By using the word “whoever,” Jesus expands the borders of who’s in and who’s out, scrambling their notions of who gets to receive the grace of God and how they get to receive it. By opening eternal life to “whoever eats of this bread,” Jesus begins to deconstruct that old bureaucratic system of circles and opens up eternal life to . . . well . . . whoever! It isn’t about blood or lineage or culture or tradition. It has nothing at all to do with any of the circles the people of God had previously drawn. Perhaps the disciples were scandalized because they wondered, “Could it be just anybody who eats the bread?” Maybe they even worried, “Could it be . . . everybody?”
Exclusion is easy. Walking around thinking that we are the special ones, that we are justified simply by virtue of who we are or what we believe, some identity or another, is comforting. Cutting more and more people out of that circle isn’t a problem as long as we stay nestled safely inside of it.
Expanding the circle, however, is a “hard teaching.” Expand it too far and we start to wonder if there’s anything special about us at all.
By that measure, universalism might just be the hardest teaching because it expands the circle all the way.
— Derek Ryan Kubilus, Holy Hell, p. 126
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 21, 2026