the bread from heaven, he’s just saying he came from heaven. And certainly, Jesus does come from heaven. But Jesus does not accept this as an accurate understanding of what he’s teaching here. In verse 48, he pushes back, he says, “I’m the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven that a man may eat of it and not die.” Verse 51, “I’m the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Notice what details he added now. Not just “I’m the living bread, but the living bread is meant to be eaten. And the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Now that’s really critical because he’s added the two elements. First, that the bread from heaven, himself, needs to be eaten. And second, that the bread which he’ll give for the life of the world is his flesh. If he’d said like “my teaching”, that would harmonize with a lot of Protestant interpretations of the passage, that to eat the flesh of Christ just means believe in his teaching. And he could have easily said, “The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my word. It’s my teaching. It’s my doctrine.” He doesn’t say that. He says the bread which we need to be eating is his flesh. Now that is a much stranger kind of teaching.

And now, it’s only here, verse 52, we’re well into the chapter now, that the Jews hearing him dispute among themselves and say, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Now notice, they’re still not saying, “Oh, obviously he means something like the Eucharist.” They’re baffled, but they’re baffled in, from a Catholic perspective, they’re baffled in the right direction now. So the third guess is, we need to eat the flesh of Jesus somehow?

The evangelical scholar, F.F. Bruce, one of the best respected evangelical scholars of the 20th century, in his work on the Gospel of John, describes this moment. He says of the crowds, they did not suppose that he seriously implied cannibalism, yet that was a natural sense of his words. It was an offensive way of speaking, they thought, even if he was speaking figuratively. And if he was speaking figuratively, they could not fathom the figurative sense of his words. Some had one interpretation, some another, and a wordy strife broke out among them. Is it too far-fetched to see in this wordy strife an anticipation of the perennial controversies in which Christians have engaged over the meaning of their Lord’s words of institution, “This is my body, which is for you.”?

In other words, Bruce is saying, on the surface, Jesus seems to be saying, literally, “Eat my flesh.” But the crowd’s saying, “Well, that sounds cannibalistic, so that can’t be it, so it must be something else.” But what that something else is, what a figure of speech this might mean is totally opaque. It’s not clear at all. What does it mean to chew on Jesus to mean faith, or how does that mean discipleship in any way? In other words, if this is all a metaphor, a metaphor for what? So that’s where the crowd’s at. They’re seeing that this might mean something like the Eucharist, but they’re baffled as to why that would be the case. Jesus then says six things in response, and it’s worth pondering these six things. So they’re at this moment where they’re saying, “We don’t get what he means by this.” They’re not just jumping to a Eucharistic belief, but they’re really confused as to how they can avoid that kind of outcome. Well, listen to the six things that Jesus says.

First, in John 6:53, “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.” Okay, what has Jesus added to the discourse? He’s added the phrase, drink his blood. As F.F. Bruce points out, this amplifies his contentious statement. He’s doubling down. And in fact, the amplification is more offensive than the original statement. The law of Moses imposed a ban on the drinking of any blood whatsoever, including the eating of flesh with the blood in it. So you couldn’t even have a rare steak. The idea of drinking the blood of the Son of Man was impossibly abhorrent. They, the crowds, found the problem set by a strange language more impenetrable and more scandalous than ever. So if Jesus doesn’t mean something literal, if he doesn’t mean something Eucharistic, what in the world is he meaning here, and why is he seemingly pushing them in the wrong direction? That’s the first of the six claims.

The second, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I’ll raise him up at the last day.” Now, there’s another amplification that’s happening here. As Bruce points out, Jesus has switched from fagian to trogian, which is, as he says, a coarser word, which means to munch or to chew, and is used in classical Greek to describe animals eating. So, “Gnaw my flesh and drink my blood.” Eat my flesh, maybe you can take that as kind of a poorly chosen figure of speech on our Lord’s part. But gnaw my flesh, drink my blood, to mean accept my teaching? Why would that mean accept my teaching? How do you get the metaphor out of that?

I can understand how Jesus is a sheep gate. He’s protecting the sheep, keeping them from going the wrong way. I can understand any of these different phrases Jesus uses metaphorically about himself, even the way he’s a temple, he’s the indwelling of the Lord and his presence in the world. But gnaw my flesh, drink my blood to just means something as innocuous as listen to my teaching and trust it? Why would he do this? And yet that’s Jesus’s second kind of claim of the six claims. The second one, he’s now gone from eat my flesh to something like munch or chew or gnaw my flesh.

The third claim, in John 6:55, he says, “For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” In other words, he seems to just be saying, “Stop thinking this is some convoluted figure of speech. I actually mean that my flesh is food and my blood is drink.” And to Protestants who don’t take a real presence view like this, I would just say, what more could he be saying here that would help you? What more could he be saying here to get you to accept the Catholic view than what he’s actually giving you? But in any case, we’re only halfway through the six claims.

The fourth claim, in John 6:56, he says, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I am him,” that if you do this, you have the abiding of the Lord. Then his fifth claim, in John 6:57, “As the living father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me,” that somehow, eternal life and the abiding of God are connected to this apparently Eucharistic act of eating the flesh and drinking the blood. And then in John 6:58, we get his sixth and final claim. “This is the bread which came down from heaven, such as the fathers ate and died. He who eats this bread will live forever.” So as we’ve been hearing about the need to receive the bread of God, eat the bread of God, gnaw the bread of God, all of this drinking of blood language, he’s now rounded it out.

But notice, if the disciples were confused and understandably confused about what Jesus meant, he’s just given them six statements that seem to push them in the wrong direction, if this is the wrong direction, because he seems to be pushing them towards a Eucharistic kind of teaching. And now, as we think about this strangeness of this teaching, I want to just consider the response of the disciples. We’ll get back to this in a little bit, but in John 6:66, many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.

Now these are people who’d heard Jesus talk about the need for faith, the need to believe, but what he’s taught here is something stranger that they find intolerable. And in the next verse, Jesus doesn’t say, “Hey, hey, hey, hey, you guys don’t understand metaphors. Let me correct that.” He instead goes, even to the 12, and says, “Will you also go away?” And it’s really remarkable how St. Peter responds. He answers on behalf of the 12 and says not, “Lord, we get it. We understand how a metaphor works.” No, he says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life and we have believed and have come to know that you are the holy one of God.” So even St. Peter, even the 12, don’t seem to get what it is Jesus is wanting us to take away from this.

And understandably. Jesus hasn’t institute of the Eucharist yet. So all of this would be a very baffling teaching. If the Catholic claim is right, the strange reactions that both the crowd and the apostles have make total sense. Jesus’ seemingly strange reaction to the confusion of the crowd makes total sense, that he’s inviting them into a really shocking, really controversial, really counterintuitive kind of belief. Okay. That makes sense. But if Jesus meant something else by it, well, it doesn’t seem that that would be a very strange teaching, and it’s hard to understand why everyone acts in such a strange way. Jesus acts in a strange way. The disciples find this whole thing strange. The apostles find this whole thing strange but continue to follow Jesus nevertheless. We should be understanding this as a strange kind of teaching.

The second, Jesus’s Eucharistic teaching is sacrificial. Now I want to turn here to what St. Paul says about the Eucharist. He says in 1 Corinthians 10, the cup of blessing. Now, let’s just pause on that for a second. The cup of blessing is the third of four cups in the Passover. Scott Hahn and others have done really good work on understanding the Passover kind of theology behind the Eucharist. But understand, the Eucharist is a Passover. John 6 takes place at Passover. The last supper takes place at Passover. The cup of blessing is a Passover cup. And he says… And by the way, the Passover is a sacrifice. It’s a sacrificial meal. All of this is important. But in 1 Corinthians 10:16, St. Paul says, “The cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” Well, how?

Well he says in verse 17, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body for we all partake of the one bread.” That’s easy to miss, but this is really key to understanding 1 Corinthians 10, 11 and 12. St. Paul is saying, the church is the body of Christ, because it partakes of the Eucharistic body of Christ. He throws it out there in one line and then moves on. But if you catch that verse, it’s really key because in 1 Corinthians 11, he’s going to talk about the Eucharistic body of Christ, and in 1 Corinthians 12, it’s all about the church as the body of Christ. And here in 1 Corinthians 10, he’s highlighted how those two things go together. We are the body of Christ, because we receive the body of Christ in the Eucharist.

And then he’s going to show us how this sacrificial participation makes us one with Christ. And he’s going to do this in a really strange way. He’s going to first point to Israel, the Old Testament sacrificial system. 1 Corinthians 10:18, “Consider the practice of Israel, are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?” Now notice, to explain the Eucharist, he points out that in the Old Testament, and even in Judaism of his day, those who eat the sacrifices are partners in the altar. So a Eucharistic theology should have eating of sacrifices at an altar. Or, it’s not clear why he would think that would be a helpful image to bring up.

But then, he looks to an even more shocking place, in verses 19 and 20. He says, “What do I imply then, that food offered to idols is anything or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagan sacrifice, they offered to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons.” So if it wasn’t enough to show how Israel eats sacrifices on altars and how that’s like the Eucharist, well, now he’s going to say, “So do the pagans.” And then he says in verse 21, “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.”

Now, what’s the table there? This is all about a sacrificial altar, eating the food of the altar. And so you’ve got three groups, pagans, Israelites, Christians. The pagans, how do they experience communion? Well, they eat the sacrifice from the table of demons and that make some partners with demons. The Israelites eat the sacrifice of the altar in the temple. And Christians eat the Eucharist from the table of the Lord. Now, if this is a threefold parallel, as Paul seems to think it is, this only makes sense if the Eucharist is a sacrifice, if the table of the Lord is like the table of demons and that is an altar, and if we’re eating the sacrifice as the pagans and the Israelites did. So all of this is really clear, if the Eucharist really is a sacrificial offering that we then eat.

If it’s just a commemoration, where we don’t literally sacrifice anything, and we don’t actually eat a sacrifice made to God, then this doesn’t work. Then it’s not like what the pagans are doing and it’s not like what the Israelites are doing. But if the Catholic view and the Eucharist is right, well then yes, there are some obvious similarities between the pagan, the Jewish and the Christian kind of approaches to sacrifice and eating food sacrifices and the like. In fact, this is something we get knocked on all the time for as Christians… Excuse me, by non-Catholic Christians. They’ll say, “Oh, you Catholics, this looks so pagan.” Well, St. Paul is saying, “Yeah, there’s something about this that looks like the Jewish temple service, and there’s something about this that looks like the pagan offerings.” It’s neither of those, but those two are both pointing to the true sacrificial offering.

So if what you’re believing in couldn’t be compared to what happens in the temple liturgy, if what you’re believing in couldn’t be compared to what pagans were doing, with food sacrifices, animal sacrifices and eating them to become partners with their demons, then you’re not believing the same that the early Christians believed and that St. Paul describes in one Corinthians 10. That’s the second of the five parts of the test.

The third is that Christ’s Eucharistic teaching is serious. Let’s turn from 1 Corinthians 10 to 1 Corinthians 11. St. Paul introduces the last supper by saying, “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread,” and so on. And he has the institution. But that critical line at the beginning, “I received from the Lord, what I also delivered to you,” is something we can kind of overlook, but that’s important language. As C.P. Coffin points out, “Paul has made such statements elsewhere, with reference to the source of his views, his doctrine, his gospel.”

For instance, in his writing to the Galatians, he says with great emphasis that he got his gospel by revelation that he did not get it from men.” In other words, St. Paul seems to be saying that Jesus taught him the institution narrative directly, that he didn’t get it from the other apostles, that this was so important that Jesus wanted him to know exactly how to do the right. And Coffin goes on, “It would certainly seem as if his statement to the Corinthians, with respect to the sources of information as to the supper, means the same thing, namely that he got his view of that occurrence, his understanding of its meaning, by revelation and not from men.”

Now, that is an old article from 1901. You’ll find plenty of scholars in the intervening years who make the same point, that if you go to somewhere like Galatians 1, St. Paul says, “I would have you know brethren that the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel, for I did not receive it from man, nor is I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” Paul seems to be saying the same thing here. He wasn’t present at the last supper, but the pattern of institution in terms of the events that happen and kind of the presentation of those events, he’s getting this from Jesus in a revelation. So that’s really remarkable because it points to the importance of this event. It points to the seriousness of this event, that Jesus isn’t revealing every detail of his life to St. Paul directly, and St. Paul doesn’t claim that he is. But this one, he’s saying he got directly from Jesus.

He goes on in 1 Corinthians 11:27 to say, “Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks a cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.” That just as you don’t take the table of the Lord to mean literally just like a dining room table, you should be thinking in sacrificial context like the table of demons. Likewise, when we talk about the cup of the Lord, the bread of the Lord, we don’t just mean, yeah, yeah, it’s a loaf of bread, it’s a cup of wine or a cup of grape juice. No. How do we know that? Because there’s a seriousness to this that if you receive these unworthily, you’ll profane the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. That doesn’t make sense if it’s just a metaphor.

In verse 28, Paul says, “Let a man examine himself,” and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup, “for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment upon himself like damnation. That is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died.” Now, this I find to be a really convincing refutation of a merely symbolic view. Jesus gives all sorts of parables, and some of those parables are more helpful to certain people than other ones are.

So for instance, Jesus gives the parable of the lost coin. He also gives the parable of the lost sheep, because some people work indoors and some people work outdoors, and you might find one of those more helpful than the other. The point of the parable are the exact same. But if this is just another parable, basically, another symbol that’s supposed to teach us something about God, it’s really remarkable that if we don’t get this one right, we eat damnation upon ourselves. There’s not that kind of punishment attached to it. If you don’t understand who the father of the prodigal son is, you’re going to hell. They don’t find that kind of language anywhere else. Because Jesus knows, as a great teacher, that people understand teachings in different levels at different kind of places in their life, that you might understand it a little bit, and then later on, you understand it more.

And in fact, when he’s asked why he teaches in parables, he’s very clear about that point. He knows not everybody’s going to get everything right away. But this, we need to get right. And Jesus says, if we don’t, if we aren’t discerning the body, we’re eating and drinking judgment upon ourselves. So that’s the third thing, that the teaching on the Eucharist is serious. It is deadly serious. And in fact, many of you are weak and ill. Some have died, that there are those in the Corinthian church who aren’t taking this seriously enough.

The fourth is that Christ’s Eucharistic teaching is sacramental. So we already looked at one Protestant scholar, F.F. Bruce. I want to look at another, Don Carson, D.A. Carson and his book The Gospel According to John. And he’s looking at different scholarly views on how to interpret this part of John 6. And he highlights one that he doesn’t agree with, but he acknowledges this. D.A. actually calls it the first view. He says this passage, “It is argued,” he is talking about how the Christian ought to view the Eucharist, the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, “the very strong language of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood is taken to support this.” We already saw that. “Many,” he means many scholars here, “think that early Christian readers for whom the Eucharist was a central right could not have failed to understand the passage this way.” And I want to underscore this point.

If you read what the early Christians have to say about the Eucharist or about John 6, you’ll find that even in the first 200 years of Christianity, there are a lot of these really clear affirmations that the Eucharist is actually a sacrament. Even if the word sacrament isn’t used, what a sacrament is, it’s a right by which God gives grace to his people. It’s an encounter with Christ. It’s something that makes us holy. That’s the sacra part of sacrament. Sacramentum, to make holy. It’s something that makes us holy.

“Moreover,” Carson says, Ignatius who probably knew the evangelist, he knows John. If you want to know what John 6 means, talking to a guy who is a student of the Apostle John, most people believe Ignatius was, it’s a pretty good place to start. And who wrote between 25 and 40 years after the gospel was published adopts a sacramentarian stance. Now, this is really important. Carson is not a believer that John 6 is teaching the Eucharist and teaching anything sacramental, but he’s acknowledging that Ignatius, who unlike Carson, unlike modern Protestants, was directly a disciple of John does think that. He does believe the Eucharist is sacramental, and that seems to be his understanding of John 6.

So Carson’s going to disagree with Ignatius. He’s going to think, well, Ignatius gets a lot of things wrong. He thinks there’s one bishop per city, which is what Christians have always believed until the reformation. But he’s going to think all these things are accretion, so Ignatius is not a reliable kind of interpreter. Well, whether you think that or not, I think that’s a bad view. What is agreed between both Carson and those with whom he’s disagreeing, is that the earliest Christians that we have writings of clearly believe the Eucharist is a sacrament, and he points to Ignatius, he points to three places in the writing of Saint Ignatius.

The first one is his letter to the Ephesians. Now Ignatius is seven letters, and these letters are so Catholic that John Calvin thought they were Catholic forgeries, that they must have been written much later. They couldn’t actually be from 107 as we now know they are. That’s how thoroughly Catholic they are. But if you’re someone who believes that all this stuff is later Catholic invention, it’s hard to square that with the fact that the earliest Christians’ writings we have outside the Bible treat these things as just given. Well, Ignatius writing to the Ephesians, this is the same church to whom St. Paul wrote and help build up, tells them to obey the bishop and the presbytery with an undivided mind as an aside. The presbyters aren’t the same as the bishop. There’s only one bishop in Ephesus.

He tells them to obey the bishop and the presbytery with an undivided mind, breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote to prevent us from dying, which causes that we should live forever in Jesus Christ, that Ignatius takes all of those things Jesus says in John 6 as actually applying to the Eucharist, that this is how we receive the medicine of immortality. This is the antidote that prevents us from dying. This causes we should live forever in Jesus Christ. That’s Ignatius to the Ephesians.

To the Romans, the very last thing that he talks about there, he’s preparing to die and he says, “I desire the bread of God, the heavenly bread, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the son of God, who became afterwards of the seed of David and Abraham, and I desire to drink of God, namely his blood, which is incorruptible love and eternal life.”

And then to the Sumerians, Ignatius says, he’s speaking here about a heretical group, probably the gnostics who don’t believe that Christ actually came in the flesh, and he says they abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior, Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the father of his goodness raised up again. So you’ve got this divide in 107 between the Christians who believe that the Eucharist actually is the flesh of Jesus and the gnostics who think it’s not. They take it’s just a symbol. Why do they think it’s just a symbol? Because they don’t think Jesus actually came in the flesh.

Now, if you’re a time traveling Protestant, you’re going to be in an awkward situation here, because the two groups, the group that agrees with you on the Eucharist disagrees with you because they think the incarnation wasn’t real either. They don’t think Jesus really died on the cross. They don’t think he really rose from the dead. They take it all as a symbol, not just the Eucharist. And the Christians, like Ignatius, say no. None of this is just a symbol. Jesus actually came in the flesh. He actually dies on the cross in the flesh. He actually gives us his flesh to eat in the Eucharist. And he actually rose in the flesh. None of this is just a symbol. None of this is just an image, that the flesh really is real in all of these cases.

And Ignatius underscores this, and he sounds a lot like St. Paul because he says, “Those therefore who speak against his gift of God incur death in the midst of their disputes.” Just as St. Paul pointed to the seriousness in 1 Corinthians 11 that you will spiritually die if you are not receiving this properly, well, Ignatius says the same thing about those who are denying the real presence. But it were better for them to treat it with respect that they also might rise again. And then he says, “It is fitting therefore that you should keep aloof from such persons and not to speak of them either in private or in public.”

I’ve had more than a few Protestants tell me in their story of their conversion journey, that their eyes were open when they realized that the early Christians wouldn’t have even regarded them as Christian, that Protestantism is so far from early Christianity, that when you hear someone teaching something like the Protestant doctrine of the Eucharist, Ignatius says Christians should have nothing to do with such a person, that is really striking. It’s really shocking. You either have to take Carson’s view that the next generation of Christians lost the gospel so badly that Ignatius has no idea what his own teacher taught.

But if that’s the case, why trust these same Christians which gospels were right? Why trust these same Christians to have gotten anything right in the transmission of Christianity? Why not just say there was a great apostasy so early, we can’t trust that they preserved the New Testament or even know which books were supposed to be in the New Testament. If they don’t understand what the Eucharist is, which was a central right in early Christianity, why would we trust that they got the books of the New Testament right? Why would God miraculously preserve that while allowing them to teach rank idolatry and heresy and the like? So either you go in Carson’s direction and you undermine the next generation of Christians as being unreliable witnesses, in which case you should give up on Christianity seemingly logically, because this is the Mormon view, the Muslim view, that the early Christians cannot be trusted.

Or you say, no. If I don’t understand the text, and here’s a guy who spent years studying under the guy who wrote the text, I can probably trust what he says his teacher taught, even leaving aside the fact that God is protecting his church and building up the church. Just on a human level, you would expect that. And then you look at the fact that Ignatius is such a saintly figure that he’s going to be martyred to be an early Christian. He’s a bishop of Antioch, where Christians are first known as Christians. You’d have to not just say one guy went astray, but the churches in Antioch and Ephesus and Rome and all over the place, these biblical churches all went astray very quickly, by 107. John dies about the year 100. Think about seven years.

I mean, it’s a lot. It’s a lot to claim that sort of thing that all of these people went bad because it’s not just Ignatius’ beliefs as he takes for granted that these churches he’s writing to believe this stuff as well. So all that’s to say the earliest Christian view, the biblical view, certainly seems to be sacramentarian. And the people who compiled the Bible certainly seem to think that’s what the Bible is saying.

The fifth and final test is that Christ’s Eucharistic teaching is shocking. Now, I’ve already alluded to this a little bit, but the strangeness, but the strangeness, the fact that it’s something unusual isn’t the only part we want to focus on. It’s also something really shocking. Once the light bulb moment happens and they realize this isn’t just a metaphor for Jesus being incarnate or coming from heaven, and it’s not just talking about something like the manna, but the true manna is Christ flesh and blood, the Jews dispute among themselves saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? There’s something shocking here.

And now, you can say, well, that’s the Jews. And it’s not clear if those are believers or not. Well, in verse 66, it’s really clear, many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him. So this isn’t something that’s just shocking or strange to those who are casual listeners of Jesus. This is something shocking even to the disciples of Jesus. And so if your Eucharistic beliefs aren’t shocking even to other Christians, then they’re not what the early Christians believed.

And so I’m going to go back to the one Protestant view I’ve been kind of pointing to, that notion that this is all just a symbol for something like believing in Jesus. That’s not shocking. Telling disciples, oh, you need to believe, there’s nothing shocking about that. The disciples already were doing that. Remember, we’re now in John 6. Think back to John 5, because the disciples endured John 5. And I say endured because in John 5:17-18, “Jesus says, ‘My father is working still and I am working.'” He’s talking about why he’s performing miracles on the Sabbath.

And John says, this was why the Jews thought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, now he didn’t actually break it, but he was seen as breaking the Sabbath, but also called God his father, making himself equal with God. So Jesus is doing these really shocking things. He’s apparently breaking the Sabbath. He’s apparently calling himself equal with the Father and calling himself the Son and the Father. He’s making these apparently divine claims, and these disciples are totally fine to continue following him. And then in John 6, he says something so shocking that they walk away and Jesus lets them walk away.

If Jesus just meant believe in me, that wouldn’t have done it. Why do we say that? Well, because he says in John 5:46, “If you believed Moses, you’d believe me, for he wrote of me.” That’s not just saying, believe my message. He’s also claiming to be the one of whom Moses wrote in the Old Testament. And in John 2, after the wedding feast of Cana, John says, “This is the first of his signs. Jesus did it at Cana and Galilee and manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him.” The one thing we can say of the disciples is they believed in Jesus. And so in John 6, these people who had believed in Jesus stopped following him. And there’s not following him anymore because he said something a little more profound than believe in me as he had before. He’s saying something more shocking than that.

And I would point out here that one of the… Remember the point that F.F. Bruce makes is, he’s speaking of this Eucharistic teaching that sounds cannibalistic. Well, the early Christians were regularly accused of being cannibals for their Eucharistic theology. So if your Eucharistic theology couldn’t be mistaken for cannibalism, then it’s not what Jesus taught. It’s not what the disciples believed. It’s not what the early Christians believed.

The last point here on the shocking nature of this is one that I didn’t make in the book because it’s more speculative, but I’m just going to throw it out there, you can accept it or reject it. But I want to point to something that happens at the end of John 6. Remember, Jesus goes to the 12 and ask, “Will you go away?” Also, Simon Peter says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ Jesus then responds, “Did I not choose you, the 12, and one of you as a devil?” And in the last verse of John 6, John says, “He spoke of Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the 12, was to betray him.”

And it’s worth asking, why does Jesus bring this up right now? Well, because this is a make or break moment for the disciples. You’ve got disciples of Jesus openly walking away over his Eucharistic teaching. And this might be a clue that this is where the seeds of Judas’ betrayal are sort of planted, that this is the moment where he thinks, okay, this is too much. This guy is not good news.

And there’s another reason to believe that might be what’s going on here. Because at the beginning of the chapter, John tells us, this happens at Passover time, John 6:4, “Now the Passover, the Feast of the Jews, was at hand.” That’s really important context because John is showing us, if you want to understand what Jesus is teaching, you need to be thinking of the Passover in the past, where you actually ate the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. That’s what’s going on. But you also are being prepared for what’s going to happen a year from now, which is what they don’t know. But we know, as we’re looking back now reading the text, that one year after this at Passover time, you have the last supper.

And so in Matthew 26:17, on the first day of unleavened bread, that means Passover, the disciples came to Jesus saying, “Where will you have us prepare for you to eat the Passover?” That’s how we need to understand the Eucharist is the fulfillment of the Passover sacrifice. And then in verse 20, when it was evening, he sat at table with his 12 disciples. Now, as they were eating, he said, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” And they all say, “Is it I Lord?” And he says, “He who has dipped his hand in the dish with me will betray me.” That Judas’ betrayal seems to have been planted at Passover with the teaching on the Eucharist, and it comes through its horrible fruition at the next Passover with the institution of the Eucharist, that Judas goes out from the last supper and has Jesus arrested and killed, that there’s something shocking about Jesus’s Eucharistic teaching that seems to have been too much, not only for those disciples in John 6:66, but also for Judas Iscariot particularly, that it seems to be connected to Judas’ betrayal.

On the liturgical calendar, there’s what’s known as Spy Wednesday. The day before Holy Thursday, you have Spy Wednesday commemorating the fact, not celebrating, but commemorating the fact that Judas is going to betray Jesus. There’s a lot going on at the Last Supper. So we got moved to a different day, just to draw attention to that fact, that the Eucharistic teaching is so shocking, that Christians walk away, disciples walk away, one of the 12 seemingly walks away and decides to betray Jesus over this.

And so if your belief on the Eucharist isn’t that shocking, and you don’t see external evidence that it’s that shocking, then it doesn’t seem that you’re believing the same thing Jesus and the disciples believed. Now, as I mentioned, all of this is derived from my book, The Eucharist Is Really Jesus, other than that very last half of point about Judas. And so if you want to know more, I encourage you to feel free to pick up the book at shop.catholic.com. Use the promo code SP33 to get 33% off, or get a bulk order where you can save a lot of money. And I would love to hear your thoughts, your comments, your reactions in the comments below. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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