(cont.)
Jesus goes on to declare Himself the One who will judge the world at the end of time, and talks about the necessity of believing in Him for salvation (John 5:21-23):
For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will. The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.
Jesus then explains that
He’s the one that the Bible is about: “You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. […] If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.” (John 5:39-40, 46).
And we’re to believe that these disciples were okay with the claims to divinity, to the breaking the Sabbath, to the declarations of equality with God, to the claim to be the Eternal Judge, but then heard a generic “believe in Me” message, and suddenly freaked out?
So, instead, you end up with Protestant exegetes explaining that it wasn’t
really a hard teaching. Rather, people just left Christ because they misunderstood Him. When Jesus’ disciples declare His a “hard teaching,”
Calvin says:
On the contrary, it was in their hearts, and not in the saying, that the harshness lay. But out of the word of God the reprobate are thus accustomed to form stones to dash themselves upon, and when, by their hardened obstinacy, they rush against Christ, they complain that his saying is harsh, which ought rather to have softened them.
Or take
Barclay’s bizarre claim that this
wasn’t a hard teaching to Christ’s original listeners, and that they didn’t take Him literally:
To most of us this is a very difficult passage. It speaks in language and moves in a world of ideas which are quite strange to us and which may seem even fantastic and grotesque. But to those who heard it first, it was moving among familiar ideas which went back to the very childhood of the race.
These ideas would be quite normal to anyone brought up in ancient sacrifice. The animal was very seldom burned entire. Usually only a token part was burned on the altar, although the whole animal was offered to the god. Part of the flesh was given to the priests as their perquisite; and part to the worshipper to make a feast for himself and his friends within the temple precincts. At that feast the god himself was held to be a guest. More, once the flesh had been offered to the god, it was held that he had entered into it; and therefore when the worshipper ate it he was literally eating the god. When people rose from such a feast they went out, as they believed, literally god-filled. We may think of it as idolatrous worship, we may think of it as a vast delusion; yet the fact remains these people went out quite certain that in them there was now the dynamic vitality of their god. To people used to that kind of experience a section like this presented no difficulties at all. […] They would not read phrases like eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood with crude and shocked literalism.
That interpretation is, of course, directly contradicted by the shocked reactions of Christ’s original listeners. Likewise, when the Jews objected, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?” (John 6:52),
the Enduring Word commentary explains it away by saying:
It’s probable that the Jewish leaders
willfully misunderstood Jesus at this point. He just explained that the bread was His body that would be given as a sacrifice for
the life of the world (John 6:51). They willfully twisted His words to imply a bizarre cannibalism.
But in fact, this
wasn’t the crowd’s initial objection. It’s only after Jesus stressed the physicality of His Eucharistic teaching that,
on the third time, they finally took Him literally. It wasn’t like they rushed to the most literal interpretation: they interpreted Him metaphorically
twice before finally taking Him literally. And it was only the first two interpretations that Christ corrected. The third time, after they take Him literally (John 6:52), Jesus responds with even more graphically literal language (John 6:53-58).
If the crowds were simply mistaken – if Jesus was just saying “believe in Me,” a message He’d presented countless times to His disciples – why would He take absolutely no steps to clarify their confusion, and in fact speak in such a way that seems designed to intentionally mislead them further?
The standard Protestant interpretation just doesn’t
work. It doesn’t make a lot of sense of why Jesus would choose the metaphor of bread and then switch halfway through to the metaphor of meat (meataphor?),
nor why Jesus seems to correct figurative interpretations of His words, nor why the crowds of His own disciples would revolt at such an innocuous teaching and abandon Him, nor why He would let them go without clarifying that He actually meant something uncontroversial.
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