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You say you are eating someone’s body and drinking their blood. You say you walk up the aisle and receive what appears to be bread and wine, but which is, according to you, Christ’s Body and Blood.
Do you have a question?
The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) described Christians as cannibals. Many of Jesus’ followers simply went away when he was recorded as saying, “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him” (Jn 6:56 ff). It is a hard saying.
An answer might be found in the word “sacrifice.” I do not reference that word in today’s meaning, which is: to give up something you like, e. g. candy in Lent. Or, as parents might say: “I sacrificed my own interests in order to raise you kids.” This is a good meaning—to abstain from something—but not the one at issue here. There is a longer history of the word sacrifice, and significantly, it involves body and blood.
In ancient times, the tribes of the world tried to please whatever gods their tradition held, in order to get heavenly favors: avoidance of storms, of drought, or starvation, and so on. By offering their best to the heavens, they hoped to win over high gifts to the earth from their gods.
And they often killed what was being offered! Why would they kill the gift?
Because by slaughtering it—the best lamb from the herd, for instance, or whatever else they were offering—they made it available for the gods. The lamb or dove (or young girl!) represented the best things that belong to earth, which by death are freed from earth and sent up to heaven.
Think of it this way:
Send the best of our world to heaven so that the best of heaven might come down to us.
This desire to be at one with the gods, at one with their gifts and the good things they provide, is lodged deep in human culture and human nature. In time, the one God gave his people a connection with God’s own self—this was the real God, not the ones pagans had fancied. But now, God reversed the order of things by sending a gift into the world in the first place, instead just responding to gifts received.
Notice the difference.
Instead of people sending the best of earth to heaven so that the best of heaven could come down to them, their Abba performed the reverse: s/he
sent the best of heaven (Christ) to earth, in order that the best of earth
could convincingly go up to heaven (Christ on the cross).
Christ originated from the kingdom of heaven and yet was of the earth. Therefore he achieved for us the perfect unity of heaven and earth. Animals could not choose to be sacrificed, but Christ did freely choose it, out of love, out of unity with us.
On the night before he suffered, Christ gave his disciples sacramental signs of what would be fulfilled the next day: he handed them his body and blood under the appearance of bread and wine. He told them to consume it, a gift from God. Thus the sacrament became a presentation of the bloody sacrifice of the cross, but in an unbloody form.
This is the answer to the question with which we began, “why do you and I eat his body and drink his blood”? From the above we see that we do this in order to take part in Christ’s sacrificial presentation of all humanity to the Father. His body and blood are an offering of the best of us, but also the worst: our sinfulness, our errors, our forgetfulness. All of these he takes unto himself, and presents them as the price of love and forgiveness.
And this is why we walk up the aisle and receive what appears to be bread and wine, but which is Christ’s Body and Blood.
John Foley S. J.
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