Denver Catholic

16 AUGUST 2023 | DENVER CATHOLIC If Jesus, therefore, wanted to soften his teaching, to place it in a wider interpretive context, to insist upon the metaphorical or symbolic sense of the words he was using, this would have been the perfect opportunity. As I mentioned, the skeptical questions of his interlocutors are often the occasion, in John's Gospel, for Jesus to clarify the meaning of his pronouncements. A very good example is his symbolic explanation of the sense of "being born from above" when confronted with the literalistic question of Nicodemus, "Can one enter a second time into the moth- er's womb and be born?" (Jn 3:3–5). But in this case, Jesus didn't spiritualize his rhetoric; just the contrary. He said, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (Jn 6:53). Behind the English term "eat" in this sentence is not the Greek word we would expect, phagein, which means to eat in the ordinary sense. The term that is used is trogein, which was typically employed to communicate the manner in which animals consume their food; it might be rendered as "gnaw" or "munch" in English. Thus, if they were both- ered by the gross animalistic overtones of what he had said, he purposely bothered them further. And in case they still missed his meaning, he added, "For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink" (Jn 6:55). He then draws the crucial conclusion from all of this bluntly realistic talk: "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me" (Jn 6:56–57). For Christians, Jesus is not simply a wise teacher by whose words one abides (like Confucius) or an ethical exemplar whom one might strive to follow (like Gandhi or St. Francis) or even a bearer of definitive revela- tion to whom a person might feel beholden (like Muham- mad); rather, Jesus is a power in whom we participate, a field of force in which we live and move and have our being. In his master metaphor, St. Paul speaks of the Body of Jesus of which baptized people are members. The rhetoric that we have just cited implies an intensely organic relation- ship between the Father, Jesus, and the Church, the third deriving its life from the second who derives his life from the first. We must eat the Flesh and drink the Blood of the Lord because that is the way that we come to participate in him and thus, finally, in the life of the Father. Elsewhere in John's Gospel, we find equally vitalistic language: we are much more than followers of Jesus; we are grafted onto him as branches are grafted onto a vine. The very earliest theology of the Eucharist is found in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, penned probably in the early fifties of the first century, and it clearly brings forth this organic, participative quality. Paul speaks of the intense identifi- cation that is effected between Jesus and his Church precisely through the Eucharist: "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?" (1 Cor 10:16). The evocative Greek term 16

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