GOSPELS 14 BLOOD COVENANT

GOSPELS 14 BLOOD COVENANT

In Gospels 14 we will continue in the Bread narrative that we looked at in Gospels 13 in the Gospel of John and Chapter six where Jesus said that he was the Bread of Life. And just as we eat bread and take bread into ourselves to sustain and energise our natural life, we take the Spiritual life of Jesus into us by faith through the Holy Spirit, to sustain and energise our inner spiritual life together with God. This inner spiritual life was made available to humanity after Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead and sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. 
Jesus continues in John Chapter six, saying he was the Bread of Life from Heaven, and the crowd fiercely resisted him and everything he was saying.
John 6:41 So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
They could only see the natural man Jesus whom they knew, and they knew his mother Mary, and his father Joseph, who was a local carpenter. Jesus then tells them to stop grumbling and resisting, and in the next nine verses he says three times that he is the bread of life that has come from Heaven to give us this bread of life as the spiritual energy that sustains our inner spiritual life.
It was obvious that they were not going to accept what he was saying but instead of softening the message Jesus knew he had to frame his words even more strongly, and the third time he mentions the bread of life he also makes another startling statement. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. (John 6:51).
The word for flesh (sarx) is a lot stronger than the word for body (soma). The body is thought of generally as the outer embodiment of the whole being, whereas the flesh is the body with all the inner viscera. He said to them ‘As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me (John 6:57)
And that difficult statement is followed up by Jesus making an even stronger statement; ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you’. 

That was just too ‘eye-rollingly’ much for them, especially because he was not saying this up on some hillside – he said this in the synagogue in Capernaum. The people began rowdily disputing with one another and with him about everything he was saying. Jesus knew in his heart that many of his own disciples were also offended, and most of the people there had totally rejected the idea that he had come from Heaven, so he asked his disciples what they would think if they actually saw him ascending back up to Heaven where he first came from. They had no answer.
Jesus then says ‘the flesh profits nothing’ (John 6:63) which means that only the Holy Spirit could one day give them understanding of his eternal life that he was offering to them and to all of humanity, and that all human physical or intellectual effort to obtain that inner life was futile. The Holy Spirit was poured out on all of humanity afterwards on the day of Pentecost and Jesus was to call this ‘The Promise of the Father’ (Acts 1:4). Within that Promise comes the unfolding of how the Father draws people to Jesus, and explains what Jesus meant when he then said ‘no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.’(John 6:65). The Father grants that promised invitation to all Mankind, but not all accept. 

Many of his own disciples and many others in the crowd decided to stop following him after saying all that left him. John writes that he turned to the twelve disciples and said, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:66-69)

All the other Gospel writers have Jesus saying that the bread was his body (soma) and that the cup was the blood of the New Covenant, (Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 22:19) but none of them went as far as to say like John, that unless we ate his flesh (sarx not soma) and drank his blood that we could not have his life within us. The picture of Jesus being the bread from Heaven for them to eat might have been cringeworthy for them to hear, but being now told that they had to actually eat his flesh and drink his blood was utterly disgusting, so no wonder most of the people walked away. But only John could have come up with this illustration. Afterall it was in John‘s Gospel that John the Baptist gave us the same picture when he saw Jesus and said Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). 

That picture is the one of Israel eating the Passover Lamb from the very first Passover feast when God rescued them from the tyranny of Pharoah in Egypt, and every Passover since then Jewish families would gather together (and still do) to divide the pieces of a slaughtered Lamb to eat as the Passover sacrifice, and they were commanded to eat it entirely. That was not disgusting – that was the most holy and precious and memorable landmark of their history and was the central core of their belief as being the people of God in the Old Testament. And that had always been God’s big idea about Father God sending his Son to the earth to become not only the Passover Lamb for Israel but also to be the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the whole world. 
In the Book of Leviticus the ongoing eating of the flesh of the daily sacrificial animals is described in all the gory details about which parts of the animal and its entrails were to be eaten by the priests and which parts burnt up (Leviticus 7). The whole chapter goes into great detail about these sacrifices and who was to eat them and how certain obviously inedible parts were to be burnt up. It states that this ‘flesh’ of the slaughtered animal was to be the total provision of food for the priests and their families.  The momentous historical and spiritual reality of all of this was that the spilled blood had to be put into bowls and even scraped up off the earth and be ceremoniously burnt upon the altar of sacrifice and go up in smoke to Heaven.   

That is why it is so significant that Jesus celebrated the Last Supper Passover feast with his disciples and ate the flesh of the lamb before he was arrested and went and shed his blood as our Passover Lamb. Paul writes to us in 1Corinthians how he received a revelation from the Lord about what happened on that Passover night so that Christians could live out that spiritual reality by faith, about the Lamb of God being slain for us before the foundation of the world. ‘and when he had given thanks, he broke the bread and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the New Covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1Corintians 11:23)
Jesus has just there described the New ‘Blood Covenant’. The Old Covenant agreements were also called ‘blood Covenants’ and sealed with blood, and the Bible says that the life is in the blood (Leviticus 17:14). The Old Testament reality was that people staked their lives on blood covenants or agreements. People ask ‘why should we read the Old Testament? Because three and a half thousand years of blood covenant life has been indelibly carved into history - a story so brilliantly designed that it cannot be denied and could not be devised by mortal means. So what does a person do with that? you stake your life on it. We know that Israel were forbidden to ever drink blood, and that had become the main offence when Jesus spoke to the people about eating his body and drinking his blood. Jesus was to stake his life for all of mankind and give us his life by offering up his own blood on the sacrificial altar of fire of the cross at Golgotha–– where a new Blood Covenant with humanity was established – his life for us, his life in us, our life for him, and our life with him.
Then Jesus rose from the dead after he had descended into hell for three days and he emerged from the tomb and was met by Mary Magdalene, who wanted to greet him, but he said to her. “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father... (John 20.27)
And just as the Old testament sacrificial lifeblood on the altar of fire ascended into heaven Jesus was now granting his lifeblood to ascend into heaven and be offered to his Father for the whole earth for all time, as the Scripture says, Hebrews 9:11 TLB. He came as High Priest of this better Covenant that we now have. He went into that greater, perfect tabernacle in heaven, not made by men nor part of this world, and once for all took blood into that inner room, the Holy of Holies, and sprinkled it on the mercy seat; but it was not the blood of goats and calves. No, he took his own blood, and with it he, by himself, made sure of our eternal salvation.

It is done, and at communion time we remember the love behind that sacrifice of the Father in sending his Son whose sacrifice gives his own life and being to us. Jesus staked his life on that and he says what about you. He says I’ve given you my life can you give me yours. This is not just about a life in heaven one day it is about a heavenly life today. Our lives and his life become one life together with the Father and the Holy Spirit and they become one life together for us with each other in the spirit of that New Life. A gory story that is full of glory. Believe and live.