Well,here's how it works:
When Jesus said he was the "door to the sheepfold", did he have to remember to explain he wasn't a real door? When Jesus said he was the "bread of life", did he have to be sure to add he wasn't saying he could be baked in an oven and used for a sandwich? When he taught that he was the "water of life" and whoever drank of him would never thirst, did he have to include that he didn't mean his bodily fluids could be dispensed and literally drunk? The obvious answer is no, of course not. The Jewish people were accustomed to the use of idioms and symbolical language. They grew up with Almighty God Jehovah likening himself to a mother hen guarding her chicks and as a husband who must deal with an unfaithful wife among other types. Somehow, I just don't think Jesus thought that he would have to explain OBVIOUS simile's. There was no need for him to "label his words as a parable", because the manner in which he taught THIS lesson was not the same as his parables. They just got it that he was not, could not possibly, be meaning his literal flesh and blood had to be physically consumed.
It was only centuries later that certain theologians started trying to interpret this lesson as literal and came up with the idea that explained how the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper observance actually became the real flesh and blood of Christ in order to make such a "sacrament" a regular and obligatory act necessary to BE saved. And, of course, they had to develop the "laws" that governed who was legitimately able to confect such miraculous changes and the office of the Catholic priesthood was born. But to insist that this doctrine was ALWAYS and EVERYWHERE believed in the same way by everyone, is simply false.
John 10:6 clearly describes Jesus’ discussion of the sheepfold in John 10:7 as a ‘parable.’
No such clarification is written to clarify the discussion in John Chapter 6.
Why is that?
Why would Jesus repeat himself, making it clear that we should ‘knaw’ on his flesh, all while the divine writer fails to clarify, as it is clarified over and over in the Bible when Jesus speaks in parables, if he was in fact speaking in terms of a parable?