Christ in the Eucharist David Elliot Originally published in Issue V  of Vulgata, February, 2002.

He's a terror, that one-
Turns water into wine,
Turns wine into blood-
What on earth does he turn blood into?
                      --Christopher Derrick in New Oxford Review, October 1981, p. 23.

Although millions of tons of ink have been spilled by learned authors on the subject of the Eucharist, there seem to be only a few serious bones of contention surrounding the matter, and so it is to these that we must turn.  To begin with, we see that after what is arguably the most famous of His miracles - the feeding of the five thousand - our Lord enjoyed such a meteoric rise in popularity that the well-fed masses began swarming and tried to force Him to become King.  But their cries of "This is of a truth the Prophet who is to come into the world" would, within twenty-four short hours, blister upon their lips and be replaced with grumbling as our Lord revealed to them the inner meaning of the multiplication of the loaves.  So difficult would His teaching on this prove that all of the crowds and most of His disciples would abandon Him, leaving only the half-hearted Twelve behind.  What then was this massive stumbling-block that forever annihilated Christ in public estimation?  It was His flesh and blood.  He told them, in no uncertain terms, that they were as good as corpses unless they ate His flesh and drank His blood, and they reacted with fury.  Now to a good Catholic groomed in a nice bourgeois setting, the idea of receiving the body and blood of Christ won't cudgel the brains too badly.  It's simply what one grew up with.  The belief in receiving the body and blood of our Lord often seems inscribed in the very air we breathe, and we have grown very comfortable with the idea.  But imagine if you had never grown up in a culture steeped for two thousand years in this imagery.  Imagine if, out of the blue, a wandering street preacher with dust in His hair and thunder on His brow had told you on some sweltering day in Judea to begin dining on His flesh and blood.  "Avid" is probably the last word that would be used to describe our reaction.  The Eucharist is indeed a great mystery, a scandal to reason, and the sooner we admit this the sooner we can talk sense.  But this is how God intended it.  "Truth" says Chesterton, "must be stranger than fiction; for we have made fiction to suit ourselves".  This is not to say that we simply bray like asses when muddleheaded logic if foisted upon us.  The dialectical case for the Eucharist is iron-clad, but few except Ph.D's would find it edifying.  If anyone is interested in this logical spelunking, I recommend to him Elizabeth Anscombe's On Transubstantiation.

But with any trepidation we might face, consider that it would be far more difficult for a first century Jew to accept these teachings than it would be for us.  In the Old Testament eating a man's flesh and drinking his blood were so vociferously taboo that they were punishable with death.  So how do we think that a Jewish hearer would react to such passages of our Lord’s as "I am the Living Bread, which came down from heaven.  If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give, is My flesh for the life of the world"; "He that eats My flesh, and drinks My blood, has everlasting life: and I will raise him up on the last day.  Unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man you have no life in you.  For My flesh is true food and My blood is true drink.  He that eats My flesh and drinks My blood, abides in Me, and I in him"; "He that eats Me shall live by Me" etc. (John 6: 51 ff.).  These words buzzed like mosquitoes in their ears because they (like us) were quick to circumscribe the world within ready-made boundaries and then cry foul when the façade crumbled.  It is reminiscent of the two tadpoles who sat discussing the possibility of a realm beyond their little pond.  One tadpole said to the other: "I think I will stick my head above the water to see what the rest of the world looks like.  The other tadpole quipped back at him: “Don’t be stupid.  Don’t try to tell me that there is anything else in the world besides water!”  The fact that we sport so cagey a disposition in the face of lavish heavenly riches is probably what makes man the jest of the Universe.

Christ told us to be fishermen.  Apologists included.  This means that when we throw our fishhooks into the sea, we often pull up red-herrings.  Perhaps this is nowhere more true than with the Eucharist, where I have heard a lot of arguments to the effect that Christ was only speaking figuratively in this passage and that to interpret the eating of the flesh and blood literally would be to take the dead letter at its deadest.  Thus fundamentalists will argue that when Christ said "I am the bread of life.  He who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst" (John 6: 35); what He meant to say was that going to Him is like food and believing in Him is like drink.  All that talk, therefore, of eating and drinking Him simply refers to having faith in Him as Lord and Saviour.  The problem with this - to say the least - novel  interpretation, is that for a first century Jew (as for an Arab today) the phrase "I will eat your flesh and drink your blood" when used figuratively referred to a vow a vengeance to be achieved by slander and false accusation (for an example of this see Micah 3:3).  "To interpret the phrase figuratively then" Fr. John O'Brien writes in The Faith of Millions, "would be to make our Lord promise everlasting life to the culprit for slandering and hating him, which would reduce the whole passage to utter nonsense."

Also, if Christ was only speaking figuratively here, why did the previously moonstruck crowd thumb their noses at Him?  After all, nobody balked when He said "I am the door", or "I am the vine", because both of these statements were understood as being symbolic.  But when Christ told them to eat His flesh and drink His blood, they knew exactly what He was driving at, and they would have none of it.  In fact, He did not merely say to "eat" His flesh.  The Greek word He used was trogon, which means to "gnaw", or "chew", further driving home the pungency and earthiness of the doctrine.  Note also that He prefaced the discourse by saying "Amen, amen, I say unto you", which, as Peter Kreeft notes, was an old rabbinical formula meaning "Take this literally!  Don't weaken it in any way.  I mean it in the strongest possible sense.”

But in the Last Supper Christ does not say "This symbolizes my body" (even though He explained what was symbolic to His disciples.  See Matt. 13:10 ff.), or "Here is my body" (which might imply that the bread was still present, as in Lutheran consubstantiation), but "This is my body". Nor is any haven from the supernatural tenor of the Eucharist to be found in the words "Do this in memory of me", since, as the Lexicons point out, this phrase can equally be translated "Offer this as my memorial offering" (though it usually isn't for literary reasons).  The Passover Lamb of the Old Covenant was eaten as a memorial too, but this doesn't mean that a real lamb wasn't eaten or that scarlet blood wasn't shed.  It is the same with the Eucharist

Here we must be careful to point out that Christ is not re-sacrificed upon our altars, but that the once for all sacrifice of Christ (eternally present before the Father) is re-presented under the sacred species so that He may nourish us with His own divine life (the theme of the letter to the Hebrews).  So the Eucharist does not nullify Calvary, it applies to us its fruit.

But here the fundamentalist may furrow his brows and trot out the classic proof text for denying the literal truth of the Eucharist.  This text caps off John 6 and appears when the crowds have already dispersed and only the disciples remain.  At this point Jesus has already said in one thousand and one ways that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood, and as the crowds fade into the woodwork, the disciples pipe in with their own two cents: "This is a hard saying; who can accept to it?"  Jesus responds and tells them: "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life" (John 6:60 ff).  Whenever all other objections to the Eucharist fail, this is the text that is appealed to.  When the house of cards crumbles, this is seen as the ace on the table.  "The Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing" - this seems to mean that Christ has been speaking spiritually rather than materially all along, and that they are to interpret His words as figurative and not literal.  But this results from a patent misreading.  "Flesh" in the Biblical sense does not refer merely to the biological organism; to muscle, tissue, veins, blood, fat etc.  "Flesh" is not the meatcage, but rather the "old Adam", that is, self-worshipping man in his fallen state, the black sheep careering from the fold.  It is analogous to the Biblical use of the term "world", which does not refer to God's green Earth with all its teeming oceans, snow-capped peaks, and valleys of snapdragons; but rather to the self-destructive civilization of fallen man, to the Tower of Babel erected and re-erected.  Thus St. Paul can speak of idolatry and sorcery as sins of the "flesh" even though they are spiritual (Gal 5:20), and say that "By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified" - "flesh" referring to fallen man as a living soul rather than just a bag of bones.  The proper and perennial interpretation of this passage is that Christ was telling the disciples that they would not be eating dead flesh (the way a vulture eats a carcass), but that they would receive His body fully alive with the soul present and the Holy Spirit vivifying it.

Now if I have erred in making it sound like only the Catholic Church is a believer in the Eucharist, please forgive me.  The Eastern Orthodox Church (the Chinese Dragon of Christendom) has a robust faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the Protestant Churches have retained some vestiges.  But only vestiges.  Just as many of us want a plastic cross rather than a wooden one (it is much easier to carry and doesn't challenge one's faith), many also opt for a wheaten Eucharist rather than a bloody one.  It is, after all, so much less wild.  There is no danger of the glorified Lord shattering our complacency in it or of Heaven and Earth fleeing away at its touch.  But the Biblical and Catholic view of the Eucharist will not be buffaloed into concessions.  Here, where it matters most, it is all or nothing.  We must not, as Christians, choose the more popular and easy-to-swallow option of pretended presence versus Real Presence simply because it wins applause and brings home the laurel.  To do so would be to gloss over the true beauty, the unsung beauty, and end up in disillusionment; bringing to mind the story of the man who had a choice to marry either a beautiful but unknown servant girl or a famous but ugly opera singer.  He chose the opera singer and the night after their honeymoon he took one look at her in the full light of day and cried out: "For God's sake, sing!"

We have been venturing into controversial waters here, by seeking to define and to defend the Eucharist.  One can almost see dotting our subject the old warning at the far edge of tea-stained treasure maps: "Here there be dragons!"  But the point is that there is treasure to be found.  The treasure is so great that it would make the most fainthearted traveler laugh off as impotent skeletoned booby-traps and dragon-fire if he only knew what awaited him.  But many Catholics, I think, might shy away from this grand adventure.  "Why not just let sleeping worms lie?" they say.  Why risk drawing ecumenical blood?  We're happy with the Eucharist, and other people seem happy with their spiritual liveries, so why the need to proselytize?  Not only this, but undue sword-thrusts of the apologetic persuasion seem to prove a stumbling-block to unity with other Christians.  "He who would have nothing to do with thorns" I have been told, "should never attempt to gather roses".  But surely such objections miss the point.  Only the most swollen-thumbed fop could fail to pick roses without being pricked by thorns.  So here: if we truly believe that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ, then why don't we act like it is Jesus Christ and tell our brethren about it?  The spoils of victory far outweigh any possible consequences of defeat, so why aren't we shouting it from the rooftops, each in our own way?  Suppose you found out that Jesus Himself was present in a decrepit old Church down the street from you.  There He was, as truly present as when He walked the dusty roads of Palestine two thousand years ago.  Wouldn't you rush to the Church in a delirium of joy, leading everyone you could find to see Him like a modern day Pied Piper?  Of course.  Traffic would stop, kids in pajamas would fly from their houses, old men with canes would bound like sprinters, and the Church would soon burst from the ocean of bodies.  And now for the good news: this is exactly what we've got.  Jesus Christ is truly present on the altars of our Churches.  He is risen and glorified.  The only difference is that His glory is veiled behind the appearances of bread and wine.  But here appearances are proverbially deceiving.  After all, a bride still has the same beautiful face even when the white veil she wears hides all the lyricism.  So too the light of Christ's divinity is no less luminous because He hides it in the Eucharist, knowing that it would blind us.  He's there, truly there, and though we cannot see Him, "more blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed."