The words of Jesus on this subject, were not understood by those who heard him. “The Jews therefore strove one with another, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”[608] But this was not because the Jews had never heard of eating the flesh of a sacrificial victim, and of drinking blood in a sacred covenant: it was, rather, because they did not realize that Jesus was to be the crowning sacrifice for the human race; nor did they comprehend his right and power to make those who were one with him through faith, thereby one with God in spiritual nature. “Many,” even “of his disciples, when they heard” these words of his, “said, This is a hard saying; who can hear it?”[609] Nor are questioners at this point, lacking among his disciples to-day. Before Jesus Christ was formally made an offering in sacrifice, as a means of man’s inter-union and inter-communion with God, there were two illustrations of his mission, in the giving of his blood for the bringing of man into right relations with God. These were, his circumcision, and his agony in Gethsemane. By his circumcision, Jesus brought his humanity into the blood-covenant which was between God and the seed of God’s friend, Abraham, of whose nature, according to the flesh, Jesus had become a partaker;[610] Jesus thereby pledged his own blood in fidelity to that covenant; so that all who should thereafter become his by their faith, might, through him, be heirs of faithful Abraham.[611] The sweet singer of the Christian Year,[612] seems to find this thought, in this incident in the life of the Holy Child: “Like sacrificial wine Poured on a victim’s head, Are those few precious drops of thine, Now first to offering led. “They are the pledge and seal Of Christ’s unswerving faith, Given to his Sire, our souls to heal, Although it cost his death. “They, to his Church of old, To each true Jewish heart, In gospel graces manifold, Communion blest impart.” In Gethsemane, the sins and the needs of humanity so pressed upon the burdened soul of Jesus, that his very life was forced out, as it were, from his aching, breaking heart, in his boundless sympathy with his loved ones, and in his infinite longings for their union with God, through their union with himself, in the covenant of blood he was consummating in their behalf.[613] “And being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”[614]