It is important when considering the eucharist to separate the "how" question from the "what" and "why" questions. How do bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ? We do not know. We can try to explain what happens in a way that is not utterly ridiculous to the mind. But ultimately we cannot explain how the change takes place.Why the eucharist? Because Jesus, at the Last Supper before his death and resurrection,chose to leave us with a physical sign of his self-offering on the cross and of his continuing presence in us, his Church. Jesus told his followers to, "do this in memory of me."
Every time we gather to celebrate the eucharist, therefore, we "proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." (1 Corinthians 11.26) This act of proclaiming involves not just our remembering a past event together. It involves Christ's making that event "come alive" for us so that we may be moved to participate in his suffering and death. That is why the celebration of the eucharist is the most intimate and important way in which Christ comes to share his life with us.
In the eucharist, Jesus is present in the physical signs of bread and wine, which become his own body and blood, and he is present also in the worshipping community, which becomes the physical sign of his continuing ministry in the world. How do we understand what happens in these two changes?
First we must understand something about sacraments. Sacraments, for Catholics, are physical signs of a non-physical reality. Why are physical signs needed? Because to know anything, as humans, we usually begin with what we can see, hear, feel, taste, and touch. God works with what is ordinary for humans. The non-physical sign of which sacraments are a sign is what Catholics call "sanctifying grace", that is, the indwelling of God in our hearts. Without God's coming to dwell in us in this way, we would hardly be able to know and love him. But there is more. Sacramental signs are not symbols which only stand for or represent something else. Through the physical signs of the sacraments, God actually causes what the sacraments represent to happen, namely his dwelling in us. There is still more. The eucharist is unique among the sacraments. The bread, the wine, and the community of believers do not just represent the presence of Jesus; they are the presence of Jesus. That is why, unlike some Protestants and Anglicans, Catholics believe that the eucharist is not just symbolic. Thus Catholics normally do not receive the eucharist in churches that do not share the same understanding of the eucharist; likewise, the church usually discourages non-Catholics from receiving the eucharist at Catholic celebrations, unless they desire to partake in the body and blood of Christ. We should pray and do everything possible to come to some common understanding of the eucharist with our Christian brothers and sisters so that, one day, we may all gather round the same table of our Lord.
So what does happen in the Catholic eucharist? We believe that, when the priest lays his hands over the bread and wine asking the Holy Spirit to come down on them, and when he says the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, "Take this all of you and eat it. This is my body...", "Take this all of you and drink it. This is the cup of my blood...", the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Jesus but keep the appearances of bread and wine. It is not dead flesh and blood that is present, but living flesh and blood that brings us into contact with the whole person of Jesus. This is true of both the flesh and the blood. That is why the church allows Catholics to receive the eucharist "under one species" (usually bread only) when there are large numbers of people at the eucharistic celebration.
That Jesus is really present as flesh and blood is a difficult thing to accept. It was difficult also for the Jews of Jesus' time to accept his words: "I am the living bread which comes down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." (John 6.51). They asked, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (John 6.52) And John's Gospel tells us that "after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him." (John 6.66)
It is primarily through faith and love, which develop gradually in the context of a personal relationship with Jesus, that Catholics recognise his presence in the bread and the wine. It is the sort of "recognition" that comes with familiarity with someone, like the experience of one who "knows" that one's spouse or best friend is in a crowded room even before actually seeing him or her. The presence of Jesus in the eucharist is not just a physical presence; it is also an interpersonal presence. We recognise in the bread and wine SOMEONE whom we love quite a bit. We should not be discouraged if we do not believe right away; it takes time, much prayer, and most of all the grace of God to achieve this level of intimacy with him.
But the church does not discourage us from using our minds to try to understand what happens, or at least to show that what happens is not as ridiculous as it might seem at first. For instance, in the seventeenth century, the church accepted the attempt by St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) to explain the change that happens to the bread and wine as a "transubstantiation". He used the ideas and language of Aristotle, an Ancient Greek philosopher, to do this. Basically Aristotle distinguished between "substances" and "accidents". Substances are things that can exist independently in the world, like tables, rocks, trees... Accidents exist only as descriptions of substances, e.g. colour, size, shape... Aquinas held that, in the eucharist, the "substance" of bread and wine is changed by God to the "substance" of flesh and blood, while the "accidents" (size, shape, colour, texture, taste...) of bread and wine remain. This is only one way of explaining what happens; theologians today also use the ideas and language of recent philosophers to try to explain the same change.
In the eucharist, Jesus also is present in the community of believers that gathers together. The unity of this community is the physical sign of Jesus' continuing presence and ministry in the world. In sharing the one bread and the one cup, we not only share intimately in the life of Jesus but also in the lives of one another. That is why the eucharist is said to "create church," and be the foretaste of our life in heaven. It helps us to grow toward the true unity of the saints who love one another through mutual concern and self-giving. It was said that one distinguishing characteristic of the early church was the extraordinary degree of love that was manifest in its members--"See how they love one another."
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