Your desired outcome dictates how you act to get it. The more significant the outcome, the more significant the action. For Christ, the desired outcome is that each and every man and woman should live for ever, and that the world itself, the cosmos, the universe, should share in that life. For that reason, He undertook an action which is the most significant ever known. That action is still ongoing. In fact, it will go on for ever.

That action is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a verb before it is a noun. At face value, it means to give thanks. But for what? Or rather, for whom? Before answering that, let’s take a step back. Jesus says at one point in His teaching and ministry that He says only what the Father tells Him to say and does only what He sees the Father doing. That’s why He prays so much. It is in His prayer that he receives the insight and inspiration to know and do the Father’s will.

In this light, the Eucharist is not an invention of Christ. Rather it reflects and expresses the interior life of God. Within God, then, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit live and act in a Eucharistic manner: they, too, give thanks – for what, for whom? For One another. Each divine Person makes a gift of Himself to the Others in an exchange of eternal self-giving, and each responds to the Others by giving eternal thanks. This self-giving is also self-sacrifice, setting yourself apart, giving yourself up for the Other. Eucharist thus comes to designate both the self-offering, the self-giving and the thanksgiving of the One who has received that self-offering.

From all eternity, what God wanted for humanity and for the created world was that we should become part of this Eucharist in God: the act of self-giving or self-sacrifice, on the one hand, and the act of thanksgiving on the other. God not only wanted that we should give thanks to God and to sacrifice ourselves for Him. He Himself also wanted to give thanks to us for welcoming Him, for accepting His self-sacrifice to us, for loving and thanking Him.

God knew that we would foolishly say no to His plan. But His love would not be thwarted. His whole being trembled at the thought of losing us. To make it possible for us once again to say yes to Him, He took that very Eucharistic action that is in God and turned it outwards towards us. The Son of God thus became flesh so as to become Eucharist for us and in us. He took our no and made it His own; He took on our sin as if He were the sinner. He died our death as if He were the condemned. Having destroyed sin and death in His own Body on the Tree, He rose in that same Body on the third day. Having thus dealt with our no and overcome it through that self-giving, self-sacrificing love of God, He has now firmly put the ball back in our court. We are given the choice: to remain closed in our no, or to open up by His grace and to say yes to Him, to believe in Him, to learn again how to love, to self-sacrifice, to perform the action of Eucharist, to be Eucharist.

At the Last Supper, the Apostles had little clue as to what was happening. But after the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the gift of Pentecost, the Apostles began to understand what He was doing at the Last Supper and what He had earlier taught them about the bread of life that they were to eat and the blood of life that they were to drink. They saw that the ritual meal of the Last Supper, which the Mass is, and the sacrifice of calvary and the resurrection, not only explain each other: they are in each other, they are each other. The same reality is present in sacramental form in the Mass as was present on Calvary and in the empty tomb. Christ’s death and resurrection are therefore not just historical events now past, but, through the Mass, permanent realities across time and space. They are the new and ongoing beginning of humanity and of the cosmos. They are the core and consuming reality of all time and space, of the Church and of the world, and therefore of the life of every human being. In the Eucharist, Christ’s death out of love for each of us is permanently available, the life-giving Spirit who raised Jesus in the Body is always accessible. That’s why we can say that our lives are more truly part of the Eucharist than that the Eucharist is part of our lives. Not just the bread and wine, but we ourselves and the whole universe is being transubstantiated into Christ.

What the Lord asks in return is that we now withdraw from our no’s to Him, that we respond with a sacrifice of thanksgiving by renouncing everything in our lives that is not worthy of Him. He well knows that this takes time and effort and involves steps forward and backward. He knows we are fragile and weak, but in drawing us patiently and compassionately towards Himself He wants us to let go of what offends His love and our own dignity. He wants us so to let Him love us that we will no longer wantanything incompatible with our own personal Eucharistic self-sacrifice to Him. And there is no question that He is more committed to our freedom from what holds us back than we are ourselves. Therefore, He will most certainly help us if we ask Him. His desired outcome, His endgame for each of us is to live for ever, to share in the Eucharistic life of the Trinity along with a humanity and universe redeemed. He wants the Eucharist to revive us eternally.

And so the Eucharist is not just a holy thing we receive or a holy ritual we attend. It is the inner life of God brought to earth and into history by the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and made living bread for the life of the world. There is no greater reality to which we can dedicate the love of our hearts, the effort of our wills or the focus of our minds while on this earth. What a privilege is ours! And what a responsibility, if we truly want it! If I may supplement Blessed Carlo Acutis, the Eucharist is not just our highway to heaven: it is how and who and what we will be in heaven.