Wrong. He not only said so but when others took Him literally and began to walk away, He did not say they were mistaken. Indeed he doubled down on it. But the Church’s authority goes back to not only Scripture but also TRADITION. The books in the Bibles did not fall from the sky. They authorized by the Church fathers some 30 years after the death of Christ. It was the oral traditions and rituals that were understood and carried out by His disciples. This is large mustard tree, the Catholic Church, the rest are 35,000 varieties of heresies. On flock, one body, one food. The Body and Blood of Christ.
“He not only said so...”
Do you recall that He told the rich young ruler to give away all his possessions? Did He and does He require all rich people to do that? According to the rest of the Bible, no. Jesus at times spoke judgment on the crowds, telling His disciples that He spoke in parables that He didn’t explain to them because of their unbelief. And one parable was about the different types of soil, and another about the wheat and chaff. He knew that the crowd He’d fed had come to Him because they wanted Him to be their earthly king and provide bread for Him. And as I imagine you know, so much of what is going on in the Gospels is about the two types of prophecy about the coming Messiah, with some saying He was the Suffering Servant and other the Victorious King. Up to Jesus’ time, some rabbis believed that meant two Messiahs, and there was a conflict between the views that Jesus stepped into, and the Jews (incl. Peter when He tried “correcting” Jesus) at the time wanted the Victorious King. And Cont’d
(cont’d) Jesus had to deal with this embrace of the Victorious King over the Suffering Servant with not only Peter, and His other apostles and disciples. He had to prepare them for His death, and they only understood it afterwards with His Resurrection, even though as He said at different times the sacrificial death He’d die was foretold in Scripture. But I can tell you from reading from Jews that have accepted Christ, the Jews have put the Suffering Servant prophecies just about out mind, and one Jew I talked to on Yahoo Answers religion section, who said no one can die for another’s sins, when I pointed out passages of Isaiah 53 to him, within minutes deleted the whole thread. I pray that knowledge took root in him. But all in all, you cannot say that Jesus gave of His physical body, which was there at the Last Supper and first Communion. He spoke, as He did all along, of the sacrifice He was to make. It was all about Him going to the Cross, and Communion would be something utterly different (Cont’d)
different without Jesus’ death on the Cross. The chief offense of the Cross is that we’re all sinners so no one is right with God, and no one can make themselves right with God, either, but they need Him even to do that, and to pay their penalty for sin. The crowds that came to Jesus, and even many who followed Him (and one of the Twelve, too, Judas), weren’t “seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,” so after not responding to Jesus’ miracles , but listening to their flesh instead, Jesus judged them.
I also wrote Post 140 to you.