It’s a curious fact of life that the food we eat to stay alive is itself all dead. Yet, no matter how well we eat, or take medication, to stay alive, we know that death will come. For some, mortality simply means that we will die one day; it’s a point in time. But in fact mortality is a constant feature of life: think of sickness, of fatigue or, more deeply, of sadness and sorrow. These are shadows of mortality we experience at any point between the womb and the tomb.

Death in any sense was never God’s will. In the creation account of the book of Genesis, everything points to life in abundance, for all created things, and especially for us. God gives food to all as an expression of communion between creation and the Creator; for all things exist in Him. Then, we didn’t need food to keep us alive because there was as yet no death. Still today we echo that original idea of food as communion when we sit around the table with family or friends. Food was originally a gift of love received with gratitude and with more love in return.

That circle of love was broken when, as we see in the symbolism of Genesis, the only creature with the freedom to break it, man and woman, chose to eat some food that God had not given them. They took it; they arrogated it to themselves. Consumerism was born. They had been warned beforehand that death would ensue, because death is the effect of freely breaking the communion of life with God, of trying to turn a gift into a right, of trying to be god unto yourself in deciding good and evil, in making an idol of your own will. In trying to be self-made gods, our first parents not only failed in doing so, they also failed their own humanity. They incurred death in body and soul and gave it a foothold in the rest of creation. Food now fed, not communion with God and creation, but mortality. It became primarily a means of self-defence, to survive and delay death, instead of a means of self-giving, of love.

We have got used to death, and even call it natural. But death is far from natural, as grieving mourners and their broken hearts testify. The Lord and Giver of Life created us to live: that is our nature. Death is absurd. It’s a monstrosity. It is the enemy of God, of humanity and of creation and it is the direct consequence of sin. The leaven in all sin is to live as if God did not live. But God alone is the source of life, therefore to choose and to remain in sin is ultimately to choose death, body and soul.

The way out of death is necessarily the way out of sin. There is only one such way, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His Cross is the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil; it is also the Tree of Life. Obedience to God in self-sacrificing love is the only measure of good and evil, the only victory over sin. The fruit of the Tree of Life is the Eucharist, which the Father freely gives to those who repent of sin. They can therefore again receive in gratitude and love this food of eternal life, of communion with God, with humanity and with creation. It is food given to sinners, not because we sin, but because we sincerely undertake the path of repentance from sin, that is, we choose life. If we were to receive the Eucharist with the same pride and arrogance of our first parents, we would only be courting an even worse death than them. It would be the folly spoken of in the book of Proverbs, a folly which God urges us to abandon for the wisdom of humility and repentance.

The Eucharist is therefore the bread and the cup of eternal life. That is why Jesus calls it real food and real drink: it feeds divine life in us while ordinary food feeds our mortality. That is why Jesus is so insistent, desperate almost, that we receive the Eucharist, with real faith, which means a life lived entirely for Him. He intends it to give life not only to our own individual souls and bodies, but through us to the whole of humanity and creation. He draws life from the Father; we draw life from Him; and in the same way, He wants the human race to draw life from His living and life-giving Body in the world, which we are. The Church is not just one human institution among others. She is the instrument chosen by God through which the living Presence of the Risen Christ communicates the life of the Eucharist and the light of the Gospel to the world, to give light to those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.

It is the Eucharist which makes us salty, to be salt to the earth, to empower us to give the taste of eternity to contemporary society and to all things truly human. We fail to understand the Eucharist properly if we reduce it to a sort of spiritual vitamin for private consumption. Eucharist propels us to be missionaries, to be prophets and prophetesses to our own circumstances and relationships. We are not just another NGO or socially aware group of people, but are sent like the city on a hilltop to allow the eternal life of Christ to shine and work through us so that He can attract to Himself those who do not yet know or love Him, or who have lost their way.

The mission of the Church is not to blend in and be dissolved into contemporary society. She is sent to bring God to the world, to point out and unveil where God is already present in the world: not any God, but the God who has revealed his Face and his will in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Such is our mission right here and now, brothers and sisters, and the Eucharist gives all the grace and power we need to carry it out. When we come to Mass, we bring our neighbours and our neighbourhoods with us; when we leave the Mass, we bring Christ to them. The Real Presence of the Risen Lord in the real food and real drink of the Eucharist makes us real agents of real change in the world. The world still hungers and thirsts for Christ. He will feed it and quench its thirst through us.