John 6:56 is typically translated as:
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.
Christians have long connected this verse to Communion. In many Christian practices this language is taken remarkably literally: the bread and wine truly become, or even contain, the literal flesh and blood of Jesus. Even where Communion is understood more symbolically, “flesh and blood” is still usually read as referring to consuming the physical body of Jesus.
But what if eating and drinking was never meant to describe consuming Jesus’ physical body in the first place?
A few verses earlier, the crowd points directly to manna: “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness … He gave them bread from heaven to eat” (John 6:31). Jesus answers, “My Father gives you the true bread from heaven” (6:32), and then makes the crucial substitution: “I am the bread of life” (6:35). Later he says it even more plainly: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven” (6:51). The new manna is not something Jesus gives. It is Jesus himself.
That makes the image of eating unusually precise. When you eat something, it begins outside you. You take it into yourself. It ceases to be external to you, and it becomes part of what sustains your life. So “eat my flesh” doesn’t need to be literal. Instead it might mean take me into yourself, as Israel took in the manna God supplied. Depend on me as the thing God has given to sustain you.
But then why add, “drink my blood”? In the Jewish world, blood had a specific meaning: “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Flesh points to the person, whereas blood points to the life within him. Together the images say: take me in, both who I am, and the life I live.
The rest of the verse suddenly fits. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.” Jesus was outside you; now he is in you. The next verse makes it even clearer: “The one who eats me will live because of me.” His life becomes yours. Don’t merely follow behind Jesus. Take him in until the life he was living is now being lived through you.
This may also explain why Jesus’ death matters so much. As long as Jesus remains alive as one teacher, he remains external to everyone else, and his followers can remain students. Jesus is always available for questions. But John later gives a striking image: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” A seed does not survive by being preserved. The original seed is lost, but its life appears again in many new seeds.
Jesus is the first seed. His death forces the transition from one external teacher to many people carrying his life within them. What lived in Jesus takes root in the disciples, then in others, then in others again. His victory over death is not merely preservation. It is propagation.
Given this John 6:56 could be retranslated as:
“Whoever takes me into himself as food, and takes my life into himself as drink, remains in me, and I remain in him.”