I have this confession to make. I struggle to make sense of the passages in John 6 where Jesus announces that his followers must drink his blood and eat his flesh.
Obviously, many of his followers have the same problem, since they abandoned him after this sermon.
It’s not surprising. Taken literally, he was speaking of cannibalism and drinking blood — which the Law of Moses repeatedly condemns in the strongest terms.
In an early post, I suggested that there is a strand of Jewish thought that took the wine of the Passover as symbolic of the blood of the lamb. Jesus compared himself to the Passover lamb — a significant theme of the book — and that makes better sense than most theories. After all, the Jews did eat the flesh of the lamb and drink the wine (blood) at Passover. And the Passover metaphor pervades John.
But I stumbled across another theory that is, well, kind of crazy. Maybe even dumb. But there’s enough to it that I thought I should post it and see just how insane it really is.
The theory —
Well, what Old Testament passage do Jesus’ words refer to? Where are similar words used? Oddly enough, the only Old Testament passage I can find that speaks in similar terms is found in Ezekiel 39, dealing with the defeat of Gog by God.
Most of us are familiar with the battle described in Revelation where God defeats Gog and Magog, but few realize that this passage is built on Ezekiel 38-39, a description of God’s victory over Gog.
The scholars aren’t entirely sure what nation is called “Gog.” The best guess appears to be Lydia, in ancient Asia Minor. (It’s not important for purposes of this post, but interesting.)
What is important is that God wins and does so in overwhelming fashion. As a result —
(Eze 39:17-20 ESV) 17 “As for you, son of man, thus says the Lord GOD: Speak to the birds of every sort and to all beasts of the field, ‘Assemble and come, gather from all around to the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel, and you shall eat flesh and drink blood. 18 You shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth — of rams, of lambs, and of he-goats, of bulls, all of them fat beasts of Bashan. 19 And you shall eat fat till you are filled, and drink blood till you are drunk, at the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you. 20 And you shall be filled at my table with horses and charioteers, with mighty men and all kinds of warriors,’ declares the Lord GOD.”
God tells Ezekiel (the son of man) to call the animals and birds to feast on the flesh of Gog’s defeated army. This will be a sacrificial feast to God as the animals and birds “eat flesh and drink blood” — the same words, in much the same order as in John 6.
The Greek of the two passages is very similar, the main difference being that Ezekiel refers to “meat” rather than “flesh,” as in John.
(Eze 39:17 BGT) φάγεσθε κρέα καὶ πίεσθε αἷμα (eat meat and drink blood)
(John 6:53 BGT) φάγητε τὴν σάρκα τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ πίητε αὐτοῦ τὸ αἷμα (eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood)
However, the Hebrew is “flesh,” and so the translators prefer “flesh” to the Septuagint’s “meat.” It’s a close call as to whether Jesus was alluding to Ezekiel based on the vocabulary and grammar. But I can find no other Old Testament passages that’s as close.
The NET Bible translators take Eze 39:19 as a reference to God’s portion of the sacrifice. The fat and blood are forbidden to the worshiper and to the priest. They are given to God. Here, God gives the sacrifice that would normally be his to the animals and the birds — but the sacrifice is a field of dead soldiers.
So is there even a possible interpretation of “drink my blood” in light of John 6? Does the Ezekiel passage have anything to do with the Messiah?
Well, the literature of the Jews written between the testaments — uninspired literature — interprets Ezekiel 38-39 as a Messianic passage. Two different works conclude that the Messiah defeats Gog in an earthly battle. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Num 11:26, interpreted messianically by the Fragment Targum; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exo 40:11; as well as 3 Enoch 45:5. (New International Commentary on the Old Testament).
Hmm …
If Jesus invites his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and if those phrases refer to being nourished by the death of someone defeated by God, well, Jesus would soon be defeated out of obedience to God, so that his followers would live eternally thanks to his sacrifice.
Indeed, his followers would soon begin eating a symbolic meal of his flesh and blood, “proclaiming his death.”
This interpretation, of course, completely reverses the interpretations found in the Targums and 3 Enoch, which consider the battle against Gog an earthly victory of the Messiah over his enemies. If Jesus meant to evoke Ezekiel 38-39 in John 6, then he was completely reversing his listeners’ image of the Messiah. Rather than being an earthly king who defeats a great nation, the Messiah is defeated by God so that his death will feed and nourish those who believe in him.
They eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Messiah to be nourished and sustained, consuming a sacrifice meant for God but given by God to those who follow Jesus.
It does kind of fit. I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with it, but there’s an argument …
This takes us to Rev 20 —
(Rev 20:7-8 ESV) 7 And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison 8 and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea.
This is plenty obscure enough, but in some sense, the battle against Gog is repeated at the end of the thousand-year reign.
However, it’s not much of a battle —
(Rev 20:9-10 ESV) 9 And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, 10 and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
The battle is quickly won by God, who sends down fire from heaven. In short, Gog is defeated by God, not the Messiah (or the Lamb, in the vocabulary of the Revelation).
Revelation thus does not adopt the view of the uninspired Jewish writings in this instance Rather, it sticks much more closely with the account found in Ezekiel, although there are differences. We should take the Gog of Ezekiel as a prototype used in Revelation, not as describing the very same events. After all, there’s no fire from heaven in Ezekiel’s battle scene.
Arguably — and I readily admit the challenges of this interpretation — when Jesus begins to speak of eating flesh and drinking blood, he is referring to the Old Testament passage that speaks most closely to those terms — God’s defeat of Gog.
In the language of Ezekiel, to eat flesh and drink blood is to enjoy the benefit of a sacrifice given to God, a sacrifice that can only be enjoyed by God — or those to whom the sacrifice is specially given by God. Not just anyone can eat.
For the analogy to apply, though, this must be a sacrifice of someone who became, at least for a moment, God’s enemy.
(2Co 5:21 ESV) For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
(Gal 3:13-14 ESV) 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” — 14 so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.
(Rom 8:3-4 ESV) 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Therefore, it’s at least possible that Jesus sees himself as becoming, on the cross, forsaken and accursed by God — indeed, for a moment, the very person of sin, to be defeated and killed as a sacrifice.
Upon dying, like the defeated army of Gog, Jesus’ body is given by God to support the life — not of animals and birds — but of Jesus’ followers. They are sustained by the death of Jesus.
At first, the comparison of the followers of Jesus to carrion eaters is a bit disgusting (even though Jesus really does tell us to eat his flesh and drink his blood). But from God’s perspective, those creatures that feed on the dead are merely doing what they were designed by God to do. They are not disgusting — they are creatures of God fulfilling their God-give purposes.
And so, from God’s perspective, this is not disgusting at all. It’s how nature is and was designed to be. There’s no evil or shame in the metaphor from God’s perspective.
From the perspective of Jesus’ listeners, however, the metaphor is extremely intense (as Ezekiel 38-39 was to Ezekiel’s listeners). Jesus expects to die as a sacrifice, at the hands of God, as — in a sense — an enemy of God. This Messiah is not a great general over a powerful army. Rather, this Messiah is more like Gog — defeated at the hands of God.
Therefore, the followers of Jesus are like the birds and animals to whom God has given this feast and sacrifice — beneficiaries of God’s sacrifice.
Okay. It’s crazy. I’m not sure I believe it myself. Nonetheless, at least it’s a biblical theory for what Jesus was saying — one that would have been difficult to understanding before Jesus’ death but one that might have made some sense to his followers afterwards.
