I am the bread of life. Unless you eat my flesh, you have no life in you. John 6:35
“This bread is my flesh which I will give for the life of the world.”
“Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
Astounding claims.
In Mere Christianity Lewis famously says, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg – or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”Jesus claims to be that which sustains life, that which keeps us alive. He might be saying that the occasional sense of deadness which is part of 21st century life, revealing itself in the epidemic of depression, is because we do not eat the flesh of the son of man, and drink his blood.
The bread we need to stay alive is not in friendships, or social life, or motherhood, or marriage, or money, or gardening or success or work or other life-enhancers–it is in a continual communion with him, in literally eating him, drinking him.
I would love to know Jesus so intimately. How? Through devouring him Scripture, inviting him into my heart in prayer, and, most of all, and hardest, doing what I hear him tell me to do.