THIS IS Holy Communion
Catholic Piety Episode: The Eucharist, THIS IS
Among the difficult dogmas to grasp coming from a Protestant background, Baptism and the Eucharist are at the top of the list. Not simply the ‘Lord’s Supper’ or ‘taking communion,’ but the full blown John chapter 6 bread of life discourse. All Christian denominations take communion. Usually it is once a month or on special occasions like Easter. It is normally bread baked at the local grocery store and grape juice. Sometimes it comes in the form of a lunchable where there is a cracker on top of a plastic disposable shot glass wrapped in cellophane. That shot glass says a lot actually. My pastors would give a big speech on how we don’t believe that this is really the body or blood of Jesus and that it is a symbol of our faith and so here’s to Jesus. Raise your glass and let’s toast to Jesus. I guess we were doing shots for Jesus…with grape juice. It is incredible how much effort is taken to prove it is faith alone and not works, and yet is not obeying the command ‘do this in remembrance of me’ a work? And this is where I started to question things. “Do this in remembrance of me.” But wasn’t there more to those verses? What about ‘this is?’ What about ‘for the forgiveness of sins?’ I began to look deeper into the doctrine.
The Bread of Life Discourse
Jesus had just multiplied the loaves and fishes, and the crowds were following Him looking for more free food. But Jesus steers them toward a spiritual reality. In John 6:53-54, He drops an extremely difficult statement to the people:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
If Jesus was speaking metaphorically, this would have been the perfect moment to clarify. In Jewish law, consuming blood was strictly forbidden, which would make this statement a horrifying concept to His listeners. The crowd literally started arguing, asking, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Did Jesus back down? He didn’t backtrack and say, “Oh, don’t worry, guys, it’s just a metaphor”? No. He doubled down. In the original Greek text, the word used for “eating” shifts from phago (a generic term for consuming food) to trogo, which literally means to chew, gnaw, or crunch.
The result? Verse 66 tells us that many of His disciples drew back and no longer walked with Him. They left Him over this teaching. Jesus watched them walk away and turned to His twelve apostles, and asked, “Will you also go away?”
He was willing to lose followers rather than soften the literal reality that we must eat His flesh and drink His blood.
We read later in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus gathered with His apostles in the Upper Room. He takes the bread, breaks it, and gives it to them. He doesn’t say, “This is a symbol of my body.” Matthew 26:26-28 says explicitly:
“Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
Add in Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:23-25 and you get the full structure of the events and where we get the words of institution at the Mass.
“Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you.
Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.”
For some reason, in my Protestant days all I was taught was “Do this in remembrance of me.”
This left me with further questions. Aside from THIS IS my body and blood, we see that Jesus is doing something in Holy Communion. The blood is poured out for many; for the forgiveness of sins.
Holy Communion is a means of grace by which Jesus administers the forgiveness of your sins!
This is why St. Paul continues in 1 Corinthians on how eating or drinking unworthily brings judgement on himself.
“Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.”
Why would a symbol bring judgment on a person? How does a symbol forgive sins?
It must go back to what Jesus said in John 6 that,
“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
And so THIS IS must mean THIS IS his body and his blood.
The Early Church Perspective
The early church believed this from the very beginning. Let’s look at Saint Ignatius of Antioch. He was a disciple of the Apostle John, the guy that wrote John chapter 6. Around the year 110 AD, on his way to be martyred in Rome, Ignatius wrote a letter warning against heretics called Gnostics. He says,
“They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again.”
Think about that. Already by the year 110 AD, the defining mark of a true Christian was believing the Eucharist is the literal flesh of Christ.
A few decades later, around 150 AD, Saint Justin Martyr wrote a defense of the Christian faith to the Roman Emperor. He described early Sunday liturgies, explaining:
“Not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but... we have been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word... is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”
The early Christians took this so literally that the pagan Romans actually accused them of cannibalism. If they had believed it was just a symbolic cracker, they could have easily cleared up the misunderstanding and saved their own lives from the lions.
So what does the Catholic Church teach about these verses and what Holy Communion is?
The Catholic Teaching on the Eucharist
Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1385): “Anyone who is aware of having committed a mortal sin must receive the sacrament of Reconciliation before approaching Communion.”
Host: This is why Catholics place such a high premium on Confession. If we have severed our relationship with God through serious, deliberate sin, we must let Him restore us in the Confessional before we dare to receive Him in the Eucharist. To do otherwise is to place a crown of thorns back onto His head.
Through a miracle we call transubstantiation—which simply means the substance of the bread changes into Christ while the physical properties or appearance remain—Jesus humbles Himself to become our spiritual food. As CCC 1374 beautifully summarizes:
“In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist ‘the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.’”
When we are at Mass and we hear the Priest say the words of consecration, the bread and wine may look the same, the substance is transformed into the true body, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ.
The bread transforms into Christ’s body immediately after the priest says, “This is my Body.” The wine transforms into Christ’s blood immediately after he says, “This is the cup of my Blood.”
The Priest stands in persona Christi, in the person of Christ and Jesus is doing all the verbs.
This isn’t our work of obedience by remembering him. This is Christ coming down to administer grace to us. To feed us with His holy body and blood, to give us life and the forgiveness of our sins.
Knowing this we should run to Mass as much as we can. We should long to spend time in the adoration chapel before our Lord, still present in the eucharist. This has become the central part of my faith and as the church describes it, “the source and summit of the Christian life.” There is nothing that compares to being this close to Jesus.
+JMJ+
Rich