During this month of August, the Year B Lectionary is digressing from the Gospel of Mark at Sunday Mass. Beginning on the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time and continuing for five weeks until the Twenty-first Sunday, we hear John, chapter 6, which includes the Bread of Life Discourse. When instructing catechumens in the Real Presence of the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus in the Eucharist, John 6 is one of the go-to scriptural references.
John 6:52-58
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,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me
will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever."
I have never understood how Bible-alone believing Christians can read this passage and not take it literally. How much more emphasis could Jesus have placed on His words? I pose this question to our Protestant brothers and sisters: Do you have life within you if you do not eat His flesh and drink His blood?
The sacrifice of the Mass is a re-presentation of the same once and for all sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. Jesus is the sacrificial Lamb of God. Like the animal sacrifices offered under the Old Covenant, this perfect sacrifice in the New Covenant must be offered by a ministerial priest. Where else besides the Catholic Church can one find a continuous line of ministerial priests to act in the person of Christ in offering the bread and wine that become the body and blood?
Normally when the bread and wine are consecrated in the sacrifice of the Mass, the accidents or appearances remain while only the substance changes into the body and blood. The Church calls this change transubstantiation, the change of substances. Last week in our OCIA (RCIA) class, we examined some of the rare occasions where the appearance or species of the host also changed. Where those miracles have occurred and could be scientifically examined, the bloody substance was determined to be heart tissue from a heart that had suffered damage, the blood type AB. Think about that next time you receive Holy Communion!
(See the Eucharistic Miracles of Buenos Aires, Lanciano, and others.).
