John 6:57 ... reads: “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me” . That word ‘so’ sets up a parallelism. Jesus says that as He was sent by The Father, and lives by Him. In the same way, as we eat of the LORD, so we will live by Him. The parallel concepts are Jesus ‘being sent’ by God the Father and us ‘eating’ God the Son. Being sent = eating.
Though this may seem like a valid argument at first glance, it's got a major problem. This implies that the processions in the Trinity can be A) understood on human terms, and are B) applicable to human relations. Jesus, the
Logos, was sent by the Father; they are One. We partake of the Eucharist - eat of the Lord (Latin:
manducat = to eat; to chew) - and, through this unity, we become, in a certain sense, one with Christ in the Mystical Body of the Church. But because we do not proceed from the Father as the Divine
Logos does, we cannot equate Christ's "being sent" by the Father to our "eating" Christ's Body and Blood in the Eucharist. I'm no Bible scholar, but it seems as though a better argument for interpretation of this passage might be to say that Christ desires us to be one with Him and with each other as He and the Father are One. (John 17:11) Because we are humans (read: not God), we cannot relate to God the way the Father and the Son relate to each other. We cannot equate relations in the Godhead with a relation between the
Logos and man.
Does this make sense? Hope it helped.
