(Since this year, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary replaces the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, I have nevertheless, provided a reflection for this Sunday in Ordinary time so that I can continue my reflection on the 6th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the Bread of Life Discourse)
Jesus said to the crowds:
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
Whoever eats this bread will live forever;
And the bread that I will give
Is my flesh for the life of the world.”
I still remember the day of my First Communion as if it was yesterday. It was an overcast morning yet, that did not tarnish the bright joy of this day for me. Since I’m of an age when the first reception of the Eucharist was preceded by the stringent fast from all food and liquid, including water, from midnight until Communion, I was ever so careful in brushing my teeth that morning lest an errant drop of water would break my Eucharistic fast.
In practicing for this all-important day, the good Sisters instructed us to let the host rest on our tongues and dissolve and, under no circumstances, were we to ‘chew the host’ lest ‘we hurt Jesus!’
All dressed up in my first suit and clutching my First Communion prayer book, I knelt reverently to receive the Lord, on the tongue, of course, since it would have been abhorrent to touch the consecrated host with my hands. However, my mouth was extremely dry from no water and no sooner did the priest place the host on my tongue, it somehow got stuck to the roof of my mouth! I panicked. For the life of me, I could not maneuver my tongue to ‘unstick’ it. I was frantic. Finally, it began to dissolve, and I was able to swallow the Lord of Life filling my little heart with immense joy!
As we continue our reflections on the 6th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel, also called the Bread of Life discourse, a common misunderstanding of the nature of the ‘Real Presence” of the Lord in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine, is betrayed in that simple admonishment of the good Sisters prior to my First Communion, “don’t chew the host lest you hurt Jesus!”
Last week as we reflected on the “What” and “Why” of the Eucharist, we focus our attention this week on the “How” question. How is Jesus truly and really present in the Eucharist. For the early Church the “How” question took a back seat to the “What” and “Why” questions concerning the Eucharist. However, in time, theological inquiry began to focus on the “How” question as Christians wrestled with this central Mystery of Faith and tried to understand the precise nature of how Jesus is present in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the theological genius of St. Thomas Aquinas who has left our theological musings on this question with the classic understanding of this question.
Before we venture to unpack what St. Thomas wrote, a word of caution about all theology. Another wise Dominican theologian and professor of mine in post-graduate school, used to remind us that all theology ‘merely describes the contours of mystery’ in human language. St. Thomas understood well that his theological reflections on the ‘How’ of the Real Presence possessed limitations and in, no way, captured completely the august Mystery of Divine Presence within the consecrated bread and wine.
To unpack the question of “How,” Aquinas did something that was ingenious to some and abhorrent to others of his time. He utilized the philosophical categories of nature of one of the most preeminent philosophers of Greek antiquity, Aristotle, to attempt to plunge the depth of Eucharistic Real Presence.
Aristotle posited that all created realty consisted of two essential elements: substantial matter or the deepest ‘essence of a reality’ and ‘how’ that ‘deepest essence’ was presented to our human senses in its ‘form,’ the external qualities of that essence. Perhaps, an example would be helpful. We humans possess the deepest essence of being human beings and we share that ‘essence’ with all of humanity. That substantial essence is made visible or concrete through our physical corporality. These are ‘accidental’ qualities, i.e., height, weight, nationality, color of eyes, hair, etc., that make present to our human senses and localize in space our essential being as humans. However, we are far more than our height and weight, our nationality and the color of eyes and hair. What differentiates us as human beings from, let’s say, pigs or cows, is far deeper than the external ‘accidental’ qualities of our physicality. We are essentially and substantially at the deepest core of our existence, human beings.
Aquinas, utilizing these philosophical categories, applied them to attempt to ‘unpack’ the vexing question of: How is Jesus present in the bread and wine?
On the night before he died, Jesus left his Church a lasting legacy of his real presence in the meal that would anchor and shape our deepest identity as Christians down through the centuries. Taking bread and wine, he said his now memorable words: This is my Body; This is my Blood. In other words, these utterly simple elements of earthly nourishment would, somehow, became his lasting presence until he comes again in glory.
Following the invocation of the Holy Spirit and the words remembering the Last Supper at every Mass, the bread and wine become the Real Presence of the Lord. Utilizing the philosophical categories of Aristotle, Aquinas would say that while the ‘accidental’ qualities of bread and wine would remain – it still tastes like bread and wine, looks, and feels like bread and wine – something utterly unique in the world of nature has taken place. The deepest reality of that bread and wine – it’s essential ‘being’ as bread and wine, has been transformed into the deepest reality of the Risen Lord, his substantial and real presence as the Second Person of the Divine Trinity whose life was given in loving sacrifice for us. Hence, Aquinas coined the revered theological term, transubstantiation to denote this wonderous change – the substance of the bread and wine has changed into the deepest reality of the Risen Lord, not an empty symbol or merely a remembrance of so great a gift, but the very gift itself for the life of the world.
The Eucharist is given to us as ‘food for our journey’ and, as such, we normally do not just let food ‘dissolve’in our mouths, we ‘eat’ it. There is, of course, no risk of ‘hurting’ Jesus by chewing, since his presence is not one that is in the ‘accidents’ of bread and wine, that remain, but in the realm of ‘substance’ that has now been transformed into the real and true presence of Jesus. Orthodox Catholic belief holds that this real presence is not contingent on the belief of the recipient and continues after the Eucharistic celebration. It is for this reason that we Catholics have the venerable practice of reserving the consecrated bread in the tabernacle so that those unable to be present for Mass due to sickness or advanced age, may receive the Bread of Eternity as well as being the praise-worthy focus of our prayers of adoration.
Theological words and their meaning remained the focus of St. Thomas Aquinas’ life particularly in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae. As death neared, however, Aquinas realized that theological words pale in comparison to the reality that they pointed to in describing the contours of mystery. Butler, in his famous Lives of the Saints, writes:
On the feast of St. Nicholas [in 1273, Aquinas] was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”
We owe a debt of gratitude to Aquinas for helping us gain an insight into the “How” questions of the Real Presence. But in the end, perhaps the Hymn that Aquinas himself wrote, Adoro te Devote, captures the essence of so great a mystery of our faith:
I devoutly adore you, O hidden Deity,
Truly hidden beneath these appearances.
My whole heart submits to you,
And in contemplating you, It surrenders itself completely.