We are getting closer to being able to gather together to worship God and receive the Eucharist, an oasis glimpsed on the horizon.
Technology is truly amazing. Had this pandemic struck a generation ago, we would not have been able to “live stream” our church attendance, and our separation from the Mass would have been that much more complete. Still, even with all of our high-tech access, there is no substitute for Jesus Himself in the Sacraments.
Some commentators fear that many people simply won’t return to Mass once the restrictions are lifted. This fear is not unreasonable. Recent bombshell polls revealed widespread ignorance among self-professed Catholics of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2019/08/new-survey-only-one-third-of-catholics-believe-in-real-presence/ This cuts to the very heart of the Faith.
To view the Sacraments – especially the Eucharist – as mere “symbols” is, I believe, to miss the essential point about who Jesus is in relation to God’s covenant with Israel. He is, in every way, the FULFILLMENT of what came before. (For example, “’Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill'” Mt 5:17; “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to [the disciples on the road to Emmaus] what referred to him in all the scriptures” Lk 24:27.) And, if that is the case, then the actions He commands – “do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24); “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them” (Mt 28:19) – are likewise greater than what prefigured them.
The Eucharist is greater than manna, but manna is a prefiguring type of the Eucharist. Jesus specifically associates Himself with the manna that sustained the Israelites in the wilderness (Ex 16): “‘I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.'” Jn 6:48-50. In roughly the year 387, St. Ambrose of Milan explained to his catechumens that the manna was the symbol which pointed forward to the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist:
All this took place as a symbol for us. You know now what is more excellent: light is preferable to its shadow, reality to its symbol, the body of the Giver to the manna he gave from heaven.
https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/eucharisttruebodyofchristheavenlymanna/ To consider the Eucharist to be a mere symbol is actually to make it even less than the manna (which, after all, provided much of the Israelites’ daily sustenance).
As with manna, so, too, with the Passover lamb, which God commanded the Israelites to sacrifice and consume every year to commemorate their redemption from Egypt. Ex 12:26-27. Scripture tells us the Eucharist was instituted by Christ at Passover. (Mt 26; Mk 14; Lk 22.) We know Jesus is “the Lamb of God.” Jn 1:36. As Scott Hahn asks,
But what does this mean to us today? How should we celebrate our Passover? St. Paul gives us a clue: “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival . . . with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:7-8). Our Passover lamb, then, is unleavened bread. Our festival is the Mass (see 1 Cor 10:15-21; 11:23-32). [ ¶ ] In the clear light of the New Covenant, the Old Covenant sacrifices make sense as preparation for the one sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our royal high priest in the heavenly sanctuary.
[. . .]
It is not enough that Christ bled and died for our sake. Now we have our part to play. As with the Old Covenant, so with the New. If you want to mark your covenant with God, to seal your covenant with God, to renew your covenant with God, you have to eat the Lamb –the paschal lamb Who is our unleavened bread. It begins to sound familiar. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:54).
Scott Hahn, The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth 25, 26 (Doubleday 1999) (italics in original). No longer simply a commemoration, nor just physical nourishment, the Passover lamb of the New Covenant is Jesus’ gift of His own body and blood, a sharing in His supernatural life.
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It would be tragic for anyone to walk away from such an astonishing gift.
The following anecdote sums things up well.
Once, in the late 1940s or early 1950s, the author Flannery O’Connor was a guest at a dinner party with the author Mary McCarthy, a former Catholic. O’Connor related the ensuing conversation in a letter to a friend:
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest is expendable.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/20417/pdf
The Catechism states (¶ 1392) that the Eucharist “preserves, increases, and renews the life of grace received at Baptism.” Baptism is also more than a symbol, and I will try to delve further into that topic in a later post.