“I’m telling you the most solemn and sober truth now: Whoever believes in me has real life, eternal life. I am the Bread of Life. Your ancestors ate the manna bread in the desert and died. But now here is Bread that truly comes down out of heaven. Anyone eating this Bread will not die, ever. I am the Bread—living Bread!—who came down out of heaven. Anyone who eats this Bread will live—and forever! The Bread that I present to the world so that it can eat and live is myself, this flesh-and-blood self.”

52 At this, the Jews started fighting among themselves: “How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?”

53-58 But Jesus didn’t give an inch. “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you. The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life and will be fit and ready for the Final Day. My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. By eating my flesh and drinking my blood you enter into me and I into you. In the same way that the fully alive Father sent me here and I live because of him, so the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me. This is the Bread from heaven. Your ancestors ate bread and later died. Whoever eats this Bread will live always.”

59 He said these things while teaching in the meeting place in Capernaum. (The Message)

Jesus had a habit of using shock language, stark phrases, to wake people up: to arouse interest, arrest attention. Think, for example, of when He said: ”If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matthew 5:29,30).

Again: ”“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).

Was He talking about literal decapitation and actual hatred? No. He was wanting to challenge, to make His listeners think, and discover the deeper truth.

So, in John 6, Jesus was not advocating cannibalism. Nowhere else in the gospels does He do that. But all who come to know Jesus, who receive Him into their lives as ”the living Bread” know what it is to enjoyably ‘feed’ on Him by faith, to be nourished by Him spiritually. It’s not something we can properly explain intellectually, but we intuit this reality spiritually. We possibly experience it in a most focussed way when we partake of communion.

When Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, He spoke of the bread being His body, and the wine His blood, and they were to be eaten and drunk in remembrance of Him. ‘Flesh’ and ‘blood’ in separation point to death – violent death at that. We are brought to the centrality of the Cross, where we find the meaning of the universe, and of our own little lives.