Who Walked Away in John 6

I sat through a sermon on John 6 not long ago. Most of it was good. The preacher was right that the bread of life discourse is about divine provision and human appropriation, right that God's presence moved from the tabernacle and the temple into His people, and right that you can starve looking at food you will not eat. Then he came to "eat my flesh," told a story about a nun teaching transubstantiation to schoolchildren, said the Catholics "got confused," and moved straight to verse 66: "many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him." He compared the Catholics to the disciples in John 6:66BH who walked away when the teaching got too hard. I wrote that sentence down within the year, twice, and it is what I heard from the pew; the recording I have of the sermon is too broken to quote him word for word, so I will not, but the comparison was made, and the room heard it. I was raised Catholic, I study church history, and I am now merely a Christian, and I have no interest in defending Rome. But I do have an interest in the text, and the text says almost exactly the opposite of what that room heard.

What Jesus said, and how hard He made it

The chapter turns on one exchange. Jesus says, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." (John 6:51). The crowd recoils: "The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (John 6:52). Now watch what Jesus does with their objection. He does not explain it away. He makes it harder, four times in a row: "Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." (John 6:53-56). Eat. Drink. Meat indeed. Drink indeed. He that eateth. Every time they flinch, He says it again more plainly. And then: "Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?" (John 6:60).

So here is the first thing the sermon got backward. The disciples who left did not leave because they had adopted a too-literal reading of "eat my flesh." They left because they could not accept it at all. "This is an hard saying; who can hear it?" is not what you say about a metaphor. Nobody walks away from a figure of speech. They walked away because He would not turn it into one, and they would not take His words as they stood. Which is the irony the sermon missed: Catholics take those words more literally than anyone, and the pulpit that called them the departers is the one that reduced the flesh and blood to a symbol. Whatever else you conclude about Rome, they are not the people in that room who walked out. And when they did, He did not run after them saying "I only meant believe on me." He turned to the twelve and asked, "Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?" (John 6:67).

Who stayed, and what they said

"Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God." (John 6:68-69). Peter did not understand the saying any better than the ones who left. What he had was a confession: You are the Christ, and where else would we go? That is the dividing line the chapter draws, in its own words, and it is not between literal and figurative readers. It is between those who would stay with Christ when His words were hard and those who would not. John tells us who the departers really were two verses earlier: "But there are some of you that believe not" (John 6:64). The ones who walked away were the ones who did not believe. The ones who stayed were the ones who confessed Him. By the chapter's own test, a Catholic who says "thou hast the words of eternal life" and stays is on Peter's side of verse 67, whatever you think of his theology of the bread, and a man of any church who leaves when the words get hard is on the other.

The verse the sermon leaned on

The symbolic reading rests on one verse: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." (John 6:63). See, the argument runs, "the flesh profiteth nothing," so the eating was never literal; it was always a figure for believing. But read it in the room. Jesus has just spent eight verses insisting on His flesh as "meat indeed." If "the flesh profiteth nothing" meant His flesh profits nothing, He has just contradicted Himself and the cross, since it was His flesh He would "give for the life of the world." The Fathers read it the other way, and the plain sense is with them: the carnal understanding profits nothing. The crowd was picturing butchery, and He told them the Spirit is what gives life and His words are spirit and life. That is not a retraction of the eating. It is the key to it: a real partaking, but by the Spirit, not by the teeth. Augustine put the two halves together in one sentence the site already quotes: "to partake of that meat and that drink, is to dwell in Christ and Christ in you" (see John 6 in the library).

What the early church did with it

This is where the sermon's history fails, because the reading it called Catholic confusion is older than any Catholic. Ignatius of Antioch, who knew the apostle John, wrote around the year 107 of the heretics of his day: "They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins" (To the Smyrnaeans 7). Justin Martyr, around 155, explaining Christian worship to the emperor: "For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word… is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh" (First Apology 66). Ignatius again, to the Ephesians, calling the one bread "the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying" (To the Ephesians 20). Chrysostom on this very chapter: "This is no enigma, or parable, but you must really eat the body of Christ." Those are the men nearest the apostles, and not one of them read "eat my flesh" as a figure for asking Jesus into your heart.

Notice what they did not say either. None of them had the word transubstantiation; that came in 1215, with Aristotle's categories borrowed to explain the how. Augustine was careful to distinguish the sacrament from the reality, and warned that a hypocrite "eats and drinks the sacrament of it to his own damnation." What I hold myself is closer to Calvin than to Rome, and it is what C.S. Lewis held as an Anglican: a real spiritual presence, Christ truly meeting and feeding the believer at the table through the Spirit, even if none of us can diagram how. Paul treated it as that real; some in Corinth took the bread carelessly and "for this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep" (1 Corinthians 11:30BH). You do not get sick from mishandling a symbol. So the honest history has three positions, not two. The early church held a real partaking of Christ in the bread, by the Spirit, received by faith. Rome later over-explained the mechanism. And the reading the sermon offered, that the bread is a bare symbol and the eating is only a figure for believing, is the newest of the three; it enters with Zwingli in the 1520s, and Luther, who had already broken with Rome, refused it to his face. If we are sorting readers of John 6 by who left the apostolic teaching, the memorialist is the one furthest from the room where Ignatius wrote.

The irony inside the sermon

Three things deserve to be set side by side. Earlier in the same chapter, the preacher stopped on "of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day" (John 6:39) and said, "eternal security." Then he read verse 66 aloud, disciples walking away from Jesus, and asked the room to imagine it. He did not connect the two. The chapter does. The same discourse that says the Father's will is that Christ lose none shows disciples leaving Him, and Christ letting them go, and asking the twelve whether they would go too. Whatever John 6:39 means, it does not mean that no one who followed Jesus ever walked away, because verse 66 is in the same chapter (see The Security of Salvation).

And the second thing: the preacher spent ten minutes on the presence of God moving from the tabernacle to the temple to the believer, "your bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost," and he was right, and I have written the same thing (see What Is Love?). But the God who moved His presence into a man is the God who said "my flesh is meat indeed." The man who believes God can dwell in a believer should not find it unthinkable that Christ can feed him with Himself at a table. The early church held both. So should we.

And the third thing came a year later, from the same pulpit: a sermon on unity, and a good one, on keeping "Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling;" (Ephesians 4:3-4). One body, which is larger than one congregation. I kept waiting for the circle to widen past the walls of that room, and it never did, and the earlier sermon kept sounding underneath the newer one. The two do not fit together. A pulpit cannot preach the unity of the Spirit and, from the same spot, assign a billion people who confess Christ to verse 66. When the disciples forbade a man casting out devils because he was not one of them, Christ answered, "Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me." (Mark 9:39). And Jude records that Michael, contending with the devil himself, "durst not bring against him a railing accusation" (Jude 1:9). If the archangel held his tongue with Satan, the rest of us can hold ours with people who call Jesus Lord.

Where this lands

I am not asking anyone to become Catholic, and this page is not a defense of Rome's explanations. It is a defense of the chapter. The ones who walked away in John 6 were the ones who would not stay with Christ when His words were hard, and the ones who stayed were the ones who said "to whom shall we go?" That test does not sort Catholics from Protestants. It sorts the men in every church who stay from the men in every church who leave. Jesus prayed the night before He died "that they all may be one… that the world may believe" (John 17:21). Every sermon that assigns a billion baptized believers to verse 66 is one more line drawn where He drew none (see Every Line Drawn Is Another Division). Read the chapter again. Then eat.

Related: Baptism in the Early Church, What the Word Says, and What We Believe It Means, The Lord's Table, What the Hail Mary Is, Loving the Church You Disagree With, The Church, One Story, The Security of Salvation, and John 6 in the library. Ignatius and Justin are quoted from the Ante-Nicene Fathers (public domain); Chrysostom and Augustine from the Catena Aurea as on the library page. The sermon is described, not named; the preacher was a guest, the church is not the point. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple.