Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”
At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”
“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

• John 6:34-60

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.”
Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it.
“This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” he said to them. “Truly I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

• Mark 14:22-26

“ ‘When we see the host we ought to believe not that it is itself the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is sacramentally concealed in it.  We Christians are permitted to deny that the bread which we consecrate is identical with the body of Christ, although it is the efficacious sign of it.  …
“[Those who identify them] fail to distinguish between the figure and the thing figured and to heed the figurative meaning. … The spiritual receiving of the body of Christ consists not in bodily receiving, chewing or touching of the consecrated host, but in the feeding of the soul out of the fruitful faith according to which our spirit is nourished in the Lord.  …  For nothing is more horrible than the necessity of eating the flesh carnally and of drinking the blood carnally of a man loved so dearly [Jesus Christ].’ (The Eucharist 1.2, 11;7.58, 1.15).”

• Tony Lane, A Concise History of Christian Thought

Like Martin Luther more than one hundred years later, John Wyclif, or Wycliffe, Wickliffe, among many variations, (1328?-1384) was a philosopher and scholar who translated the Bible into Middle English from the Latin Vulgate.  Using the Vulgate, there were inherent errors in the translation.  He spent much of his life in academia, at one point funding his scholastic efforts by claiming an ecclesiastical office (a common practice at the time).  Oddly, as he had to affect a self-imposed exile due to his views late in his life, he moved to a church near Rugby, where he had been the absentee cleric for many years.

The biographies state that Wyclif came from propertied parents.  They do not claim that he came from money.  As he worked toward degrees in philosophy and theology during his “ecumenical sabbatical” or what we now would call a professional student, he noticed how the largest landowners among those in England were the churches, and they paid no taxes.  He argued against a tax-free status for churches, especially monastic orders.  This granted Wyclif favor among the secular government.

This secular favor that Wyclif enjoyed caused him to be emboldened to take his disgust of the church’s excess to the next level.  He argued that transubstantiation was not biblical (the point made in part by the quote above).  He also argued that the papacy was a creation of man.  You would think any of these arguments in a time when the Pope was more influential than any one king or another would get him excommunicated, exiled, or killed.  It would be nearly another hundred years before William Tyndale tried to translate the Bible into English, but from the original languages, just to be strangled and then burned at the stake.

Wyclif had powerful friends who wished Wyclif’s ideas of taxing the monasteries, if not the church, so that the English war with the French could be funded.  They had no clue what Wyclif’s reformational ideas meant.  They only saw the money potential.

John Wyclif felt the heat from his comments and retreated to a pastoral life.  He was not labeled a heretic until after his death.

But, many of his arguments were repeated by Martin Luther and John Calvin, both crediting John Wyclif with his ideas.  The Pope had crossed over to influence secular governments.  The church had money to expand their properties and gold plate everything in their churches yet do so tax free.  All this excess while the poor starved.

But John Wyclif lived about 150 years too early to see his ideas form a reformation.  But if it were not for him and others, would the reformation have gained root in the time of Martin Luther?

As for his argument against transubstantiation above, I have readers on both sides of that argument.  I agree with Wyclif, but I will not argue one way or the other.  Yet, Wyclif’s point is a good one.  The important thing is our relationship with Jesus Christ when we take communion.  It dates back to the times of Jesus.  He said to eat the bread and drink from the cup in remembrance of Him, a spiritual thing.  Many disciples went away when Jesus claimed to be the bread of life.  They thought He meant cannibalism.  And here Wyclif states that if we do not have the right life-giving relationship with Jesus and transubstantiation is true, then it is a form of cannibalism.  With a proper relationship of Jesus as our Lord and Savior, then it does not matter whether we partake in blood and flesh or the symbolism there of.

But I cannot write about John Wyclif without mentioning Wycliffe Bible Translators.  One of the ladies that I graduated high school and college with became a Wycliffe Bible Translator.  They go into villages who speak a language that has never been written before.  They learn the language.  They create a written language.  And then they translate the Bible.  Along the way, they work with the people, establishing relationships with them and bringing many to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.  I also have a second connection to the organization.  One of my nephews married the daughter of another Wycliffe Bible Translator.  Their wedding was filled with glorifying God.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.