2.01.07. The food that Jesus gave to his own
VII. THE FOOD THAT JESUS GAVE TO HIS OWN.
“ I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say \mto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drinli his blood, ye have no life in you.” — John 6:51-53. To finish his work was bread to himself: his work finished is bread to his people. His food was the subject of the last exposition; theirs invites our attention now. As never man spake like this man, so never hitherto has even this man spoken as he speaks here. After intimating generally, “ I am the bread of life,” he proceeds to declare specifically, “ The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” Here he glides from a deep into a deeper revelation. In answer to the perplexed questioning of his auditors, he declares with great clearness that, in order to their spiritual life, they must “ eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of man.”
He was well aware, when he uttered these extraordinary words, of the offence that they must give. The conception of eating his flesh, in as far as they took it in a bodily sense, was fitted to shock them as men; and the conception of drinking his blood was additionally distasteful to them as Jews, who were forbidden in any circumstances to eat the blood. He foresaw that many would take offence at these words and desert his ministry; but he would not on that account refrain from uttering them. The truth which these words convey is necessary to the life of men, and therefore the merciful Redeemer will not withhold them.
He must finish his work. This rock must be laid down although many of the superficial disciples may stumble over it, for it is necessary as the foundation of a true disciple’s faith and hope. The cross must be held aloft, although the offence of the cross may drive many of the unstable away. Already the Lord saw meet to proclaim his own sacrifice as the atonement for sin.
Let it be distinctly understood at the outset that the Communion of the Lord’s Supper is not the subject of discourse here. The doctrine which the Lord here teaches, and the ordinance which he afterwards instituted in the upper room at Jerusalem, are distinct things, although they are related to each other.
If the instituted supper is like a lofty tower, the doctrine tauo-ht in this passage is like the solid ground on which the tower rests. This broad world is a greater thing than any tower or mountain that it bears. There might have been a world the same substantially as that which is, although no tower or mountain should have. ever raised its head into the sky; but no tower or mountain could have lifted its head towards the heavens if there had not been a deep steady world to bear it. Not the words of this passage, but the truth which they teach, is the ground on which the Lord’s Supper rests. The Communion is a lofty monumental tower from whose summit the spectator can look eastward into the morning of time, till he meet Abraham’s straining faith looking down the ages; and westward, farther and farther toward the end, till he go round the circumference of time and meet another morning — the second coming of the Lord in the clouds of heaven. But that ordinance depends absolutely for all its value on the foundation-truth that is revealed here: that Christ crucified — his flesh and his blood — constitutes the sustaining food and refreshing drink of all who enjoy spiritual life and are heirs of the life eternal. The evangelist John omits from his history both the sacraments. He mentions neither as an instituted ordinance; but he records from the lips of the Lord the fundamental doctrines on which those ordinances severally depend. In the conversation with Nicodemus you find the ground which sustains Baptism; and in this discourse the ground which sustains the Supper. The Supper, although it is Christ’s own institute, is an outward thing, deriving all its meaning and power from this precious truth. This is the soul which animates the body of the sacrament. If Christ had not made himself the meat and drink of his people, the Supper would never have been set up as a monument of the fact; and if Christ’s disciples do not really thus live upon him in secret, their participation of bread and wine at the Table wdll be to them a stone instead of bread.
Wanting Christ’s sacrifice for sin, the sacrament of the Supper would have contained nothing for us; and wanting individual personal faith in Christ crucified, we can get nothing from the sacrament. For the beginning of this doctrine regarding the spiritual appetite and its supply, we must go back to the conversation with the Samaritan woman (iv. 10). “He would have given thee living water.” Living water! what may that be? It is not a springing well; it is not a running stream. The water that Christ gives is not only living, it gives life. He who drinks of it is satisfied, and that for ever. The woman failed to comprehend his meaning, as one who had enjoyed a better education had failed before her to comprehend the new birth; but both the woman and Nicodemus, like new-born babes, received the nourishment which they could neither explain nor understand. It is a mistake to suppose that spiritual profit is always in proportion to the intellectual comprehension. A little child may thrive upon the food of whose name and nature he is ignorant, while a physician who knows the constituents and properties of every morsel he swallows may be dying by inches, not for want of food, but for want of hunger. The woman soon got beyond her depth in doctrine; but she thirsted, and drank the living water.
Forthwith she became an apostle, and called the men of her city out to the Lord. In this portion the same doctrine appears at a further advanced stage. There, it was water for the thirsty; here, it is meat and drink. Then the Lord gave water; now his flesh is meat and his blood is drink.
Hunger and thirst inhere naturally in human souls.
There is a craving in humanity for more. We are in this respect completely distinct from other orders of living creatures. The craving for something not yet possessed, and not yet visible, is a universal characteristic of our kind. The pressure of that appetite makes the whole machinery of the world go round. It sends armies into the field, and ships across the ocean; it mines the solid earth, and washes gold from Avistralian sands. The cry of human nature, blind and unintelligent, but eager and constant, is the cry of the horse-leech — Give, give. This soul-hunger in humanity human beings attempt to satisfy with body-food. “ Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years,” etc. But when all these have been flung to it, the poor soul is more hungry than before. It is as when the shipwrecked seaman on his raft drinks salt water to appease his thirst, and so makes his thirst burn more fiercely. This strong but blind appetite is cheated, moreover, by all the idolatries and all the self -righteousnesses that men have invented in name of religion. To meet and satisfy this craving Christ came into the world, and gave himself a sacrifice. Neither is there salvation in any other. “ My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.”
“ Except ye eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of man, ye have no life in you.” Here we have, on the part of Christ, his incarnation and sacrifice; on the part of Christians, their faith in exercise, and their life thereby.
I. On the part of Christ, Incarnation and Sacrifice.
1. His incarnation: the Son of man. A deep mine of meaning lies in this form of expression. Not man, not a man, not a son of man; but the Son of man. There is only one to whom this title is due. It points not to the millions who are sons of man, and nothing more; it points to him who, being Son of God from eternity, became the Son of man in the fulness of time. Neither a son of man nor the Son of God could be our substitute and saviour. The one is near enough to us, but has no power to save; the other has power to save, but is not near enough to us. A son of man is linked to us in the sympathy of a common nature; but this only secures that he sinks with us when we fall: the Son of God is far above, out of our sicjht, and we cannot rise with him when he rises. Thus, if mere man had been our help, we should have perished, for there would have been no strength to lay hold of; and if only God had been our help, we should have perished, for we could never have laid hold of his strength. The incarnation — that is, when he who is God blessed for ever took our nature, and became a man — is the greatest fact in the course of time. It is the knot that binds a fallen world to a stable heaven, that interlaces divine power with human weakness, and imparts divine righteousness to the fallen as their covering and their plea.
2. His saGrifice. Beyond question the Lord points already to his own atoning death when he speaks of his flesh and his blood as the meat and the drink of his people. Even the incarnation, if it stood alone, could not save us. Although the Son of God had taken our nature, we must have been left to perish, if he had not in that nature given himself a sacrifice. Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins. This is the great central lesson of the Scriptures. This cardinal doctrine was imprinted into the being of the Church during the period of its infancy. From Abel’s sacrifice to the Passover which Jesus kept in the upper room wath the twelve on the eve of his suffering, the blood of sacrifices flowed on the altar like a continual stream.
Daily sacrifice; morning and evening sacrifice; sacrifice when the sun went down, and sacrifice again to greet his risinc:: blood, blood; all things under the law were sprinkled with blood. Expiation by the victim’s blood was the very mould in which the people’s minds were cast from youth to age, from generation to generation. If that were only the invention of men, what a waste! but if that be the appointment of God, what a meaning! When Christ came he recognized his place and his mission. He placed himself in the focus of all those converging fires, and owned himself the Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world. “ It is finished,” he said at length, and gave up the ghost.
II. On the part of Christians, They believe and live.
“Eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of man.”
He employs plain, powerful language. Nor does he take any pains to give warning that it is not the bodily eating of his material body that he means. He knows what is in man, and what man needs. He knows that if any would not perceive his meaning without such a warning, neither would they accept his meaning with it. Those who entertain the conception of a corporal and carnal receiving of Christ’s flesh and blood would have run into that idolatry over the back of all the warnings that could have been written. All through, the Lord speaks not of the hunger and food of the body, but of the hunger and food of the soul. If any one misses or rejects this, he would not have been corrected and instructed by any other form of words possible in human speech. But mark well, although it is a spiritual and not a material food, it is yet a real supply of a real hunger. The soul’s hunger is a greater thing than the hunger of the body. A Roman poet has called avarice a spiritual thirst for gold. And this spiritual appetite works greater effects on earth than any bodily appetite. Correspondingly, a pure and divinely inspired spiritual appetite is a more imperious and far-reaching power than the natural appetites of the body. From the Psalmist downward, it has been common for souls to be so eager for the spiritual food that they have forgotten to eat their daily bread. The soul’s appetite has overruled and overridden the appetite of the body. And as hunger is often quickened into sharper activity by the sight or the scent of food, so longing eager souls become more eager when, after long striving in vain for that which will satisfy, they come near their true satisfaction — the Christ of God, incarnate in our nature and sacrificed for our sin. Never did the Ethiopian treasurer more keenly hunger for this flesh to eat and this blood to drink than when, on his journey homewards, he continued seeking, and was blindly groping over the very place where his satisfaction lay — the Lamb of God led to the slaughter — the sacrifice of Christ for the world’s sin. To eat his flesh and drink his blood is to secure and live upon Christ — God with us, and sacrificed for us. As truly a believing soul receives this food as the living body receives its appropriate nourishment; and as truly does the new life of the soul prosper on this sustenance, as does the healthy body prosper on its convenient food.
“ Except ye eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of man ye have no life in you.” Even intelligent assent to the truth of the gospel does not give life. Even devout admiration of the incarnation, the ministry, and sufferings of Immanuel will not give and sustain the life of a soul.
It is the personal individual acceptance and relish of the divine and crucified Redeemer, as your own Redeemer, and this acceptance as real as your acceptance of food for the body’s life — it is this that contributes, that sustains, that constitutes the new life of a Christian.
Drink his blood is a striking, and must have been to the Jews who heard it, a startling addition to the more familiar conception of eating the flesh of the sacrifice. He must have intended to startle them, and to shake them out of their lethargy. They were strictly forbidden to eat the blood; and yet they were taught that the blood was the life. It was like the prohibition laid on the primeval pair acfainst eatinsr of the tree. Yet the tree is a tree of life; and the Lord means that they shall eat of it yet, and eat abundantly. Not in an imlawful way or at an unripe time, but in time and manner divinely appointed, Israel shall yet drink the blood in which is the life. The time had now come. The way was open; the barrier was removed.
There was now access into the holiest. That which was veiled off before is laid open now, and whosoever will may come and take of this water — may drink of this blood, which is the life, freely.
These words of Jesus have a direct and obvious bearing on the question whether participation in the communion of the Lord’s Supper, the external ordinance, is necessary to salvation. The doctrine taught here manifestly settles that question. The words were spoken by Jesus, and recorded by John, in order that they might settle that question.
Here the circumstance that John, writing after the other three Gospels were before his eye, gives fully this discourse, and gives not the institution of the Supper at all, is broadly significant. By eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man believers then had life, at a time when the Supper was not appointed, and none but the Lord himself knew that it ever would be appointed. This is given in full by John, and the sacrament not given at all, to prevent a corrupt priesthood, in a subsequent age, from laying a yoke of bondage on the necks of believers. There were men who then and there did eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of man before the external ordinance was appointed; and a multitude which no man can number would have so eaten and so drunk for their own eternal life, in succeeding ages, although it had pleased the Lord not to have instituted the Supper at all. But althouo-h the discourse of Jesus vindicates for all time and all places the possibility of living in Christ here and with him on high, without actually partaking of bread and wine with the Church on earth, it does not make the ordinance which Christ subsequently instituted of no effect, and does not liberate any disciple from the duty of observing it. The fact that he lives a new life, by secretly eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ, so far from making a believer careless of the ordinance, is the very thing that impels him with desire and joyfulness to take the cup of salvation in his hand, and so call upon the name of the Lord. It is the consciousness that he has already been redeemed from all evil through the shedding of the Saviour’s blood, that induces him to serve the Lord that bought him by a glad obedience to all his commandments. The supposition of a believer living in Christ, and eating his flesh and blood, yet refusing to partake of the Lord’s Supper, is vain and useless. For if the refusal spring from some mist that has come over a true disciple’s mind, preventing him from seeing the way that the Lord has pointed out, it is like the case of a man who wants a limb — he lives, but his progress is impeded by the calamity. And if it be the case of one consciously, with his eyes open, refusing to obey that dying command of Christ, that despiser is none of his. No man who really trusts in the risen Saviour for redemption and eternal life, will persist with understanding in refusing to obey what he knows to be the Saviour’s command. When one has tasted that the Lord is gracious, you may be well assured he will cast up wherever and whenever new tastes of the same grace are going. As even the dumb brute which draws your carriage will turn aside with a strong determination when he approaches the spot where formerly he has obtained food when hungry or drink when thirsty, so a Christian who has already lived upon the Lord will be feund pressing in to whatever places, by the Lord’s own appointment, new experiences of his love are given, — in the Closet, in the Church, at the Table.
Pause a moment yet over the word, “ Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” The Lord seems to ignore the life that we now live in the body. He will not count or call it life at all; at least, when in his view this life is laid for comparison alongside of eternal life in himself, he deliberately refuses to count it life. He reckons it only a process of dying. We are aware of the general law that one’s view depends upon his view-point. Christ, though he is Son of man and our Brother, yet stands within the veil while he speaks to us. He stands on his own footing as the eternal Son of God, with all eternity exposed beneath his eye: in this position he stands while he speaks to us, and he cannot call this fitful struggle to keep death at bay for a few years, a life. In his view, unless we are found in him and so partake of life spiritual and eternal, we have not life at all.
If it were possible for us, by a certain process of union or engrafting, to admit an insect whose life is but a day into a participation of the human life, with its intellect and its span of seventy years; and if the creature could become aware of the fact, and capable of receiving instruction regarding it, you might, in such an imagined case, approach it while its one-day life was drawing towards sunset, and say, Haste and take such and such measures for engrafting yourself into me; for except ye be inserted into my flesh and blood, ere that sun go down you have no life in you. From man’s view-point, and with his measures, the life of that ephemera is not a life at all. The figure, though feeble, helps, as far as it goes, to explain the meaning of the Lord when he says, “ Except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, ye have no life in you.” With his experience and with his prospect, he counts this fitful life in the body as not a life. In comparison with the life of which we are capable, and which he both has at his disposal and loves to bestow, this is not life. But as in this lower life, if we do not eat and drink it cannot be sustained; so in that higher life, unless we receive its sustenance we cannot enjoy it. The Hebrew fathers, although they tasted the manna that fell from heaven, died. No material plenty, no spiritual privilege, will secure for you the life of the soul. The body and blood of Christ are the appropriate and necessary sustenance of that only real and perfect life. You must, not after a corporal and carnal manner, but by faith, discern the Lord’s body and feed upon it. A soul can live as well as a body. A spirit can hunger and thirst as well as a body. The hunger and thirst of a spirit are as real as the hunger and thirst of a body. The food that satisfies a spirit is as real as, and inconceivablymore substantial than, the food that satisfies a body. Nor is it true that body-hunger and body-food are substance, and the spiritual need and spiritual supply a kind of shadowy figurative thing. No; the opposite is the truth. The real, the substantial, the original — the food that is first and shall be last — is the body and blood of Christ, on which Christians live; and the hunger and the food that bulk so largely in the business of earth are a shadow that endures for a moment and then vanishes away.