Fr Billy Swan
Dear friends. On this Feast Day of Corpus Christi, I would like to share a few thoughts on the faith of the Church in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Is it really true? Do we receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ in the Mass? Or is it merely a symbol or a sign but nothing more? Of course, the answer we give to these questions depends on faith but here are a few of the foundations stones on which our faith in the real presence is built.
As we read in today’s Gospel, Jesus invited his disciples at the Last Supper to take bread and eat it for ‘This is my body, given up for you’; similarly to take the cup for ‘this is my Blood poured out for you’. Since the very beginning, the earliest disciples of Jesus including those who knew him, understood that these words were more than merely symbolic. The bread and wine they took that night was somehow identified with Jesus himself and their union with him. This is also true in the Gospel of John where Jesus teaches that ‘unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you will not have life in you’. This caused upset to those who heard these words – so much so that John tells us that many stopped following him. But rather than toning his teaching down, Jesus insisted that his teaching on the Eucharist was true.
In the early Church, all the saints and writers on the Eucharist were in no doubt that the bread and wine at the Mass really and truly contained the presence of the Lord Jesus. They taught that when we receive the Eucharist, it was God’s way of uniting himself to us in the most intimate and lovingly powerful way. For example, the early writer Justin Martyr wrote of the Eucharist:
‘For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food that has been made into the Eucharist by the eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus’ (First Apology, 66).
This was the unanimous faith of the Church for 1,500 years until the Reformation. And despite the turmoil of that time, faith in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist has endured up to this day and to this Mass – that when we receive holy communion, we truly receive Jesus Christ, crucified and risen who comes and dwells in us and unites himself to us.
In these more scientific times, many struggle with this teaching. How can bread and wine be changed into something completely different? But when we look at the natural world, we see how material things can be changed into something completely different too. Think of a vine growing in the earth. It takes water from its leaves and the ground and over time changes that water into wine. Think of coal that is changed into diamonds over thousands of years. Think of the caterpillar who become a butterfly, a completely different creature than it was before. Think of sand that becomes a pearl. If God can change caterpillars into butterflies, coal into diamonds, water into wine and sand into pearls using time and pressure, then can he not also change bread and wine into something completely different?
But the most important reason why we believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is because of what he said and because we trust in his word – ‘Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in them’. This is the awesome mystery of our faith that we profess once again on this great feast of Corpus Christi.
Today we join with our ancestors in our faith and centre ourselves once again on Jesus, really present in the Eucharist. It is here he waits for us and desires to unite himself to us again. Let us not hesitate to welcome him now and whenever we come before the Blessed Sacrament where he waits for us with an open heart of merciful love.
I conclude with words from a friend of mine with whom I lived with at the Irish College in Rome. His name was Fr Ragheed Ganni and he was a priest from Iraq. He was martyred for the faith in Mosul, Iraq, 17 years ago on 3rd June 2007. Shortly before he was killed, he spoke at a Conference on the Eucharist in Bari, Italy where he said to the crowds: ‘For us Christians in Iraq, the terrorists take life, but the Eucharist gives it back’. He also shared how ‘at times I wake in the mornings full of fear. But then when I celebrate the Eucharist and hold the host, I know that it is not me holding him but he who is holding me’.
Fr Ragheed and other martyrs of the Eucharist did not die for a symbol or a sign. They died because of faithful love for our Lord Jesus Christ really present in every Eucharist we celebrate. O Sacrament most holy, O sacrament divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment thine!
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