You have to sympathize with those who were following after Jesus and found him hard to take. After he said, “Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink of his blood, you shall not have life within you,” they responded, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” We have perhaps gotten accustomed to hearing about the Eucharist so that it has lost its ability to shock. But shocking it is. The shock is not so much the vocabulary as the very concept. Jesus desires to become such an intimate part of our lives that he shares with us the very basic stuff of life — flesh and blood. The cliche is true in this case: you are what you eat.
