The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom
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You want to knock on all the doors
and ask for anyone; and then
see the poor, and crying quietly,
give bits of fresh bread to everyone
and to strip the rich of their vineyards
with the two blessed hands
that with a blow of light
flew from the nails on the cross!
Completing what John resists, Vallejo senses the necessity and follows up on the bread/flesh equation, subtly linking wine with blood. The new wine-blood gift of Jesus to the poor subversively replaces the old blood-wine extracted from the poor by the rich. John resolutely holds this bread/wine symmetry in abeyance, just as Jesus holds open the past theological understanding of bread (manna) to the present, and its present political meaning to the future. In doing this he opens up a field for planting new meanings. The new bread of Jesus is like manna from heaven. But unlike manna it is his flesh.
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Jesus makes two forays in creating this radical redefinition of bread. His first discourse (6:35–48) expands the meaning of “manna from heaven” in order to call the past into question and include Jesus himself. This monologue, in which Jesus promises action, leaves the Jews, who know his humble origins, murmuring, incredulous at his claims. Moving from belief to touch, from the eye to the tongue, his second discourse (6:51–58) ratchets up from the first. With this radical reassessment of eating bread, the future is called into question and his listeners both repelled and transfixed. This monologue, in which Jesus demands that his listeners take action, leaves even his disciples murmuring, confused by Jesus’ “hard saying.” It is a watershed.
“I am the bread of life” (6:35, 48), Jesus asserts at the beginning and the end of his first discourse. The same words, but they are by the end of this first monologue transformed into a different statement. John opens up the discourse for this possibility by having Jesus tease us with a hinted closure of symmetry, saying “he that comes to me shall never hunger; and he that believes on me shall never thirst.” Hunger and thirst, eating and drinking, naturally bread & wine, yet John withholds the second term as we’ve seen in order to create space in his discourse for expansion of the meaning of bread. The “bread” at the beginning of the discourse, then, is not the same “bread” at the end. It is transformed from the manna of God into the body of Jesus.
If manna in the desert is not the “true bread” (6:32), nor the bread collected from the grass in bits, what is the “true bread”? This bread is not in the past, as traditionally believed; and it is not in the present, as the people who would make Jesus king concluded. Instead, Jesus answers, it is belief in himself, a decision to share the immortality of Jesus, who came down from heaven and who will raise up believers. In this downward and upward movement, John echoes the angels on the ladder in Jacob’s vision, which he alludes to early on in his book (1:51), descending and ascending between heaven and earth.
This dynamic of coming “down” and raising “up” creates a fine tension. The Jews are very familiar with the coming “down” from God, as did the manna, but uneasy with Jesus’ claim to be such a person. The second term of the pair is also a familiar one, the Jews being accustomed to going “up” into God’s presence but uneasy with Jesus’ claim to be in such a place. Without his coming into the world and raising up in belief, Jesus asserts that his listeners cannot have what he calls “everlasting life” (6:40, 47). He is “the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die” (6:50).
Deftly, Jesus creates here a node of meaning where up and down are resolved. And he exploits this, saying that “No man can come to me, unless the Father which has sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day” (6:44). Jesus has come down to draw up. Belief, which is essential to identifying with Jesus as the bread of immortality, comes only by reciprocal motion. Isolating this critical node in his discourse, then, Jesus initiates the Jews into a new dynamic of meaning, “bread” now being a body accessible by belief. Moreover, meaning itself requires their participation. They must believe in order to accept Jesus’ new vocabulary which is the ground of belief. No wonder they “murmur.”
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Despite their resentment of his declarations, Jesus has succeeded in his first discourse in leading them down the path of redefinition. At the end of this monologue the Jews are left asking how Jesus could come down from heaven (6:42). Now he ratchets up his claims. By the end of the second discourse they are left with a harder question, one arising directly out of his redefinition: How is it possible to eat of Jesus’ body (6:52)? Jesus collapses the spiritual (manna of a miracle) and political (barley loaf of the poor) meaning of bread into literal “flesh,” a word he repeats in this discourse, along with “eat,” until it becomes a chant.
Using the strategy of the first discourse on bread, John has Jesus make the same statement at its beginning and end (6:51, 58). A move he uses to dramatize its transformation. Jesus promises that “if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever,” radically redefining “bread” in the space of the discourse, wrenching it from the metaphoric into the literal.
Though each of the old meanings was rooted in the literal—manna fallen on the desert and bits of bread scattered on the grass—the new meaning in the future, which Jesus has pulled into the present, can only be literal. Calling himself the “bread of life” invites a metaphoric interpretation, just as when he later calls himself the “vine” (15:1). In this context, John does not link blood and wine because he wants to extend the metaphor of the vine. However, in the present context he refuses the link and eschews metaphor because he wants to open up space for the new language of bread. Jesus’ insisting that “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (6:53), makes a new invitation. One so unequivocally literal, some Roman contemporaries who grasped its fullest import accused Christians of cannibalism. It is an invitation that demands just such a radical interpretation. John pushes the literal to its breaking point: from the real loaf of bread to the real flesh.
His insistence on the literal here is shocking. Just when everyone had got comfortable with the metaphoric force of bread in the first discourse, Jesus turns the tables and insists that it’s not a metaphor. A shock made greater when he has been so dismissive of the people as being distracted by literal bread (6:26).
Jesus’ chant on the word “flesh” drives home the literal force of his command to “eat,” destroying any vestige of the metaphoric that the incredulous Jews may be clinging to. Nothing in Jewish tradition enables them to assimilate Jesus’ complete transformation of their own vocabulary, which he had inherited as well. As a result, his new way of talking can only be shocking, and we sympathize with the Jews in rejecting what can only seem to them a blasphemous invitation to practice the abhorrent rites of some alien cult.
The Swerve from the Word
Who would not agree with the disciples that Jesus’ insistence on eating his flesh and drinking his blood is a “hard saying”? John has already shifted our sympathy to the Jews in their reaction. We are not surprised, then, that at this juncture a number of the disciples leave Jesus (6:66). Likewise, even his own brothers refuse to believe (7:5). They all steer clear of what appears to be madness, something the Jews suspect, maintaining their distrust of Jesus throughout his discourses.
On the one hand, this eating-and-drinking-the-Jesus-body conundrum engages all our powers of knowing before understanding. On the other, it strains the timbers of our mental house. Pressure builds either to shore up or open up meaning, nailing it down into a single, more manageable interpretation or adding doors and escaping its literal force, as generations have done since. Or meaning can be suspended, as John ultimately does in coming to terms with the hardest saying of Jesus.
This swerve away from Jesus’ demand to eat his body and drink his blood has defined the understanding of his character ever since. The magma of Jesus’ language in these discourses on bread has solidified. Uncomfortably hot words about actual flesh and actual eating have cooled over the centuries. Conventions of their interpretation