"I had a pentecostal friend once tell me that 'this is my body' actually means 'this represents my body'." A parishioner told me this after Mass this morning. It is quite remarkable what theological gymnastics people will go through in order to avoid the truth. It is also remarkable for Christians who claim to believe in miracles to refuse to believe in the miracle of the Eucharist.
Today is Corpus Christi (also known by its overly elongated name: the solemnity of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ). Today the Church tells us to remember the significance of what happens on the altar at every Mass: that amazing change of bread and wine into body and blood. This is important because modernism has infected most of us to the point of where we easily grow bored with things that we are familiar with.
Of all the things that we can become bored with, the Sacrament of the Eucharist is the worst. It is the worst because it is the miraculous gift that God has given to us. I wish that I could describe with mere words in this post the true nature of the Eucharist, or at least the full weight of how amazing it is for God to have given it to us. Yet, I cannot do so. There are not words in the English language that fully communicate just how enormous a blessing it is for us to be given the opportunity to receive, in our very bodies, the actual body and blood of the Second Person of the Trinity.
At times I ponder what the faith would really be like if God never had given us Christ in the Sacrament. All we would have is some mental knowledge, and some spiritual feelings. There might be a "sense" of the presence of God, but nothing that could be touched and felt to confirm it. It would be an overly spiritualized religion with little to keep it pertinent to us (not much different from ancient Gnosticism). Yet, we are a physical and spiritual people, and God gives to us a physical and spiritual means of receiving Him. If Jesus had never been incarnated in human flesh, then it would be understandable that He would not give Himself to us in physical form. Yet He did come in the flesh, and He did hand on to us a means by which we can receive Him regularly.
What an amazing thing it is for God to be willing to give us this great gift. He did not have to do so, and sadly, I can remember the days as a protestant where I believed that God did not give us the Eucharist. My heart aches for all of our brethren who do not genuinely believe this beautiful truth. I know that they seek a greater devotion to our Lord, but if one rejects "some" of Jesus under the guise of being faithful to Jesus it is a sad confusion to live in. Devotion to the Eucharist is devotion to Christ, for He is truly present in the Sacrament.
Seeing things as God sees them is always a great blessing, but in the Eucharist it is even more so. What do you see when you look at the host during Mass? The priest holds it up and says "behold the Lamb..."; do you see "the Lamb" Himself? Do you see what God sees? For when God looks down on the altar after the consecration, He sees "this my sacrifice and yours" and joyfully accepts it because it is Christ Himself; His own Son. I have said it before, and I will keep saying it; if we truly appreciate what God does on the altar, we would be forever changed by it. We would never want to leave.
