The Eucharist

One

Eucharistic Appearances

There is no part of our Catholic faith that should be more bizarre to outsiders than our belief in the Eucharist.

“There!” we say. “See that little white disk? That’s the Creator of the Universe!” Um, okay, says the non-Catholic. Not sure what to make of that. And we keep going. “Look!” we say, “In that chalice is the blood of God.” And a non-Catholic says, but it looks and smells just like wine. In fact, I saw somebody fill those little cruets from a newly opened wine bottle right before mass started. “I know!” We say. “It was wine! But now it’s God’s blood!”

How is that not crazy? How does that not totally vindicate the people who say that Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, is completely irrational?

Two

How is this not Irrational?

We are Catholics, we’re the fides et ratio people, the champions of faith and reason. We say that faith and reason, and faith and science, can never conflict because they are all sources of truth, and all truth has its source in the one God who is Truth, the God who can never contradict Himself. But doesn’t reason tell us that this is bread? Doesn’t science tell you that it has all the elemental makeup and chemical properties of bread?

The thing is, even though faith, reason, and science don’t conflict, there is an order to them. A good scientist knows that appearances aren’t the full truth of a thing. And someone who uses reason wisely knows that some things we can’t figure out on our own, we have to be told. A person who believes in Jesus Christ knows that He has the words of everlasting life and that trusting what He says gives greater certainty than any confidence we can have in our own intellectual powers.

So when Jesus says that the Eucharist is His Body, we believe Him.

Three

Jesus said so

Twice Jesus said that the Eucharist was His Body. He said it in the Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, where He said that His flesh is true food, and His blood is true drink and that unless a man eats His flesh and drinks His blood, that man will have no life. He also said it at the Last Supper when he held up the bread and said, “This is my body,” and took the chalice and said, “This is my blood.”

Now if Jesus is really God, then He can neither deceive nor be deceived. He can’t lie, and He can’t be mistaken. So we believe Him. We start with belief. We don’t tell the Lord that His words have to conform to our understanding. We accept. And then we see whether our understanding can conform to His words.

Four

Things aren’t always as they appear

Actually, once we accept the Lord’s truth, we can invoke science and reason to help us understand how what He says can be true. For instance, science has repeatedly shown us that things aren’t as they appear superficially.

To take one example: it doesn’t look or feel like the earth is hurtling through space, circling the sun and spinning on its axis. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t. And it doesn’t look like the earth is round. It certainly seems counterintuitive to think of people on the other side of the world standing upside down, hanging like bats from what is from our perspective the bottom of the earth. But that’s actually the way it is. 

Reason too can help us think of examples of the essence of a thing being transformed, even though its appearances remain the same. For instance, when your dog Fido dies, he has the same color, weight, feel, and smell – all the same appearances – the moment before he dies, and the moment after he dies. But in that moment, Fido has disappeared. Your beloved dog is gone, and what’s there now isn’t Fido. What does that show? It shows that the substance of something can change without any of the appearances changing. If a living thing can become something inanimate without the appearance changing, like an animal dying then why can’t an inanimate thing become something alive, like a piece of bread becoming the living God-man without the appearance changing?

So science and reason can actually support the plausibility of the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist. As long as you are willing to put your trust in Jesus first.

Five

We walk by faith, not by sight

The New Testament tells us that we walk by faith, not by sight. That we live our lives according to what we have heard, not what we have seen.

The Eucharist is the primary place where we prove whether or not that’s true for us. Do we go by superficial appearances, trusting our observational powers and personal impressions which we know by repeated experience are incredibly fallible? Or do we go by the word of God made man, made sacrament? Do we believe Christ in the Gospel, and so believe in Christ in the Eucharist? If so, then let us truly honor the Eucharist as God. Though we celebrate science and reason, let’s not be ashamed to live first and foremost by faith.