When we receive Holy Communion, we hear the words, “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood,” to which we dutifully answer, “Amen.” But have you ever considered exactly what those words mean?

Today’s Gospel asks us to examine Jesus’s statement in a new way, because when we really look at them, his words are as shocking now as they were two thousand years ago. Jesus is telling us to eat his flesh and drink his blood! Little wonder people thought he was suggesting cannibalism when they first heard this teaching.

As Catholics we receive the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ each time we receive the Eucharist. But do we really believe that? It’s a question worth examining because in the Mass, Jesus is truly made present under the appearance of bread and wine.

Each time we attend Mass, we celebrate the fact our God loves us so much that he nourishes us with himself so that we can become saints. It is both the greatest gift—and greatest mystery—of our faith. Ultimately, it is also the principal reason to be a Catholic—in order to receive the Lord in Holy Communion, just as he commanded the Jews of his day…and invites us to do today

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“ He therefore let you be affl icted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food unknown to you and your fathers, in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.” In this evocative text from Deuteronomy, we see into the way that God makes history and its events into lessons of wisdom for his people. At this early stage in the formation of the Israelites people, God brings them out of bondage from Egypt; yet, he allows them to suffer in order to form their obedience to and reliance on him. This will be a vital lesson, one to which the psalmists and prophets will return often to help Israel remember its reasons for covenant fidelity to God.

This same lesson for Israel can work in just the same way for the new people of God, the Church. We grumble often, just as did the Hebrews, over our difficulties. Like them, we sometimes lack the faith to see that everything God allows to happen to us, whether positive or negative in our perspective, is intended for our good. Every difficulty prepares us to adhere to him with a deeper obedience and love. Like Israel, the hardest lesson we have to learn is one of the simplest: that God is infi nitely good and only wills our good.

S t. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians gives us the earliest description from the Christian era of the Church’s faith in the Eucharist. Jesus, of course, would have uttered the clear words that we hear today in John’s Gospel many years before Paul’s letter (written around 57 AD), and those words very much help us to see what Paul is referring to. But if we didn’t have John 6 (or Luke 22) to help us, we could still go a long way to reconstructing the Eucharistic Faith of the earliest Christians.

Here Paul says that the “cup of blessing”—likely a reference to the third cup of the Jewish Passover Seder that Jesus offered at the Last Supper—is a “participation in the blood of Christ,” and then that the “bread that we break”—likely an echo of the many New Testament references to the “breaking of bread” as a common facet of the early Church— is also a participation in his body. This word in the Greek is koinonia, which is sometimes translated as “communion” or “fellowship,” as well as “participation.” It comes from the root koina, meaning “common.” In the many uses of the term in the New Testament, it implies a deep form of shared life. Paul goes on to say that this sharing of the Body and Blood of Christ makes for both a mysterious sharing of his life and a mysterious sharing of oneness in his Body, the Church.

The Church usually pairs the first Old Testament reading and the Gospel reading so that we can see that Jesus is the fullness of revelation and the summation and completion of the divine plan. But this habit of pairing Old Testament and New Testament texts to show their interrelation and to cast light on the mystery of Christ and his Church is not something made up by the Church. Rather, it is something she inherits from Christ and the Evangelists who recorded the words and acts of his ministry. When Christ says of his own Body and Blood, “This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever,” he is making a clear association between the manna of the Exodus, which fed the natural hunger of the Hebrews in their desert journey, and the new manna from Heaven, which he will give to feed our deepest hunger. And just as the Exodus manna was real food, so too is the bread he will give: “For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.” And this real sharing of his Body and Blood will yield just the sort of koinonia that St. Paul mentions in our Second Reading: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” The Eucharist is thus the sacrament that binds the Church together into Christ's Body.

MEDITATION:

RESOLUTION:

The next time you receive Communion, really think about the fact that you are receiving the actual Body and Blood of the Lord, under the species (or appearance) of bread and wine. Make sure that you are in a worthy state (no serious sin) before you receive.