Let us start from verse 50, which seems to me to be a sort of key to the whole: “I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” It seems to me that the sentence occupies much the same position in this text as verse 63 occupies in the eucharistic chapter 6 of St. John’s Gospel: for these two seemingly widely separated texts are much more closely related than is apparent at first sight.
