In the Sequence of today’s Mass we find this phrase: This truth each Christian learns, bread into his flesh he turns, to his precious blood the wine.” This is what Jesus did in His love for us on Holy Thursday, the night before He died. But Holy Thursday, overshadowed as it is by the somberness of Good Friday, inhibits us from suitably expressing our joy in receiving this divine gift. So, the Church established this feast in the 13th century so that we might reflect more deeply on the significance of the Eucharist and celebrate it more joyfully.
The Eucharist is the Lord’s perpetual and life giving gift that surpasses all human understanding, so it should not surprise us if many find it hard to accept the doctrine of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist…a doctrine that the Church has described as transubstantiation. But it was so from the beginning.
When Jesus declared that he had come to give us his flesh and blood as food, people found it a “hard saying.” But he did not run after them saying that he did not mean what he said. When he turned to his apostles and asked if they would also leave, St. Peter spoke up: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Today, the Lord turns to us and asks: “Do you believe?
St. Robert Bellarmine paints this interesting scene: Let us suppose that the last day has come and that our doctrine of the Eucharist turns out to be false and absurd. If our Lord now asks us…‘why did you believe this of my sacrament? Why did you adore the host?’ may we not safely answer him: ‘Yes, Lord, if we were wrong in this, it was you who deceived us. We heard your word., ‘This is my body,’ and was it a crime for us to believe you? We were confirmed in our mistake by a hundred signs and wonders which could have had you only for their author. Your Church with one voice cried out to us that we were right, and in believing as we did, we but followed in the footsteps of all your saints and holy ones.”
Today with the Church we say, “Lord, we believe! You have the words of eternal life.” Today’s feast is a “wake-up” call from the slumber of indifference, an antidote to our forgetfulness. When our religious practice becomes routine (and Holy Mass and Communion can become routine)—just another thing we do—St. John Chrysostom says we “consider at whose table we eat.” At this altar the Lord is made present, body, blood, soul, and divinity. From this table, “we are fed with that which the angels view with trepidation and which they cannot contemplate without fear because of its splendor.”[St. Thomas Aquinas]
Today’s feast then, is also a summons to be vigilant—to keep alive a reverence and awe for Jesus who makes himself present upon the altar at the consecration of the Mass and remains present for us in the tabernacle. We do this in many ways: cultivating a climate of silence in the Lord’s House; genuflecting or at least bowing while passing before the altar, going to confession prior to Holy Communion if we are conscious of serious or mortal sin; fasting one hour from food and drink (medicine is an exception) before Communion; making an audible response of faith by saying “Amen” at Communion; and by our prayer of thanksgiving at our place after receiving. We can hardly reap the fruits of Holy Communion by rushing out the door before the end of Mass!
The amazing truth this feast places before us is that the Holy Eucharist is not just some thing or mere symbol but Some One the person of Christ who created the whole world and whom the world cannot contain, who gives himself to us under the appearance of bread and wine. We make ours the plea found in today’s Sequence:
Very bread, good Shepherd , tend us, Jesu, of your love befriend us, You refresh us, You defend us, your eternal goodness send us in the land of life to see.