Food.
Practically every event or celebration I can think of revolves around it. Even when there is no celebrating, we still need it. Our earthly life depends on it. We can’t get very far in this life without it.
Our spiritual life needs food too. The spiritual food that nourishes our soul is found in the consecrated bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist, “the source and summit of the Christian life” as the Church teaches (CCC 1324). Like our earthly food, we can’t get very far in our spiritual journey without God’s life within us.
But the food that satisfies our physical hunger here on earth is not the kind that can lead us to eternal life. Only Jesus in the Eucharist, received at Holy Communion in His Body and Blood, is the nourishment of eternal life, for He is “the living bread that came down from heaven” (Jn 6:51).
However, many Catholic Christians struggle with understanding how Jesus could actually be in the Eucharist. A Pew Study last year seemed to point to that struggle: only 31% of practicing Catholics believe the consecrated bread and wine at the Holy Mass truly become the Body and Blood of Jesus, but the vast majority do not, believing instead that they are mere symbols of His Body and Blood.
Yikes.
It is in the Eucharistic celebration at Mass that we commemorate and participate in Jesus’ Last Supper where He came together with His disciples and made an offering of Himself for all of mankind’s sins. It is a sacrament of Thanksgiving that Jesus instituted that unites and identifies us as Catholics. It is here at the Lord’s table that we discover who we are, why we are here, and what we are called to do. By His suffering, death and resurrection, Jesus becomes the spiritual food – made tangible in humble bread and wine — that nourishes our soul like nothing else can, and it has the power to transform hearts and change the world.
It is also a mystery.
That awe-inspiring moment of the Holy Mass is a scene played out in all Catholic Churches around the world and is familiar to all of us. It is the heart-stopping, breathtaking scene when the priest takes up the host and the chalice and echoes the same words of Jesus, “This is my body … This is the chalice of my blood … Do this in memory of me” and by the invocation of the Holy Spirit that the humble bread and wine become Jesus in Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, the Real Presence. The Church has a word for it – transubstantiation.
On this very significant day, the Church celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi (Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ). Since the year 1264 (that’s over 750 years!), the Church has set aside a special day to honor the Eucharist. It is in this “sacrament of sacraments,” as Saint Thomas Aquinas called it, where we encounter Jesus fully and intimately.
The suspension of Masses during the past three months here in Boston due to the coronavirus pandemic has been like a prolonged period of deprivation. For me, these long and trying months of home quarantine have only intensified my hunger for Jesus in the Eucharist, and I don’t believe I was ever alone in feeling that. So, it came as no surprise that when my parish finally reopened today, on this important feast day, it was a highly celebratory and emotional moment filled with immense gratitude to God for allowing all of us to once again receive Jesus in His Body and Blood, the spiritual food that we had hungered for so deeply and for so long.
The next time we step into Mass at any Catholic Church, leave no room for doubt. God loves us so much and invites all of us to a deeper relationship with Him, for He is the source of truth and all that is good. He is present to us in His Word proclaimed from the ambo, in the people we encounter, in His glorious creation, and definitely in the holy sacraments. It is in every Mass that God in the form of Jesus makes a gift of Himself for all of us sinners, a sacrifice He freely gives. He doesn’t want us to figure out the mystery that surrounds the Eucharist; He just wants us to believe, to adore, to trust, to allow Him to dwell in our hearts and transform us.
“…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you … For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (Jn 6:53-55).
The Eucharist is a mystery of faith that is impossible to explain in words and cannot be answered through science. We can choose to be like Saint Thomas (the doubting apostle) who needed visual proof of the Risen Jesus in order to believe. But what would Jesus say? “Blessed are they who have not seen me, but still believe!” (Jn 20:29). Sometimes it does take a personal encounter with Christ in our lives in order for us to believe. That’s when faith, even a little mustard seed of faith, can take root and thrive. May we always believe with joy in our hearts even when we have not seen with our eyes! Praise be Jesus Christ in His Holy Body and Blood!
Photo by Shalone Cason on Unsplash