Denver Catholic

14 AUGUST 2023 | DENVER CATHOLIC HOW C AN THIS MAN GIVE US HIS FLESH TO E AT ? As is often the case in the Gospel of John, a skeptical question opens toward deeper understanding: "So they said to him, 'What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? ... Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness'" (Jn 6:30–31). They were appealing, of course, to the miracle by which Yahweh fed the children of Israel during their 40 years' wandering in the desert, but Jesus wants them to understand that he is offer- ing a food that will nourish them in a more abiding way. "Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die" (Jn 6:49–50). "Heavenly bread" catches much of the paradox of the orthodox teaching concerning the Eucharist: though it remains, as far as the eye can see, ordinary bread, the Eucharist in fact par- ticipates in a properly transcendent mode of existence and possesses, consequently, the power to produce eternal life. In Jesus' next observation, we see precisely why the heavenly bread has this virtue: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh" (Jn 6:51). Here again we see that stubborn realism upon which the Cath- olic tradition will insist. Jesus unambiguously identifies himself with this bread that will nourish his people to eternal life. What follows is one of the most beautifully understated lines in the Gospel of John: "The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?'" (Jn 6:52). I say "understated," for the term "dispute" barely hints at the intensity of the objections that must have come forward from the crowd upon hearing Jesus' words. They must have found this discourse not only intellectually and religiously problematic but — if I can put it this bluntly — nauseating. Throughout the Old Testament, we can find numerous explicit prohibitions against the eating of flesh and blood. For example, in the book of Gen- esis, in the context of the Noah story, we find this divine directive: "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only, you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood" (Gen 9:3–4). The idea here is that since blood is the vital principle that belongs to God alone, it ought not to be brought under the control of human beings. We find the same prohibition among the legal decrees in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy: "It shall be a perpetual statute through your generations, in all your settlements: you must not eat any fat or any blood" (Lev 3:17), and "Only be sure that you do not eat the blood; for the blood is the life, and you shall not eat the life with the meat" (Deut 12:23). Moreover, in his vision of apocalyptic judgment, the prophet Ezekiel speaks of the carrion birds who will swoop down on the enemies of Israel and eat their flesh and drink their blood: "You shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth. ... You shall eat fat until you are filled, and drink blood until you are drunk" (Ezek 39:18–19). Finally, a popular Aramaic saying of Jesus' time identified the devil as the "eater of flesh." If the prohibitions we have rehearsed had to do with the consumption of the bloody flesh of animals, how much more offensive must Jesus' words have been, which encouraged the eating of his own human body. Hence the viscerally negative reaction of Jesus' audience. ⊲ 14 AUGUST 2023 | DENVER CATHOLIC

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