Happy Easter! Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life—thus the Greek Orthodox church is singing all around the world this morning. Christ lives eternally, and so we have eternal life with him, if we abide in him and take his pierced flesh and poured-out blood into ourselves. Because then he will abide in us, and his eternal life is ours.
But what a weird way Jesus chose to describe it! The idea of eating his flesh and drinking his blood made the Jews recoil, and even today there are massive debates on how to address that saying. But Jesus has been speaking deep spiritual truths through metaphor, and worldly people have been misunderstanding his deeper meaning, all throughout the book of John already; this time is no different. Jesus is not telling us to be cannibals; rather he is telling us to depend entirely on his guiding teachings, his atoning death, and his redeeming resurrection for every little kind of strength and nourishment in the core of our beings that we could ever need. What food and drink does for our bodies, Christ’s flesh and blood does for our souls.
Don’t forget: the flesh we eat, and the blood we drink, are alive! The Son of God lives, and so his nourishment does not merely last until we are hungry the next day; his flesh is alive, and those who eat of it have strength and nourishment and fulfillment that will never, ever run out. For the person whose diet is the resurrected Messiah, no bodily hunger, thirst, ailment, or decay can ever phase them; even in the harshest bodily discomfort, they still have all they could ever need to thrive.
We can sum up in a single word the complicated mystery of what it means to feast on Christ’s flesh; abide. We abide in him, and he in us. We situate our very lives in him. We place our faith and our trust and our every dependency in him for every good thing we could ever need. And so Christ situates his very life in us, and he is our hope and joy that no scheme of the devil can bring down. So eat of the bread that is Christ himself, always and forever, because that bread brings us to eternal life with him.
