Dear Sisters, dear brethren, today we come to the final part of our five-week-long reading of the 6th chapter of St John’s Gospel in which we have been hearing in great detail our Lord’s teaching in preparation for the gift of the Eucharist, which was still in the future at the time of this important sermon in Capharnaum. By reflecting on this teaching we have been encouraged to meditate deeply on the true nature of the Eucharist which we celebrate each Sunday, and on the Body which Christ offers to us to receive in Holy Communion for our life and nourishment.
Over the past four weeks we have heard our Lord say to those whom He had miraculously fed with five loaves and two fish, that He is the Bread of life, He is the living bread from heaven, and that the bread He will give will be His flesh for the life of the world. Then when those people were shocked and indignant at this, He went on to say that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they will have no life in them - and that, on the contrary, whoever does eat Him, He will raise such a one up to eternal life on the last day. Now He has placed all this before them and this is their reaction: ‘This is a hard saying; who can accept it?’ It is in response to this question that our Lord states that no one can come to Him unless it is granted by the Father, and that ‘it is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless’ and ‘the words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life’.
What does Jesus mean when He says that ‘the flesh is useless’? Is He saying that the flesh He will give in the form of bread is without real effect? Hardly. At the time of the so-called Reformation, two leading heretics, Luther and Zwingli, claimed that the Church’s teaching about the Eucharist was contrary to Scripture. Now because they rejected what the Church taught and relied instead on their own interpretation of Scripture, they came to opposite views about the real meaning of our Lord’s words here, and almost came to blows over the matter. For Luther thought he was following Scripture faithfully by believing that our Lord’s words ‘This is my Body’ and ‘My flesh is real food’, were literally true. So, he defended the idea of the Real bodily Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Zwingli on the other hand pointed to the words ‘the flesh is useless’ and argued from that that, because we can detect no change whatever in the bread before or after the words of Jesus have been said over it, therefore our Lord’s words were merely symbolic, and that what we receive in Holy Communion is still nothing more than mere bread. Therefore, as mere bread it is useless to anyone except as a memorial or symbol of Christ’s death, and most certainly it is not a real, living presence in its own right, much less the actual living Body and Blood of Christ.
But our Lord cannot have meant what Zwingli said. Why would anyone object to the idea of bread as a memorial, as a mere representative symbol? If that is all our Lord had wanted to say at Capharnaum, no one would have been offended. On the other hand, if Jesus was in fact claiming that bread was to be made into His flesh and wine into His blood, then no wonder the people at Capharnaum said: ‘This is a hard saying; who can accept it?’
What then does our Lord mean by saying, ‘the flesh is useless, it is the spirit that gives life’. Here the word ‘flesh’ means our merely material nature, deprived of the spirit of life. But in the Eucharist, in the Body and Blood of Christ, bread is changed into something that is most certainly endowed with the spirit of life; it is the living body and blood of Christ, not a mere sign of something else, dead or alive. For how can our Lord say that we must eat His flesh and drink His blood in order to have life, unless that flesh and blood were filled with life that they communicate to us who receive them?
Now you might think that because of this, I am saying that where Zwingli got it totally wrong, Luther therefore got it right. But that is not so. Unfortunately for Luther, He made a massive mistake about our Lord’s words. For although Luther thought he was accepting the plain meaning of our Lord’s words in Scripture that ‘This is my Body’, he did not accept what the Church teaches about how this is to be understood. For Luther couldn’t get over the problem, as he saw it, that whichever way he looked at it, the bread was still there after the words of consecration where the Body of Christ now was as well. So, when our Lord said, ‘This is my Body’, He was simply saying that He was giving us His bodily presence together with the bread that conveyed His Body. Do you remember that I mentioned a few weeks ago the song which says that Jesus is ‘here in bread and wine for me’? That is pretty well what Luther thought. For he was trying to say that the consecrated bread is two different things both at the same time: bread and Christ’s flesh. But this is not what the Church ever believed or believes. Rather, the Church has always believed that the words our Lord said at the Last Supper - ‘This is my Body…This is my Blood’ - actually bring about a complete change in that bread and wine, so that once those words of our Lord have been pronounced over the bread and wine, they are no longer bread and wine at all, but they are completely, and only, Christ’s Body and Blood. All that remains of what was bread and wine is the outward aspects of them: what our senses tell us: what we see, what we touch, what we taste. But those things are not the substance of what we receive, only the appearances.
For our Lord’s words are transformative, which means that they actually have power to bring about a total change in the bread and wine. So, Jesus is not ‘here in bread and wine for me’. He is present in His flesh and blood under the outward appearances of bread and wine. Luther’s idea, that bread and wine were still there but so in a sense is Jesus is actually nonsensical. This idea is called con-substantiation: which means two different substances or ‘things’, bread and Jesus’s Body, are both in one place at the same time. But you can’t have two different things in one place at the same time. So, before the consecration, here on the altar I will place bread and wine; but after the consecratory words of Jesus, no longer will bread and wine even partly be here, but His Body and Blood totally, under the appearances of bread and wine. This change we call ‘transubstantiation’, which means a total and complete change of all the substance, or the entire thing, that is there.
Of course, this requires of us an act of faith. It is precisely because we cannot see, touch or taste any difference whatever in what is on the altar before the consecration and what is there afterwards, that we need to make an act of faith that our Lord meant what He said,
or else He would not have insisted on teaching something so precise and definite as ‘This is my body…This is my blood.’
As the Fathers of the Church teach, particularly St Ambrose and St Chrysostom, these words of Jesus, when pronounced by the priest at Mass, actually bring about a complete change from the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s Flesh and Blood. Indeed, St Ambrose also said that it would be ridiculous to deny that God can change one substance or ‘thing’ into another ‘thing’ when we already believe that He has created every substance or ‘thing’ that exists out of nothing at all.
Our Lord’s words at the Last Supper give life, and give life not only to the bread and wine which were dead matter until they were changed into Himself, but also give life to us who receive them in Holy Communion. Believing this is an act of faith. That faith, which inspires us to cry out ‘Amen’ when we receive Communion, can only come from the Father Himself. He plants that faith in our minds and in our hearts. St John Henry Newman wrote about the difference between faith and understanding in this way: ‘People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. [Transubstantiation] is difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it difficult to believe?’ Here Cardinal Newman drives to the heart of the issue. Understanding what substance is, and what it means to change from one substance to another, this is impossible - but believing it? No – Because Jesus has said it, and His Word is true. This is a matter of faith in God’s word as He has delivered it to us through the teaching of His Church. It was the same Cardinal Newman who wrote these famous words we often sing: ‘And I hold in veneration for the love of Him alone, holy Church as His creation, and her teachings as His own’. In other words, what the Church teaches is what Christ taught. To try and say that we can believe something different from what the Church teaches and yet hope to be faithful to Christ, which is what Luther and Zwingli tried to do, is to accuse God of contradicting Himself, which is utter nonsense, of course!
Last of all, we have heard in the Gospel an important exchange between our Lord and the Apostles when, as St John says, ‘Because of this [i.e. because of what Jesus had said about his Body and Blood] many of His disciples turned back and no longer went about with Him.’ Jesus turns to the Twelve and asks, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ We can surely understand His deep sorrow at seeing those who had been miraculously fed by Him, who had been so enthusiastic to find Him on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, now turn away for good on hearing this teaching. That also is how we know it must be true. If He had not meant something so extraordinary, He would have told the people that they had misunderstood Him, but no. And now He asks the Apostles the question, ‘do you also wish to go away and leave me?’ As so often in the Gospels when our Lord asks all the Apostles a question, it is Peter who speaks up: ‘Lord, to whom can we go?’ Indeed, to disbelieve the words of Jesus is, in effect, to turn away from Him and to look for someone else to go after. Would we want to do such a thing? No, because as Peter continues, ‘You have the words of eternal life’. How true! Jesus has the words of life that will take us into eternity. Those
words transform bread and wine into His Body and Blood, and by that Body and Blood in Holy Communion He transforms us into Himself. Like Peter we proclaim our faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, the Holy One of God, the perfect image of the Father, the Only-begotten Son of God. Peter says, ‘we have come to believe and know,’ meaning that faith, or belief, is not a matter of opinion, but of knowledge of the truth. When we put our faith in Jesus and in His words and in His Church’s teaching, we then know the truth because God’s word is true. Amen, Lord Jesus. We believe that under the appearances of bread and wine you are truly present in your Body and Blood, soul and divinity, in the Holy Eucharist, for us.
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