Ah, OK. If so why can't you accept the Eucharistic miracle described by Jesus in several places in ordinary language: "this bread is my body for you to eat"?
Go back to your Greek Bible and review the tense
I shouldn't have said "entire". Naturally, when Jesus describes Himself that is present tense. Indeed He is the bread of life already. Also the general rule "except you eat, etc." is for all times so the tense is again present indefinite. The key, however, is "the bread that I will give is my flesh". This means that the bread is not given yet. Another indication that the reference is to the future Eucharist is in "If then you shall see the Son of man ascend up". These are the future tenses I spoke of. So "the act of actually eating Christ here is always put in the immediate, right now sense" is not accurate.
Of course, nothing prevented Jesus from having His First Mass happen right there instead of at the Last Supper, -- except that He has his plan already and it was to have the Last Supper instead when "His hour has come". So yes there is a sense of immediacy but still the Eucharist is a future gift, not a present gift at the point of John 6.
This is a somewhat misleading shorthand for historical-grammatical hermeneutics. It does NOT imply avoiding analogy at all costs. Rather it looks to the context, the language, the history, etc., to see if analogy is warranted, and then to proceed carefully in determining exactly what the analogy is.
For example, in the Gospels we have Christ teaching by analogy whenever he teaches in public, and in private he is always explaining the analogies, just as happened in John 6. Furthermore, we have warrant for looking for analogy in those public discourses because it was prophesied that this would be the method Messiah would use to speak to Israel.
BTW, I have at least twice provided you with three such passages indicate unambiguously that analogy is the default delivery mode for Jesus’ public teaching ministry, and you have not yet responded. I continue to be very interested in your response, because using the historical-grammatical hermeneutic on THOSE passages vindicates the presumption that the public discourse of Jesus in John 6 should be viewed as primarily analogy, under ordinary rules of language and context for spotting analogy.
Now it’s true that any such default rule is a rebuttable presumption. If I were on your side of the table, that’s where I would be taking the argument. Simply repeating naked assertions without dealing with objections is less than persuasive. I am an attorney, and I can tell you from experience your “brief” would not be taken seriously if you failed to interact meaningfully with the objections on the other side. I have won cases on such omissions.
As for the various tenses in John 6, I have already pointed out that they belong to a number of categories, future for things we would both agree are future, and present tense for most everything else. We both agree, for example, that the crucifixion was future, and I hope we can both agree that whatever benefit would accrue from that event would run to eternity future. So both of those future-looking categories are correct.
But Peter believed, right then and there, that Jesus was Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Peter through faith, right then and there, had the vital nourishing connection to Christ that is implied in John 6:63, “My words are spirit, and they are life.” When Jesus says “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.,” that is literally fulfilled by Peter and the Apostles believing in Him, trusting in Him and His mediatorial work for their salvation, right then and there. And so Jesus’ use of the present tense to describe the believer’s spiritual participation in the death and life of Christ by faith is fully justified. It was simply, literally true then, just as it is now.
So; it is Catholicism that screwed up a YEARLY meal of remembrance into a ritual performed every time the pew warmer enters the doors of the church.