Jesus said - THIS [bread] is my body
**6:52. **How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
Jesus doesn’t explain that it’s a symbold- he says very next verse with a
DOULBE Amen that we have to eat his flesh
6:53. Amen, amen I say to you, Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.
In verses **54-56 **he repates body and blood saying that truly his flesh is meat
6:57. he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me.
EAT
6:58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat Manna, and died. He that eateth this bread, shall live for ever.
Christ came down from heaven and if we eat this bread [his body] we shall live
**6:60 **This saying is hard, and who can hear it?
6:61 Doth this scandalize you?
Yes it does scandalize them
6:62 If then you shall see the Son of man ascend where he was before?
Christ insinuateth that faithless men shall not believe his presence in the Blessed Sacrament, because he is ascended.
6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I have spoken to you, be spirit and life.
Initially, Jesus is speaking literally of His flesh and blood. This is what we now call the Eucharist. His use of flesh and blood in the last portion is moving to the familiar analogy between flesh (earthly things) and spirit (heavenly things). He is simply stating that His (literal) flesh and blood are of spirit (of heaven) while flesh (all earthly things) are of no use. He is simply telling us that His flesh and blood are spiritual food. Real food!
Romans 8:13 For if you live according to the flesh, you shall die: but if by the Spirit you mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live.
Hebrews 10:19-20 Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh;
THE flesh not MY Flesh - [from Douay Rheims] For if his flesh were not profitable, all these things were vain. Therefore CHRIST denieth not his own flesh to be profitable, but that their gross and carnal conceiving of his words of his flesh, and of the manner of eating the same, was unprofitable. Which is plain by the sentence following, where he warneth them, that his words be spirit and life, of high Mystical meaning, and not vulgarly and grossly to be taken, as they took them. And it is the use of the Scripture to call mans natural sense, reason, and carnal resisting or not reaching supernatural truths, flesh or blood, as, Flesh and blood revealed not this to thee etc. Matt. 16.
This carnality then of theirs, stood in two points specially: first, that they imagined that he would kill himself, and cut and mangle his flesh into parts, and so give them raw or roast to be eaten among them. Which could not be meant, saith St. Augustine: for that had contained a heinous and barbarous fact, and therefore they might and should have been assured, that he would command no such thing: but some other sweet sense to be of his hard, mystical, or figurative words, and to be fulfilled in a Sacrament, mystery, and a marvelous divine sort, otherwise then they could comprehend.
Secondly, they did err touching his flesh, in that they took it to be the flesh of a mere man, and of a dead man also, when it should come to be eaten: of which kind of flesh Christ here pronounceth, that it profiteth nothing. Whereupon St. Cyril saith, This body is not of Peter or Paul or any other like, but of Christ JESUS who is life itself: and therefore the Body giveth life, the very fullness of the Divinity dwelling in it. And the holy Council of Ephesus in the 31 Anathemas expounded also by the said St. Cyril: The Eucharist is not the body of any common person (for the flesh of a common man could not quicken) but of the WORD itself. But the Heretic Nestorius dissolveth the virtue of this Mystery, holding mans flesh is only to be in the Eucharist. Thus there, and St. Ignatius cited of Theodorete, and many other Fathers have the like: whereby we may see that it cometh of the Divinity and Spirit (without which Christ’s flesh cannot be) that in the Sacrament giveth life.
6:66 Because of this many of his disciples went bacl and now they walked not with him
6:67 ESUS therefore said to the Twelve, What, will you also depart?
6:68 Simon Peter therefore answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of
eternal life.
6:69 And
we believe and have known that thou art Christ the Son of God.
Christ is speaking literally
