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I. THE FOOD. Familiarity with these words and mental indolence have dulled our sense of their strangeness. However unintelligible to their hearers, they must have been felt in putting forth strange claims. On any other lips they would have been felt to have been absurd and blasphemous. Upon Christ's lips they are that or something very wonderful. He presents the food of the soul in two forms.

1. He proposes Himself. "He that eateth Me."(1) Here you come across the great characteristic of Christianity, that it is all in the personal Christ. The great note is, "I bear witness of Myself."(2) He sets Himself forth here as the sufficient nourishment for my whole nature.

(a) Do I want truth of any kind except mere physical or mathematical truth? I get it here, social, ethical, spiritual, religious. He is Wisdom: He is Truth.

(b) Does my heart want nourishing with the selected elixir of love? His love is the only food for the hungry heart which does not bring bitterness or turn to ashes.

(c) Does my will want for its strength some law known to be good and deeply loved. I must go to the Master, and in His loving personality find the authority which sways, and by swaying emancipates the human will.

(3) He proposes Himself as the food for the whole world. If He is enough for me He is enough for all, and comes in living contact with all the generations right on to the end of time.

2. He offers His flesh and blood; His earthly life and violent death. It is not enough to speak in general terms of the personal Christ as being the food of the spirit. We must feed upon the dying Christ, and lay hold of His sacrifice, and realize that His shed blood transfused in mystical fashion into the veins of our spirits is there the throbbing source of life which circulates through the whole of the inmost being.

II. THE ACT OF EATING THIS FOOD. The metaphysical language is familiar in many applications. We speak of tasting sorrow, eating bitter bread, feeding on love.

1. This participation is effected by faith.

(1) "He that cometh... believeth." By the simple act of trust in Him. You may be beside Him for a thousand years, and if there is no faith there is no union. You may be separated from Him, as we are, in time by nineteen centuries; in condition, by the difference between mortality and glory; in distance, by all the measureless space between the footstool and the throne; and if there go from your heart an electric wire, howsoever slender and fragile, you are knit to Him and derive into your heart the fulness of His cleansing power.

(2) This trust is the activity of the whole nature, for faith has in it intellect, affection, and will.

2. The original expression is employed to describe the act of eating by ruminating animals; a leisurely and pleasurable partaking; an act slow and meditative and repeated, which dwells upon Him. The reason why so many Christians are such poor weaklings is because they do not thus feed on Christ. The cheap tripper cannot take in the beauty of the landscape. You cannot know any man in a hurried interview, so in these hurrying days how few of us ruminate about Christ.

3. Our Lord here uses a grammatical form which indicates the continual persistance of this meditative faith. Yesterday's portion will not stay to-day's hunger.

III. THE CONSEQUENT LIFE.

1. Separate from Christ we are dead. We may live the life of animals, an intellectual life, a life of desires and hopes and fears, a moral life; but the true life of man is not in these. It is only that which comes by union with and derivation from God.

2. Bread nourishes life, 'this bread communicates life. The indwelling Christ is the source of life to me.

3. This spiritual life in the present has, as its necessary consequence, a future completion. If Christ is in my heart the life He brings can never stop its regenerative and transforming activities until it has influenced the whole of my nature to the very circumference (ver. 54).

(A. Maclaren, D. D.)

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KJV: Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.

WEB: Most certainly, I tell you, he who believes in me has eternal life.