“You are what you eat,” my mother said. She encouraged me to eat good food so that I would live a healthy life. Mothers continue to tell their children, “You are what you eat.”
Long before your mother or mine voiced these words, St. Augustine taught that in the Eucharist we become what we receive. Every time we receive Communion, we become the Body of Christ.
When we receive the Eucharist, we are remade, rebuilt, transformed. We become what we eat.
When the priest, deacon or Eucharistic minister shows us the Host and says, “the Body of Christ,” we respond “Amen,” signifying not only that “we believe this is Christ” but also our conviction that we as the Church are His Body in the world.
The Eucharist, we Catholics believe, is the summit of our worship of God and the source of all the life-giving actions that we perform individually or as the Church.
It’s not principally our allegiance to the pope as head of the Church that makes us Catholic. It is, rather, our presence here, Sunday after Sunday, and our reception here, Sunday after Sunday, of the Body and Blood of Christ.
“We become what we receive in the Eucharist” is a consoling and life-affirming truth of Catholic faith. We heard these words from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Brothers and sisters: The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.”
But now the going gets tough!
A truth that repels
We hear in John’s Gospel words that repelled most of Jesus’ own followers – words that continue to repel many persons today:
“The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”
This sounds so much like cannibalism that it revolts some. Many Catholics find it hard to understand and accept. Yet Jesus says clearly and unequivocally: The host IS my body! The cup holds my blood!
The Eucharist is not a metaphor or a symbol. As the Catholic author Flannery O’Connor famously exclaimed, “Well, if it’s just a symbol, the hell with it.” The Eucharist is the Real Presence of Christ. It emphatically is not a symbol of Christ’s presence with us. It is the reality of Christ among us.
We eat his flesh and drink His blood, and we ourselves become the Real Presence of Christ in the world. This is a hard saying – let me briefly try to explain.
Things can be real in different ways: This candle on the ambo is a real thing. The nervous feeling that I have right now, and the bored feeling you have right now are real feelings. What we might call “conditions of world,” relationships among things, can be real. “The sky is overcast,” describes an actuality.
Likewise, there are sacramental realities in which Christ enters some physically real object in a different and deeper than ordinary way. In the sacraments God’s presence, whether in water, bread, wine or oil, creates a new reality. Not by magic, but by a divine love so generous that it generates something new and dazzling from something plain and simple.
In baptism, through water we die and rise sacramentally with Christ and become something new. We become Christian. In the sacrament of matrimony through the reality of marital intimacy, two Christians become one flesh in Christ.
Becoming the Body of Christ
In the same way, in the Eucharist Jesus becomes fully present in ordinary bread and wine, creating new reality: the intimate union that God wants with human beings, with you and with me.
Filled with love and hugging their infants tightly, mothers say, “I could just eat you up!” Jesus, filled with love and hugging us closely in communion, says, “I want you to eat me up!”
Why? Because “This is my flesh for the life of the world.” We become what we receive. We become the reality of Christ in and for the world.
As the Body of Christ, we feed the world as He fed the 5,000; we heal the world as He gave sight to the blind man; we bring peace to the world as He did by dying and rising.
Therefore, if you believe with St. Augustine that we become what we receive, make a throne of your hand or tongue at Communion and, affirm “Amen!” Then take and eat the Body of Christ. Affirm “Yes. This IS the Body and Blood of Christ,” and “Yes! We are (with all our felicities, faults and foibles) the Body of Christ given for the world.”
Deacon Clarke E. Cochran serves at St. Peter Parish in Charlotte. This is a revised version of a homily his preached on June 11, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ.
Learn more:
At www.eucharisticrevival.org: Find Church resources, videos, educational materials, prayers and more at the National Eucharistic Revival movement's website - designed to restore understanding and devotion to the Eucharist.