This Sunday we celebrate the Solemnity of the most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, the commemoration of the gift of the Eucharist that our Lord gave to us, so that we might have life within us. We are unique as Catholics, in that we still adhere to the original teachings of the early Church in terms of the nature of the Eucharist, that while it may appear to be bread and wine, it is truly the body and blood of Jesus Christ, just as Jesus said. This grace of being able to receive so precious a gift, even to this day, is through the action of the Holy Spirit, and the apostolic succession through the imposition of hands, that remains unbroken from the time of Christ.
In our Gospel reading today, we hear the dialogue that our Lord had with his followers. At the time there were roughly 80 or so of them, and when they heard the words of our Lord proclaiming that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood, many could not accept this and fell away. So, ask yourself, what would it take to make so many followers of our Lord fall away after having been with Him for so long, and enduring so much hardship in the process? What must He have said that was so plainly oppositional to them so as to cause this? It seems clear from the reaction of so many of those there that if the Lord had spoken as if He intended for the Eucharist to be either a purely mystical representation or merely a symbolic representation of His flesh and blood, His words would not have caused so much consternation and falling away. When we read John’s Gospel message today, it is quite obvious that Jesus was speaking both plainly and with very specific intent as to the nature of what He was describing. He was not speaking of mere bread and wine having a blessed status, and certainly not of a mere symbol; He told his followers quite plainly what He would be providing, and what they must do to have life within them.
For us to really grasp this, we should understand the context of the times and the background so that we may comprehend the difficulty his followers would have had with His words. The area around Jerusalem at that time was surrounded by pagan peoples and influences, who as a common practice performed blood sacrifices of humans, and sometimes consumed it as part of these practices. For a Jew, such acts were unthinkable, because God’s law forbade the consumption of blood, and certainly did not practice any of these kinds of sacrifices. To hear our Lord talk of His own sacrifice, and then be told that they must consume Him to have life within them, was more than many could bear. The only ones that remained after that were the twelve that Jesus foreknew from the beginning, because despite the difficulty of what He was saying, their faith in Him was greater, and so they remained.
The thing is, if we think about this analytically, this is some of the most compelling evidence we have that indicates our Lord’s meaning, that the Eucharist truly is His body and blood. More than seventy people who were intimately familiar with our Lord’s style of teaching and with the intricacies of the Aramaic language were plainly convinced of His literal intent to the point that they could not handle the message and left. The notion of our Lord’s words not being plain, as some would suggest, and who believe it was intended to be less literal, pretty much dies with the reaction of so many of those followers if we follow this logically. Likewise, if we follow the evidence in the scriptures, we whose roots to those present during the early times remain unbroken, must believe that our Lord’s words were just what He intended; a command to those of us who wish to have eternal life to partake of His Eucharistic sacrifice with the full knowledge and acceptance of its true nature. Moreover, if we seek further evidence of the nature of the Eucharist, aside from the words of scripture, our Lord has blessed us with examples in the form of many Eucharistic miracles that have taken place over the centuries since He spoke. We have physical evidence of the consecrated hosts changing their substance from the host to their actual form, that of flesh and blood. In multiple recorded instances in the Church’s history, this miracle has occurred. The most recent instance was recorded in Buenos Aires several years ago; the transformed host was sent for independent scientific analysis without anyone knowing its origin by then Cardinal Jorge Borgoglio (now Pope Francis), and the results revealed it to be exactly what our Lord had told us – flesh and blood, specifically from the heart of a man who had been through extreme trauma, and was from the area of what is now modern day Israel. You see, our Lord understands human curiosity, and the need we have to look at examples like this to help us grasp something so wondrous, and to strengthen us in our belief – He understands our nature and continues to care for us in this way.
With such a grounding in knowledge of what we receive, it is then also equally important for us to understand that in order for us to receive such a blessed gift, we must do so as worthily as we can. To receive the body and blood of our Lord in a state of mortal sin is a grave sin in and of itself and must not happen. If we look to the writings of Saint Paul, in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 27, we are told “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]”. You see, Saint Paul understood this link between the appearance of bread and wine and what was actually there – the body and blood of Christ, and so emphasized the importance of the state we are in when we receive it. We must therefore be the frequent recipients of God’s forgiveness and mercy through the Sacrament of Reconciliation in order to then receive the Eucharist in a worthy state. We must look carefully at ourselves each time, and perform an examination of conscience before we receive, and if necessary, wait until we have addressed whatever is preventing us to be in such a worthy state. Think about this for a second; can we really take in the body and blood of our Lord, the divine substance of His being, and place it within our body when it is stained with sin? To do so not only shows a fundamental disrespect, but directly contradicts what we know of God’s nature and His abhorrence of sin. It is easy, sometimes, to lose sight of the importance of how we receive the Eucharist, but we must be vigilant, and ensure we do so carefully. The gift we receive is too precious to allow otherwise.
The Deacons Bench 