- It’s hard to beat the taste, smell and texture of fresh bread. Disappointing that it gets stale. Blue mould. Dead. All the food we eat is dying or dead. It feeds our mortal life until we die, too.
- Jesus is not dead bread but living. Not grown from the earth but come down from heaven. And He identifies this living bread with his flesh. His flesh had been mortal like ours. He did die. But He rose in the body, now alive with immortal life, not mortal life. It is this risen body, risen flesh (and blood), which He makes to become the Eucharist. Through it, He is transforming humanity and the world to become the dwelling place of the Trinity, not in the hidden way it is at the moment (God is everywhere), but openly when the end of time comes. The real presence of Christ in Eucharist is the humble sign that, in the end, He will be really present in the whole of creation. The Eucharist is the port of entry of the Risen Christ into our material world.
- Our mortal bodies hunger for food and drink to stay alive. It is really life that we hunger and thirst for, a life in which we will not need food or drink to stay alive, a life which itself wines and dines us. That is what eternal life does because the risen Christ Himself is our life. We draw eternal nourishment from His risen Body. We do it now in the Eucharist. We will do it in the Kingdom of God in a way which surpasses our understanding but which is described as the eternal banquet and wedding feast of the Lamb. We will feed on God eternally, just as we now feed on God’s earth until we return to it.
- And so, Jesus insists: unless you eat, drink, feed on me, you have no true life, no immortal life, in you. If you do eat and drink in sincerity of belief and conscience, the results are sublime: Jesus abides in us and we in Him; and we will continue to draw life from Him as He draws life from the Father. The Eucharist plants the Trinity in the depths of our identity and plants us in the depths of the Trinity.
- We will of course die one day to this mortal life. We need to be purged and cleansed of our mortality in body (death) and in soul (purgatory), but because through the Eucharist we have the Trinity in our soul, then the redemption in our souls will also be given to our bodies on the final day of resurrection. How God will accomplish this and how our risen bodies will be is largely beyond our ken. But we do know that our bodies, if we have not died at enmity with God, will not be alive with a mortal life, but with the life of God Himself. Those who have chosen to die at enmity with God will also rise, but not to eternal life; they will rise to eternal loss or separation from God in body and in soul.
- If we receive Holy Communion in faith and in union with the whole Church, and remain friends of God until death, that Communion will manifest itself openly in glory in the Communion of redeemed humanity with the Trinity and with the new heavens and new earth we have been promised.
- It’s important to add that Communion in the life of Christ in this way does not come exclusively through the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the highway to heaven as St. Carlo Acutis puts it, it’s the way Christ wants us to walk, but another main road there is the Word of God, and there are myriads of other minor roads whereby the good hearts of many who don’t know Christ are drawn, in the end, to Him. All roads lead to Christ, for only through Him can anyone come to the Father.
- Ever since our first Holy Communion, we have been growing more and more into the Risen Lord. We turn earthly food into ourselves, but the Eucharist turns us into Christ. With each act of reception of the Eucharist we are being prepared more and more to enter the great Mystery of Faith, of Christ’s presence among us and in us, of his gradual absorption of humanity and the material world into Himself. Let’s today resolve to revive our Eucharistic awareness, deepen our understanding of what we do and inflame our hearts with sincere love, devotion and adoration for the Risen Jesus in the Sacrament of the Altar.