The time Jesus got really overstimulated and told everyone to “eat me”

It was a regular day at school until I accidentally crossed paths with my friendly neighborhood bully. He constantly picked on me about my haircut, bifocal glasses, and disabilities. There he was, right in front of me. I had avoided him for days, and now I was caught like a deer in the headlines, unable to move, just staring at him. He looked over at me with my mouth agape.

“What are you looking at?” He shouted.

“Nothing,” I responded.

“Eat me.” He said while extending his middle finger in my direction.

Part of me considered taking him up on the offer and nomming off a big chunk of his finger, but I decided against it. 

Later that week, my brother and I got into an argument. Having learned a new insult, I decided to try it out myself and yelled, “Eat me” to my little brother. He just shrugged it off, but my mother pulled me aside.

“Do you know what that means?” She demanded. I did not, and I told her so. She explained in as gentle language as she could that it had a meaning utterly different than what I had thought up in my head, and I just stood there mortified. I couldn’t believe people would do that to each other willingly! I wanted to wash my own mouth out with soap to teach me a lesson.

I imagine that is kind of how the apostles felt when Jesus looked at them and told them, in no uncertain terms, to “eat me.”

Unholy Sh+t: An Irreverent Bible Study

Corpus Christi Sunday

Today’s Reading: John 6:51-58

It might surprise you to find out that Jesus was an introvert. There are several context clues about his personality type in the scriptures. A great example of this is when the woman with the discharge of blood reaches out and touches the hem of his garment. He says, “Who has touched me?… I felt power (energy) leave me.” But I think the biggest proof is that whenever Jesus has to deal with large crowds of people, he will go to no small lengths to get the f+ck away from them. Like when he made a group of people really angry, and they tried to throw him over a cliff, he magically walks through all the people to get away. 

However, my favorite “f+ck this noise” moment of Jesus is after the loaves and fishes incident. Thousand of folks have flocked to hear him speak; they are all hungry, so he gives them something to eat, preaches a banger of a sermon, and then sends them on their way. The people have a different plan and instead decide they are going to crown him as king right then and there. Then the scriptures say, “Knowing this, Jesus withdraws to a mountain by himself.” 

The problem was that he was already on a mountain, and it had thousands of people with fish breath on it. The only other mountain was on the other side of a lake. Sure, he could have walked around the lake and over to the mountain but being God has its perks, so he just walked across the water. 

I’m sure you’ve heard that Jesus walked on water, but the story is always told in the context of Matthew’s version of events where Peter almost drowns. John doesn’t mention any of that at all. According to John, the disciples look for Jesus and can’t find him (classic introvert move) and so they decide to leave the party without him, get on a boat, and cross the lake. Right before they arrive on the other side, they spot Jesus just strolling across the water minding his own damn business. Jesus wasn’t walking on water to be a show-off or to prove any sort of theological point; he was trying to get some alone time and got caught.

Worst of all, when he finally gets to the other side he finds out that the crowd had followed him and were all waiting for him the next morning. Jesus is pretty miffed by this information and turns to the masses and says, “Eat me.”

And when I say Jesus was annoyed, I mean he was really, really p+ssed off. Probably because he didn’t get his alone time and a snack followed by a lil nap. Nope, he tries to escape, then his disciples interrupt his walk, accuse him of being a ghost, and thousands of people are just waiting for him.

“Y’all are just hungry,” Jesus said, “You only like me because you want more food, not because you saw all the cool sh+t I can do. Not because you think I am true. You just want more fish and chips. But that will never make you happy. You will eat it, and be hungry tomorrow. You'll never need food if you eat me and drink my blood.”

To which everyone immediately responds with, “What in the Hannibal Lecter is this sh+t?!”

Jesus goes into an absolutely wild tirade about how if anyone wants to be part of his club, they will have to eat his flesh and drink his blood. He then goes on about how their ancestors ate manna in the desert but they eventually died, but if you eat his flesh and drink his blood, you will never die. It would be an understatement to say that this totally freaked everyone out in a big way. 

Frankly, it still does. This teaching became so controversial in the early days of the church that people began to believe Christians were cannibals.

What Jesus is actually doing is meshing a bunch of traditions together into something that would eventually be named the Eucharist *sprays Windex* which comes from the Greek word eucharistia which means thanksgiving because of the word Pascha, which means Passover, which is a festival where we are thankful for being delivered. So pascha gives you eucharistia, which is the flesh and blood of Jesus, there you go. 

Still confused? I’ll explain.

Adam and Eve at the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and are cursed for it. Basically, they are going to die eventually as a result of disobeying God. Food quickly becomes a major narrative throughout the Old Testament, and there are a few major events were food is used for the salvation of God’s people:

1. Joseph is thrown into a pit by his brothers because they were angry that he was wearing a rainbow coat that his dad got him at Target and because he had a dream that they were all shafts of wheat that bowed down to him. Most of his brothers are half-siblings, except for Benjamin. Well, they sell Joseph off into slavery in Egypt and it would have gone pretty bad for Joseph until the Pharaoh found out he could interpret dreams. Anyway, Joseph helps Egypt avoid a drought by telling them to store grain. One day his brothers come to Egypt begging for food, and they don’t recognize Joseph anymore and, you guessed it, bow down before him begging for wheat. Joseph puts a chalice in the bag of grain that his brother Ben was carrying, and this is how he saved his family through the grain and the chalice (foreshadowing).

2. Well, the whole being in Egypt thing didn’t work out too well for Joseph’s descendants in the long run and so eventually, this dude named Moses was born. He also accidentally finds himself part of the Royal Court in Egypt, kinda like Joseph but different. Anyway, he does his whole “Let my people go” bit, and then there were a bunch of plagues because God was trying to shake down the Pharaoh. The final plague was Death showing up to kill the first born of literally everything. Fortunately, they slaughter a lamb, put the blood on the door frames, and then baked bread real fast because they were going to have to leave in a hurry. This becomes known as The Passover, another example of folks being saved through food.

3. It turns out Moses did not print out the Mapquest directions before leaving Egypt, and so everyone is now lost. Lost and super hungry. Moses takes the issue up with God, so the Lord rains down manna every morning. It was an edible substance of some kind that sustained them for about forty years while they were wandering around the desert. (Did someone say dessert, I’m hungry!)

4. After all of the chaos and calamity of being sold off into slavery, then escaping slavery, the people of God are given instructions on how to appease Him through sacrifice. There were a lot of rules about this. Most of the sacrifices could only be eaten by the priests, so that was a pretty cushy job.

Now, we have Jesus saying to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and everyone is flipping sh+t over this wild statement. It turns out, that a lot of people couldn’t stomach the idea. Shortly after making this statement, a whole bunch of his disciples defected, saying, “This is really weird teaching; who could believe this sh+t?” This is when Jesus starts to give a bit of clarification as to what he is actually getting at, “The flesh is nothing, Spirit is everything. What I am saying is Spirit and life.”

Eventually, and I mean way f+cking later, Jesus further clarifies his statement at the Mystical Supper when he takes the bread and wine, declaring them his body and blood. This is all happening right around the Passover. He delcares himself the sacrificial lamb but replaces the eating of the sacrifice with the bread and wine. Then, he does something kind of remarkable and says, “This is the new covenant, which is given to each of you.” He is now inviting everyone to participate in the sacrificial meal. Everyone is invited to the table.

The fall of man was because we ate the food that we weren’t supposed to, and ever since then, God kept trying to find ways to provide us with food to keep us alive, from the grain Joseph stored to the manna in the desert and finally with the eternal table of thanksgiving. Jesus was saying that no one should go hungry and that he would go to whatever lengths necessary to ensure that everyone was fed. That was supposed to be the mission. That is how we are supposed to remember him, in breaking bread with one another and making sure that there is always room at the table, even for the guy wearing the rainbow coat.