Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 6-7.

We often focus on what Jesus meant in this passage by telling the people that unless they eat His blood and drink His blood they have no life in them, and I will get to that.  However, I find it interesting that those to whom Jesus spoke were from among the five thousand He had fed with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish.  When Jesus told them to believe in Him, they asked Him for a sign, giving the example of manna which Moses gave their ancestors in the wilderness.  I am quite confident that John was completely aware of the irony of the people demanding a sign comparable to the people being fed manna in the wilderness just after being fed in the “wilderness”.  I don’t want to stop there.  We see this behavior a lot.  We even exhibit it.  Asking God for a sign, after He has already given us one.  Asking God for direction in our lives after He has given us guidance as to what we should do.

Which brings me to my understanding of what Jesus meant when He tells us that unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood we will not have life.  As I read this passage I saw it as mirroring the construction where Jesus told those who wished to follow Him that they must be willing to give up their lives for Him.  Here Jesus tells us that we must make Him part of us, that we must be prepared to experience suffering just as He was soon to experience suffering.  We must allow God’s Spirit to transform us to be like Him.  Jesus called for us to faithfully do God’s will even when it means ostracization and persecution.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.