The Hard Sayings: John 6:53

Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

This article is part of a series explaining the sayings of Jesus that are hard to understand. This list was put together by the Lord's Library. To see the list an access earlier articles in this series, go to this page.

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This verse is in a dialogue where Jesus describes the bread of life. In these verses, he calls himself the bread coming down from the sky. He starts this conversation by saying that the crowd has come to him because he gave them bread to eat. He then equates that bread to the manna in the desert called down by Moses. He says that this bread gives life to the world. Some then asked him for this bread always.

Jesus is talking to two groups of people here. First, he is talking to those given to him (John 6:39). Second, he is talking to those who grumble against him (John 6:43). The group given to him, he cannot lose no matter how outrageous his statements. Those who grumble against him do not have the power to come to him no matter how reasonable he is. These competing dynamics and Jesus’ sense of fun create this discussion.

After being asked for this bread always, Jesus ups the ante, saying that he is the bread of life and that those who come to him will never go hungry or thirsty again. He keeps pressing this metaphor further and further until his doubters ask how anyone can eat a person’s flesh. He answers with John 6:53:

NIV: Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

• The words in boldface are explained below.

The “very truly” comes from the repeated word, amen, amen, that begins the verse. Jesus uses this i phrase to introduce difficult ideas in a humorous way. Jesus is not arguing with his listeners as much as playing with them. This is banter that he expects those who are called to him to understand.

Eating, Drinking, and Life

We should note that this verse consists of two negative sayings. The two Greek words translated as “unless” mean “when not.” “When we do not eat or drink” something negative happens. The words for eat and drink are common ones. "Eat" means “to consume” or “to devour,” but it also has the sense of “to fret” or “to vex,” having something eat at us. “Drink” means “to drink” or “to soak up,” but it also has the sense of “to celebrate.” This not eating and drinking sets the conditions for having “no life in you.”

If we strip out the flesh and blood part, this sentence is a simple truism: if we don’t eat and drink, we won’t have life. We will die. In another sense, if we aren’t worrying and celebrating, we are dead in another way. We tend to focus on the words, flesh and blood, because they are the shocking elements in this verse, but we must start with the big picture to understand what Jesus is saying here. In this case, eating and drinking, worrying and celebrating, are the necessary conditions for life.

What kind of “life” is this? Jesus uses over a half dozen different Greek words that are translated as “life,” in the Gospels, but the one he uses here means the life of our bodies. Jesus uses this Greek word to describe flesh animated by the “spirit.” You can read more about how Jesus uses such terms in this article on The Joining of "Spirit," "Mind," "Flesh," “Heart", "Body" "Life," and "Self." This Greek word is the only one consistently translated as “life.” It is the noun form of the verb from one of Jesus’s first words in the Gospels:

Matthew 4:4 It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

So the “word” of the Divine is another form of bread that comes down from the sky. Jesus is equating this bread with the flesh of his body. Something that John does even more explicitly at the beginning of his gospel.

Flesh and Blood

The word translated as "flesh," means "meat," "the pulp of fruit," and, metaphorically, "the physical and natural order of things." It is the opposite of the spiritual or supernatural. It can mean living flesh in the bodies of animals or men, or the dead meat that we eat. What makes this shocking is mixing up this meat we eat with living flesh. Prior to this, Jesus was talking tamely about eating bread, but in John 6:5, he goes on to say that this bread is his flesh. Notice, he refers to himself here are “the son of the man,” making his flesh and blood more explicitly human.

"Blood" has the same sense of kinship in Greek as it does in English. So this verse is about Jesus sharing his physical existence with us and celebrating our kinship with him as children of the Divine. In Jewish law, blood is equated with life (Lev. 17:11, Deut. 12:23). In this verse, Jesus makes this idea shocking by talking about drinking blood.

This is even more surprising under Jewish dietary laws. According to Jewish law, blood must be drained from the flesh before meat is suitable to be eaten (Lev. 3:17; Deut. 12:15–16). An animal’s circulating blood was assumed to carry its life force from which the soul emerges. The blood that was left in the meat after draining was considered edible.

Drinking the blood of any animal was taboo under Jewish law (Leviticus 7:27). It was forbidden despite it being widely practiced in the Middle East in ancient times. The punishment under Jewish law was being cut off from your family, what we might call “shunning” today. Drinking blood led to being turned away by our blood.

What did Jesus’s listeners hear?

Listeners Heard: Amen, Amen, I tell you, when you do not eat this flesh of the son of the man and drink of him this blood, you all do not have life within yourselves.

Jesus’s flesh is equated with bread, the word of God, worrying, and the meat, that is, the most important part of a meal. His blood is equated with the life force animating our flesh, and our membership in a circle of kinship.

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