I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. John's language becomes shockingly physical and cannibalistic.
The disciples find this saying difficult to accept. Jesus doesn't soften it. He makes it stronger. The language is meant to be offensive—to push past comfortable metaphor into something visceral and real. Eating someone's flesh, drinking their blood—that's the language of complete consumption, merger, transformation. I think John is deliberately using shocking imagery to convey that discipleship isn't abstract. It's intimate. Consuming. Transformative.
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