Source and Summit

This the truth each Christian learns,
Bread into his flesh he turns,
To his precious blood the wine:
Sight has fail’d, nor thought conceives,
But a dauntless faith believes,
Resting on a pow’r divine.
—From the sequence Lauda Sion, given during the Mass of Corpus Christi

As Catholics, we would do well to reflect on the Eucharist which the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the source and summit of the Christian life” (from paragraph 1324, and sourced to Lumen Gentium 11 which says that the Eucharistic sacrifice “is the fount and apex of the whole Christian life”).

In the Gospel of John, when Jesus claims, “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,” the Jews quarreled among themselves and asked “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” These Jews did not have faith in Jesus Christ. They did not trust God’s Word. A little bit later in the Gospel, Jesus turns to other Jews, who are also his disciples, and he asks them if they also wished to leave him. Simon Peter replies, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God” (see John 6:51-69). Peter, our spiritual father in the Christian faith, does have faith in the Christ.

Was Peter’s faith perfect? Far from it. He later denied Christ during his Passion. Peter is part of that long line of sinners since Adam and Eve. Imperfect though he was, he followed Christ as a Christian to the end of the race, his trial here on earth. So does our faith rest on Peter? Not entirely. Although Peter is the Rock upon which Christ builds his Church (cf. Matthew 16:18), Peter’s faith depends very much on Christ. Peter was the fertile soil in which the Holy Spirit planted faith. The gift of faith just as the gift of life and the gift of eternal life is not our own, but grace from God. We need to be receptive to that grace.

It is a mystery why the Father chose to express his love for us by having his Son take on our frail humanity. Why should He transmit this grace through human Body and Blood? And while this particular human body and blood is also Divine, God continues in this mode of transmitting the faith though human body and blood.

Our senses cannot perceive that Jesus is actually and truly present in the Eucharist. The accidents remain. Putting aside Eucharistic miracles, there is no test using the modern scientific method that reveal anything other than bread and wine. And so this is the apex of the faith, for if one cannot trust the Church (insofar as she is guided by the Holy Spirit) and if one cannot trust Jesus himself, then it seems natural to be skeptical about Jesus being actually and truly present in what appears to be bread and wine. One only has God’s Word on this.

And so regarding the Eucharist sacrifice—called "the breaking of the bread" in Acts of the Apostles—as the source, it seems to me that I would not be a Christian but for the Catholic Church. From the beginning, Christians in an unbroken chain witnessed to their faith, and many times their witness extended to the point of giving up their lives as martyrs. Without that faith, the belief that Christ, the Son of God incarnate, was crucified, died and rose again on the third day, everything would be undone. It’s not because any mere human being merits that trust. The Christian faith would be a failure if it were not for God. That is, with God, nothing is impossible; but without God nothing is possible. What I mean to say is that I trust the Father who gave us his Son, and I trust the Son who gave us his all in all, and I trust in the Holy Spirit whom the Father and the Son sent to guide His Church. The failure to give us eternal life would be the the failure to give us eternal life.

“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day” (John 6:54).