‘Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life’

These startling words of Jesus in St. John’s Gospel caused many of his disciples to say, “This saying is hard, who can accept it?”  But Jesus did not take back what he said to the disciples who had followed him from the other side of the Sea of Galilee to the synagogue in Capernaum.  He simply asked, “Does this shock you? For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”   

St. John comments, “As a result of this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.”  Jesus then asked the Twelve Apostles, “Do you also want to leave?”  And St. Peter, speaking for them, answered, “Master, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the holy one of God.”  

The other three Gospels by St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke all include the scene of Jesus celebrating the Jewish Passover meal with his apostles on the night before he died.  They include the words about the bread being his body which will be given up for them and the wine the blood which will be shed for them.  In St. Luke’s Last Supper account, Jesus adds the command,  “Do this in memory of me.”  

That they took this command seriously is evident in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians where he describes the tradition of Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist.  “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you.  Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he also took the cup after supper saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood.  Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.  For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.’ ” 

Then St. Paul adds his own faith and understanding of what the bread and wine have become: “Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:23-28).  St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, written about the year 50, predates any of the Gospels.  
It is upon these scriptural testimonies of the apostles that our Catholic faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist rests.  That faith was handed down by the early fathers of our church, many of them martyrs.  (The following quotes are taken from Bishop Robert Barron’s book “Eucharist.”)

“In Antioch, Syria, the new Christian church first began taking in large numbers of Gentile converts.  From that community, St. Paul and Barnabas were sent to evangelize the gentile communities of Asia Minor, now Turkey.  St. Ignatius was made the second bishop of Antioch.  He was arrested under the Roman Emperor, Trajan, and sent to Rome for execution around the year 107.  He wrote ahead to the Christians in Rome as he sailed to his death.  “I desire the bread of God, the heavenly bread, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And I desire the drink of God, namely his blood, which is incorruptible love and eternal life.

“About 150, St. Justin, martyr, wrote about Christian worship: ‘This food is called among us Eucharist. The food which is blessed by the prayer of his word is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.’ 

Origen of Alexandria was a priest and younger contemporary of St. Ignatius and the greatest biblical scholar of his day.  In one of his homilies he wrote, ‘You who are accustomed to take part in divine mysteries know, when you receive the body of the Lord, how you protect it with all caution and veneration lest any small part fall from it, lest anything of the consecrated gift be lost.’

“St. John Chrysostom, fourth-century bishop of Constantinople, was called the ‘Eucharistic Doctor’ because he wrote so eloquently about the sacrament: ‘It is not man that causes the things offered to become the body and blood of Christ but he who was crucified for us … The priest, in the role of Christ, pronounces these words but their power and grace are God’s.’  Any good poet can change the symbolic meaning of words but it takes God the creator to change the substance or essence of something.

“St. Augustine was the greatest of the Western Church fathers.  He died in 430.  He taught that the consecratory words of Jesus have a transformative power: “That which you see on the Lord’s table is bread and wine.  But when a word is added that bread and wine become the body and blood of the word, the body of Christ and the blood of Christ.  
“In the late middle ages universities arose and with them a desire to explain how the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. One theologian came close, but not close enough.  He was Berengarius of Tours in the 1100s.  He taught that the bread and wine stay the same after the words of consecration, but they have a new spiritual significance, so that the risen Christ is offered spiritually to the recipient.  Jesus said of the bread and the wine ‘Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.’  And he gave his disciples the order to ‘do this in remembrance of me.’

“Jesus wanted the Mass, or celebration of the Eucharist, to be a sacred meal, a sacrifice like the Passover in which he would be the victim and a Communion with us through his body and blood which would be consumed, uniting him and the recipient.  Eucharist is the real presence of the risen Christ, not the dead one on the cross, with whom we are united.  The risen Christ who appeared to his disciples although the doors were locked’ was not limited to time and space like we are.  Therefore, he can be really present, as the Council of Trent declared, ‘body and blood, soul and divinity,’ in the consecrated and transformed species, or appearances of bread and wine, which we receive in Communion and preserve in our Catholic churches and tabernacles.  

“The Eucharist is far more than a symbol. In St. John’s Gospel the Jews were asking, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.  For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.  Just as the living father sent me and I have life because of the father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.’  In 1059 Pope Nicholas II called a synod which declared Berengarius in error and made him sign an oath that “the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are after the consecration not only a sacrament (sign or symbol) but also the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.  

“It certainly looks like Jesus wanted us to take his words literally.  In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council declared that the ‘body and blood of Jesus Christ are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the appearances of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body by the divine power and the wine into the blood.’  
“The greatest theologian at the end of the middle ages in the 13th century was St. Thomas Aquinas.  He taught that all the sacraments are physical and verbal signs that point to something more than themselves.  In six of the sacraments that something more is a divine power that forgives, as in reconciliation or heals, as in anointing of the sick.  Sacraments, as St. Thomas taught, ‘cause what they signify.’ The Eucharist is the unique and greatest sacrament in that it contains what it points to, not only a divine power of spiritual nourishment in the sacred meal and redemption through the representation of Jesus’s sacrifice of himself, but ipsum passum (the one himself who suffered).  

“St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the true body and blood of Christ are in the Eucharist, even though they are visible only through faith, which rests upon the divine authority of Jesus. Finally, St. Thomas Aquinas pointed to the authority of Jesus as our greatest assurance for our faith in his real presence to us in the Eucharist.  

As we enter a new millennium, let us make sure that our faith in Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist is passed on to future generations.  As Catholics we have maintained our faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist for 2,000 years because Jesus insisted on our celebrating it, his apostles taught it, this teaching was handed down to us by the fathers of our church, and our church’s greatest theologian plus the councils of Fourth Lateran and Trent affirmed it.

Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnnycarville@gmail.com.