The Catholic Church teaches that when we partake of the Eucharist in Holy Communion, we are consuming the actual, physical body and blood of Jesus Christ (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1244, 1275, 1335). A key passage from Scripture that Catholics and other believers in the Real Presence have looked to throughout the centuries as support for this teaching is John 6:48-67, where Jesus promises to give us his flesh to eat and blood to drink to have eternal life.
There are many reasons that believers in the Real Presence give as to why we should take Jesus’ words “Eat my flesh, drink my blood” (John 6:54) literally. Perhaps the most persuasive is the fact that both his disciples and his Jewish audience understood him literally, and Jesus didn’t correct them.
In verse 52, the Jews respond, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” In verse 60, his disciples respond, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” You would think that if his audience were mistaken, and given the gravity of this teaching, Jesus would have corrected their literal understanding. Since Jesus didn’t correct their literal understanding, we can conclude that they didn’t get it wrong.
It’s no big deal
There are two comebacks that Protestants have to the above line of reasoning. Let’s take one at a time.
The first says basically, “It’s no big deal. He does it all the time.” Protestant apologist Robert Zins, founder of the ministry A Christian Witness to Roman Catholicism, makes this argument and appeals to John 2:15-21 for support (Romanism: The Relentless Roman Catholic Assault on the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 118).
There, Jesus drives the corrupt moneychangers out of the temple, and then the religious authorities challenge him to provide a sign to authenticate his messianic authority. Jesus responds, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” His critics respond, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”
Notice they understood Jesus to be speaking of the physical temple. But John tells us that Jesus “spoke of the temple of his body.” And there’s no indication that Jesus corrected their misunderstanding. For Zins, since Jesus didn’t correct their misplaced literal interpretation here, there’s no reason to expect he would have done so in John 6.
It’s interesting that just a few verses later, at the beginning of the next chapter, John records Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus about being born again in order to enter the kingdom of heaven (3:3-5). Like the religious authorities in the previous chapter, Nicodemus takes Our Savior’s words in a literalistic way, asking, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
But here Jesus clarifies Nicodemus’s crass literalism: “Unless one is born of water and Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” So why does Jesus clarify the literalism of Nicodemus and not the literalism of the religious authorities?
One possible explanation is that the critics were hard-hearted and so merited to be left in the dark concerning the true meaning of Jesus’ words. Having foreknowledge of what was to come at his trial, Jesus knew they would seek “false testimony” (Matt. 26:59) and twist his claims to provide grounds for sentencing him to death.
Notice that John records Jesus saying, “Destroy this temple” (John 2:19), yet Matthew reports that those charging Jesus at his trial claimed, “This fellow said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God’” (v. 61). Jesus’ critics in John 2 were closed to embracing the truth that he would rise from the dead, and so Jesus, on this reading, leaves the ambiguity. Nicodemus, on the other hand, was not hard-hearted and thus did not merit being left in ambiguity. So Jesus clarifies his misunderstanding.
Not clarifying but affirming
Now, a Protestant might object, “This line of reasoning doesn’t help the Catholic interpretation of John 6, because if Jesus left his critics in the dark due to their hard-heartedness, then perhaps that’s what Jesus did in John 6. John tells us it was ‘the Jews’ (John’s label for those who didn’t follow Jesus) who said, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’”
The problem here is that Jesus’ “disciples” (John’s label for those who believe in and have been following Jesus) have difficulties as well. In response to Jesus’ sixfold affirmation that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood, his disciples say to him, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” (John 6:60).
Jesus doesn’t give any sort of explanation to his disciples that eases the difficulty they’re having with his teaching. Rather, his response underscores it: “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending where he was before?” (John 6:61-62). In other words, “If you think this saying is hard, wait till you see what’s coming! It’s going to be even more difficult to believe!”
Why would Jesus appeal to his ascension, something even more difficult to believe, given its observably miraculous nature, if he were trying to ease the difficulty by clarifying the literal thoughts of his disciples concerning his teaching to eat his flesh and drink his blood?
Such a response suggests that Jesus is not clarifying his disciples’ literal thoughts. Rather, he’s affirming them.
Spiritual words, not literal
The second Protestant comeback to our appeal to Jesus’ lack of clarification is a bit different. In contrast to the above comeback, which recognizes that Jesus offers no clarification of his remarks in John 6, this comeback argues that Jesus did. Some Protestants appeal to Jesus’ words in John 6:63: “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”
Apologist Matt Slick, founder of Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, interprets this text as Jesus “stating that the words he was speaking were spiritual words when talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood” (online as “Transubstantiation and the Real Presence”). Slick concludes, “[Jesus] did not say they were literal words; that is, he did not say that they were his actual body and blood.”
One problem with this comeback is that it doesn’t explain why Jesus’ disciples still leave him. The disciples leave Jesus immediately after he gives the “spirit and life” teaching. If people recognized the word spirit as meaning symbolic, why would the disciples leave Jesus?
The whole point of interpreting his words as having merely a symbolic meaning is to suggest that his command to eat his flesh and drink his blood should not be that difficult of a teaching. The difficulty therefore should have disappeared for the disciples after this supposed clarification, and they would have thereby stayed with Jesus. But that’s not what happened.
Moreover, the word spirit does not mean symbolic; nor does “being spiritual.” For example, the Bible says that “God is spirit” (John 4:24) and that angels are “ministering spirits” (Heb. 1:14). That doesn’t mean that God and angels are mere symbols.
Paul says that Gentiles have come to share in the “spiritual blessings” of the Christians in Jerusalem (Rom. 15:27). Should we interpret these blessings to be mere symbols? If we were to follow the logic of Slick’s counterargument, we’d have to say yes. But that’s absurd.
Causal or temporal translation?
Now, a Protestant might counter further with an objection that James White makes. In his YouTube video titled “John 6 for Roman Catholics,” White argues that the disciples left not because of Christ’s teaching to eat his flesh and drink his blood but rather because he said in the previous verse, “No one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” White states his argument this way:
What is the antecedent of ek toutou [the first two Greek words] in verse 66? Ek toutou means “because of this”: “Because of this many of his disciples withdrew and were not walking with him anymore” (v.66). Because of what? And the answer is verse 65: Jesus’ repeated assertion of what? The Father’s kingly freedom and man’s inability.
There are a few ways we can respond. First, although it is true that ek toutou can be translated as “because of this,” it can also be translated as “after this” (D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, 303). In fact, many Bible translations use “after this” to introduce verse 66. So what’s said in verse 65 could be the cause of the disciples leaving in verse 66.
But it’s possible that John simply records what happened in its temporal sequence without intending to convey a causal connection. Simply appealing to the Greek phrase ek toutou doesn’t prove the Protestant point. We must see which of the two translations—the causal or the temporal—makes more sense.
Let’s take the causal first. One reason why this doesn’t make sense is because the “disciples” were already following Jesus, so they would have simply concluded that the Father had granted them the grace to believe, in keeping with the predestinarian views of many Jews. For such disciples, Jesus’ teaching about the Father wouldn’t have given them cause for rebellion. It would have given them cause for gratitude and celebration—“Thank God I’m among those the Father has drawn to Jesus!”
The causal translation also doesn’t account for Jesus’ earlier statement about the Father in verse 44: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” There’s no indication in the surrounding context that Jesus’ disciples took offense at the statement here. The only negative response Jesus received shortly after this statement is the nonbelievers disputing among themselves about Jesus giving us his flesh to eat.
If Jesus’ disciples didn’t take offense at his teaching about the Father and coming to him in verse 44, it’s unreasonable to think they would take offense at it in verse 66. And if they never take offense at Jesus’ teaching about the Father, then the disciples’ offense at his statements about eating his flesh and drinking his blood serves as the more reasonable basis for their leaving Jesus.
A third reason to reject the causal translation is that Jesus needed repeatedly to defend his statement about his body and blood but not his statement about the Father. Jesus finds himself responding multiple times to both the Jews and the disciples. But concerning his teaching about the Father, there’s no negative response and thus no defense coming from Jesus.
For these reasons we should reject the causal translation (“because of this”) and go with the temporal one (“after this”). But even if for argument’s sake we go with the causal translation—translating ek toutou as “because of this”—the objection still doesn’t succeed. The reason is that John just as easily may have used “this” to refer to the entirety of the previous discussion, which included Jesus’ hard sayings about his flesh and blood. And this would make sense if John were seeing the disciples leaving as the climax to Jesus’ hard sayings recorded in the previous verses.
So, an appeal to ek toutou doesn’t undermine our argument, because the disciples leave after the so-called clarifying statement in verse 63.
We need the eyes of faith
The argument that Jesus did correct the crowd’s literalistic thinking also fails because it doesn’t consider Jesus’ statement about “the flesh,” which Jesus contrasts with “the spirit”: “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.” Understanding the idiom of “the flesh” sheds light on what Jesus meant by his statement “My words are spirit and life.” The flesh is a New Testament expression that often describes human nature apart from God’s grace (Rom. 8:1-14) as well as those who see reality only from such an unaided perspective. John uses the expression this way in John 8:15, where Jesus says to the Pharisees, “You judge according to the flesh.”
When we come back to John 6:63 where Jesus says, “The flesh is of no avail,” he means that his teaching can’t be analyzed from a purely human perspective. The eyes of faith are needed, since eating his flesh and drinking his blood involve the miraculous, as does his ascension into heaven, which Jesus appeals to in response to the disciples’ difficulty.
The need for faith is the reason why Jesus bookends his teaching with these commands: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” and “No one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” It’s not that his exhortation to “eat” and “drink” has a symbolic meaning but rather that it is possible to accept the reality of what he is saying only by divine grace. And accepting the reality of what he’s saying can be done only if the Father grants faith through the Holy Spirit; hence Jesus’ words “It is the spirit that gives life.”
Given that both above comebacks fail to accomplish what they set out to accomplish—Jesus doesn’t leave his audience in their misunderstanding, and he doesn’t clarify his commands by saying his words are spirit and life. His lack of clarification remains a strong reason to take literally Jesus’ words “Eat my flesh, drink my blood” (John 6:54).