=53-55. Therefore Jesus said unto them.= Therefore connects what follows with what has preceded; he emphasizes and explains the eating and drinking, in response to their interruption in ver. 53.--=Verily, verily, I say unto you.= These words give a solemn emphasis to the declaration which follows.--=Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man.= That is, of the Messiah (Matt. 10:23, note).--=And drink his blood.= The use of animal blood in any form was prohibited to the Israelites as food (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 3:17; 7:26, 27; 17:10-14; 19:26; Deut. 12:16, 23; 15:23), and was exceedingly odious to the Jewish thought. Moreover, to touch even the corpse of a man rendered the Jew unclean. It is not, therefore, strange that Christ’s language here should have offended many even of his disciples (ver. 60).--=Ye have no life in you.= The mere physical life is accounted in the N. T. no life at all. The true life is that of God in the soul, the absence of which is death.--=Whoso eateth my flesh.= The Greek verb rendered in both places _eat_ is different from that used above. The word here (τρώγω) signifies literally to _chew_ or _masticate_, and seems to me to have been substituted by Christ for the more general one (φαγεῖν), in order to add still further emphasis to the doctrine which he is expounding.--=And drinketh my blood, hath eternal life.= A present possession. See ver. 47, note.--=And I will raise him up at the last day.= This is one of the passages on which the advocates of the doctrine of conditional immortality base their belief. The promise of resurrection here certainly is limited to those who through faith have received the gift of eternal life.--=For my flesh is true meat and my blood is true drink.= To Christ the material universe was but a shadow, and the realities were those things of which the material universe is a type. “Food and drink are not here mere metaphors; rather are our common material food and drink mere shadows and imperfect types of this only real reception of refreshment and nourishment into the being.”--(_Alford._) In the interpretation of Christ’s language here, the student must remember the declaration respecting him, “Without a parable spake he not unto them” (Mark 4:34); unquestionably the language here is parabolic. It is also true that the phrases eating and drinking were used among the Jews in a metaphorical sense, and that bread especially was employed among them as a symbol for doctrine (Isa. 3:1; Jer. 15:16; Lightfoot on John 6:51; Geikie’s Life of Christ, ch. 44, note c). It seems to me, however, very clear not only that Christ here means something more than receiving his doctrines, but that he employs his peculiar language for the express purpose of emphasizing the truth that it is not merely enough to receive him as a teacher. If this had been his meaning, it would have been easy to correct the misapprehension of his Jewish hearers, and remove the offence which they felt at his discourse. This he does not do.