51st

INTERNATIONAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS

Christ in Your, Our Hope of Glory (Col. 1:27)
Jan 24-31, 2016, Cebu City, Philippines

Hungering for the Bread of Life

By Bishop Robert Barron

The fathers of the Second Vatican Council referred to the Eucharist as the source and
summit of the Christian life, that from which authentic Christianity flows and that toward which
it tends. It is the alpha and the omega, the be-all and the end-all of Catholicism. Therefore,
understanding the Eucharist is key to the renewal of Catholic catechesis and evangelization. If
we get our Eucharistic theology wrong, the entire Christian project will go off the rails.
Many years ago, I had the privilege of distributing Communion in St. Peters Square at
Easter Mass. As the people surged toward me, they stretched out their hands and pleaded,
Padre, per favore, per favore. They seemed, for all the world, as though they were starving
and this is precisely the correct spiritual attitude toward the Bread of Life. If we dont take it in,
we will, in short order, starve to death spiritually. The great English apologist Ronald Knox
made the trenchant observation that, though practically all of Jesus commands are honored, for
the most part, in the breach, there is one dominical command which has been consistently and
faithfully observed up and down the centuries: Do this in memory of me. Despite our
stupidity, weakness, corruption, and moral blindness, Christians have, strangely enough,
followed this particular prescription. It is as though the Lord knew that he had to intervene to
assure the endurance of the Eucharist.

What I should like to do in the course of this talk is to examine this great mystery under
three classic rubrics: meal, real presence, and sacrifice. I will do so by examining three
beautiful passages from the New Testament, one from Luke, one from John, and one from
Matthew. My hope is to clarify your minds, but above all to awaken your hunger.


The Road to Emmaus

One of the most compelling Eucharistic texts that we have is the story of the two
disciples on the road to Emmaus. This narrative, found in the twenty-fourth chapter of the
Gospel of Luke is a masterpiece at so many levels: literary, dramatic, psychological, and above
all, spiritual. It has inspired poets and painters and spiritual teachers up and down the
Christian centuries, and its central theme is the Eucharist. In point of fact, it is a remarkably
beautiful iconic display of what we do at the Mass. Therefore, it rewards a very careful reading.

The story opens on Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection, and it focuses on two
disciples of Jesus who are going the wrong way. Everything in the Gospel of Luke centers on the
holy city of Jerusalem. The Gospel begins and ends in the Jerusalem Temple, and the entire
ministry of Jesus culminates in his journey to the capital. Even after they have seen the risen
Jesus, the apostles are told to stay in Jerusalem until they receive the Holy Spiritand this
reception indeed occurs in that city on Pentecost. Therefore, as they walk dejectedly away from
the Holy City, the erstwhile followers of Jesus give unmistakable evidence arent following the

Lord anymore. We are meant to identify with these two people, for most of us, who profess to
be disciples of Jesus, end up walking the wrong way as well, operating at cross purposes to the
one we claim to be our Lord.
It is of supreme importance that, at the beginning of the Mass, just after the sign of the
cross and the greeting, we are invited to call to mind our sins. And then, echoing the language
of the blind Bartimaeus from the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, we say Kyrie eleison,
Christe eleison, Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy). This
move stands athwart all programs of perfectibility and any attitude of self-sufficiency or self-
complacency. As we enter into the drama of the Mass, we realize that we are broken, blind,
incapable of saving ourselves, wandering in the wrong direction. Through a thousand different
means of communication today, we are told that all is well with us, that we are beautiful in
every single way, that we have the right to invent ourselves according to our whims. A
philosophy of self-esteem indeed holds sway in our culture, but it is repugnant to a salvation
religion such as Christianity.
We are then told, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them, but they were
kept from recognizing him. It is a curious feature of many of the resurrection narratives that
the disciples have a hard time recognizing the risen Lord. We recall that, in Matthews account
of the Ascension, the followers of Jesus worshipped, and nevertheless doubted. In Lukes
description of the first appearance to the disciples in the Upper Room, we are told that they
thought they were seeing a ghost, and in Johns narrative of the post-resurrection breakfast by
the Sea of Galilee, the Beloved Disciples has to reassure his somewhat puzzled colleagues It is
the Lord! Some of this confusion was certainly a function of the sheer novelty of the
experience: they literally could not believe what they were seeing. But to a degree, it was also a
function of their moral and spiritual incapacity to take in the truth of the resurrection. The
fallen mind contributes to the fallenness of the will to be sure, but the causal influence runs in
the opposite direction as well, the twisted will conducing toward the warping of the mind. In
short, those who walk the wrong way dont see aright, and not seeing aright, they tend to speak
incorrectly. Therefore, moving away from Jerusalem, the two disciples cannot recognize the
crucified and risen oneand their speech about him is muddled and incoherent.
Jesus gently asks them what they are talking about, and they respond, Are you the only
one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days
(Lk. 24:18)? With delicious irony, the Lord asks, What things (Lk. 24:19)? They then proceed
to lay out, with admirable precision, the salient facts of Jesus life and career: He was a
prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our
rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; And what is more, it is
the third day since all this took placesome of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb
early this morning but didnt find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of
angels, who said he was alive (Lk. 24:19-23). They had the data correct, including the
insinuation of resurrection, yet they were walking dejectedly away from Jerusalem. This was
because they lacked the unifying pattern that could gather the hard facts into a meaningful
whole. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein commented that one of the most puzzling
problems in philosophy is how to see something as something. One might see every element of
a clever cartoonall of the characters, all of the attendant objects, the caption, etc.but might
nevertheless not get the joke. For getting a cartoon is not a function of seeing any new element;
it is instead a function of grasping a form, having an insight, seeing it as something. We indicate
this process through the symbol of a light-bulb going on, and this is apt, for light is not so much

another element in a composition, but rather the condition for the possibility of truly seeing the
composition as a whole.
The one who referred to himself as the light of the world then speaks: How foolish you
are, and slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer
these things and so enter his glory (Lk. 24:25)? Then taking them through the whole of the
Jewish scripturesMoses and all the prophetshe revealed the pattern of redemptive
suffering, which renders coherent the Bible as such and which makes sense of his own
Messianic career. The Mass commences with an acknowledgement that we are lost and in need
of a savior; it continues with the liturgy of the word, Christs own explication of the Scriptures.
Vatican II reminds us that when the Bible is proclaimed and the homily is delivered, it is indeed
Christ who is speaking to us and disclosing the great pattern.
As they approach Emmaus, Jesus gives an indication that he would go on further, but
they press him to stay. This is the strangely compelling power of Jesus. Inauthentic and
superficial versions of Jesus come and go, but when the real Christ is on display, people will
crowd around him as surely as they hemmed him in during his earthly ministry. Stay with us,
say the disciples of Emmaus, and men and women today echo these same words, once they get
even a glimpse of Jesus.
At table with the two disciples, Jesus takes bread, gives thanks, and offers it to them,
repeating precisely the words and rhythms of the Last Supper, and in that moment, they
recognize him, at which point he disappears from their sight. Though they had undoubtedly
begun to see in the course of Christs own Scriptural exegesis, they truly and completely saw in
the great Eucharistic act of blessing and breaking bread. This of course corresponds to the
liturgy of the Eucharist, the climactic moment of the Mass during which Jesus becomes really,
truly, and substantially present to his people under the appearances of bread and wine. I will
return to this theme of the real presence in detail later in this presentation, but suffice it to say
for now that the Eucharist is the revelation of the form par excellence. There is no more
complete way to know Jesus in this life than in and through the Eucharist, which is precisely
why Vatican II referred to the this sacrament as the source and summit of the Christian life
and why St. Thomas Aquinas said that, while in the other sacraments, the virtus Christi (the
power of Christ) is present, in the Eucharist ipse Christus (Christ himself) is on offer. This is
why the goal of all evangelization is ultimately to bring people to the Eucharist. Showing the
beauty of Catholicism is indispensable, but it is not enough; awakening interest in the faith is
required, but it is not enough; exciting active seeking on the part of a prospective believer is
essential, but it is not enough; firing the hearts of people with inspiring preaching is wonderful,
but it is not enough. Evangelization reaches its fulfillment only at the Eucharist, when a
believer is brought to a full encounter with ipse Christus.
What sense can we make of the fact that Jesus, upon being recognized, immediately
disappears? Von Balthasars comment is illuminating: He disappears into the mission of the
Church. The risen Jesus has taken to himself a new body, which the Church refers to as his
mystical body. This is none other than the Church spread across space and time, which
functions as his eyes, ears, hands, mouth, and heart. The Jesus who was physically present
walking the roads of Galilee, healing the sick, preaching the Kingdom, mounting the cross, and
rising from the dead has gone to the Father, but he still walks among us and heals and preaches
and suffers and rises precisely in and through his mystical body. Into this body, he has, as it
were, disappeared.

And we see what this looks like: They got up at once and returned to Jerusalem (Lk.
24:33). The narrative began with the two of them going the wrong way, and it ends with their
definitive and enthusiastic turn around. Despite the lateness of the hour and the danger of the
road and the threat hanging over them as disciples in Jerusalem, they return in haste to the Holy
City. They make a beeline for the Church: There they found the Eleven and those with them
assembled together (Lk. 24:33). Gods consistent promise to Israel was that he would gather
them together from where they had been scattered. The Church of Jesus is the new Israel, and
shared mission is what keeps it together. Henri de Lubac, one of the most influential
theologians at Vatican II, said that, after the words of consecration, the most sacred words of
the Mass are Ite, missa est: Go, the Mass is ended. He meant that the Eucharist finds its
fulfillment in the sending out on mission of those who have received the body and blood of the
Lord. Vatican II emphatically taught that the purpose of the Church is to Christify the world, to
bring the Lumen of Christ to the Gentes (the nations). This happens precisely in the measure
that allow Christ to disappear into our various missions.




John 6

The ancient symbol for John the Evangelist is the eagle, so chosen because that bird was
believed to be able to fly closest to the sun with open eye. This signaled the fact that, of all the
evangelists, John saw the light most clearly, that his mystical vision was keenest. The most
penetrating and thorough Biblical presentation of the Churchs Eucharistic faith is found in the
extraordinary sixth chapter of Johns Gospel, which commences with an account of the
miraculous feeding of the five thousand and concludes with the inexhaustibly rich discourse of
Jesus on the bread of life. As is the case with the account of the road to Emmaus, there are many
links between this Johannine narrative and the celebration of the Mass.

The story begins with a statement of Jesus magnetic attractiveness: Jesus went across
the Sea of Galilee. A large crowd followed him, because they saw the signs he was performing
on the sick (Jn. 6:1). Once again, the authentic Jesus is always compellingeven to people in
our increasingly secularized world. The conviction of the Church is that everyone is seeking
Jesus at least implicitly, since he is the very Logos of God and hence the fulfillment of the
deepest longing of the human heart. We are told that Jesus went up on a mountain and there
sat down with his disciples. On the Biblical reading, mountains are places of encounter
between God and human beings, where God, as it were, comes down and men and women go
up. Sinai, Moriah, Tabor, Isaiahs Holy Mountain, Mt. Zion, etc. are all sacred trysting places.
The Mass is the privileged place of encounter and hence it is the mountain par excellence. The
posture that Jesus assumes on the mountain is not insignificant. In the ancient world, a teacher
sat, and his disciples arranged themselves at the feet of the master. Therefore seated on the
mountain, the Lord is in the attitude of the teacher, and thus we are meant to understand that
an instruction of some weightiness is about to unfold. Here another link to the Mass is evident.
The first major section of that great prayer is called the liturgy of the Word, and Jesus himself,
as we saw, is seen as the speaker and interpreter of that Word.
Looking up from his seated position, Jesus sees the enormous multitude that had been
drawn to him, and he muses aloud, Where can we buy enough food for them to eat (Jn. 6:5)?
We come to learn thereby that Jesus is interested not only in instructing the crowds but feeding

them as well. Copying this rhythm from teaching to feeding, the Mass moves from the Liturgy of
the Word to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The disciples bring forth a poor pittancefive barley
loaves and two fishand make the commonsensical observation that this is woefully
inadequate for so many. But Jesus presses forward, making the customary Eucharistic moves in
regard to the bread: taking, giving thanks, and distributing. And everyone is fed. There is a
theological principle in play here that is of crucial significance, namely, that God has no need
vis--vis the world that he has made. The Creator of the universe is rightly described as self-
sufficient, utterly perfect and happy in himself. Precisely because he stands to gain nothing
from the world, whatever is given to him breaks against the rock of the divine self-sufficiency
and redounds to the benefit of the giver. From this principle follows as a corollary what St. John
Paul II called the law of the gift, namely, that ones being increases in the measure that one gives
oneself away.
During the Berakah prayer at the sacred liturgy, the priest, on behalf of the people, offers
to God the small pittance that had been brought forward: some wafers of bread and some wine
and water. But precisely because God has no need of these gifts, they come back infinitely
multiplied for the benefit of those who made the offering. Through the power of Christs word,
those gifts become his very body and blood, the only food capable of feeding the deepest hunger
of the human heart. This liturgical rhythm is beautifully conveyed by the laconic lines, Jesus
took the bread, gave thanks to God, and distributed it to the people who were sitting there. He
did the same with the fish, and they all had as much as they wanted (Jn. 6:11). When the
sacred banquet is finished, we are told, they gathered up twelve baskets of fragments that had
been left over. No number in the Gospel of John is ever without significance, and this one
indicates the twelve tribes of Israel, implying that the entire nation is meant to be fed in this
way, and by extension, the whole of the new Israel which is the Church. This scene is also meant
to remind us of the Eucharistic liturgy, at the close of which the fragments of the consecrated
bread and remainder of the consecrated wine are carefully gathered up and preserved for the
upbuiding of the community.
We are told that, immediately following this miracle, the people wanted to make Jesus
king. But the Lord, sensing the inadequacy of their conception of kingliness, crossed over to the
other side of the Sea of Galilee. Tracking him down in the synagogue at Capernaum, the people
press in upon him and commence to interrogate him. He tells them, in no uncertain terms, that
they should not be questing after earthly bread but rather the food that lasts for eternal life
(Jn. 6:27). This is, of course, a delicious echo of Jesus words to the Samaritan Woman at the
Well, to whom he promises water bubbling up in you to eternal life. When they press him to
specify what he means, he clarifies: I am the bread of life; those who come to me will never be
hungry; those who believe in me will never be thirsty (Jn.6:35). And then he becomes even
more explicit: I am the living bread come down from heaven. If you eat this bread, you will live
forever. The bread that I will give you is my flesh for the life of the world (Jn. 6:51).
At this point, the crowd balks and protests, and understandably so: How can this man
give us his flesh to eat? (Jn. 6:52). I characterize their reaction as understandable, given the
assumptions that any pious first-century Jew would have had concerning the consuming of flesh
and blood. Several times throughout the Old Testament, the eating of an animals flesh with
blood still in it was explicitly forbidden, for blood was appreciated as the life force and hence as
belonging uniquely to God. Therefore, it would have been all the more disgusting and
theologically objectionable to suggest that human flesh and blood should be offered for
consumption. Given every opportunity, therefore, to soften his words or to give them a more

poetic, metaphorical interpretationas he did when faced with Nicodemuss objections to

speech about being born againJesus in fact turned up the heat. He said, Unless you eat the
flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will have no life in you (Jn. 6:53); and lest there
be any doubt, he added for emphasis, For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink (Jn.
6:55). The original Greek that lies behind our translation is even more pointed on this score.
The word most typically used to convey the sense of human beings eating together would be
phagein, but Jesus uses the word trogein, which has the sense of gnawing or chewing,
designating the manner in which animals eat. He will simply not allow his audience (then or
now) opt for an easy symbolic reading. Along with the institution narratives themselves in the
other Gospels and in Pauls first letter to the Corinthians, this is the Scriptural ground for what
Catholics refer to as the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Up and down the centuries,
orthodox Catholicism has consistently resisted attempts to compromise the objective realism of
the Eucharistic presence, even when that resistance has proven massively unpopular. In fact,
the sixth chapter of John ends with an eerie anticipation of the conflict that would accompany
the Eucharist these last two millennia: Because of this, many of Jesus followers turned back
and would not go with him anymore. So he asked the twelve disciples, And youwould you
also like to leave (Jn. 6:66-67)? It is worth remarking that, were Jesus audience taking his
words in a purely metaphorical sense, it is hard to imagine why they would have reacted in
such a vehement way. What appears clear is that they understood his realism here only too
well.
Having grasped the meaning of Jesus words, can we begin to understand how the state
of affairs he describes is possible? It might be best to begin with a formula of the Council of
Trent. Attempting to explain the manner in which Jesus becomes really, truly, and
substantially present under the forms of bread and wine, the fathers of Trent say that this
presence is affected vi verborum (by the power or virtue of the words). They are referring, of
course, to the words of consecration, the priests repetition of the very words that Jesus used
over the bread and cup at the Last Supper. But why should these words in particular have a
reality-changing quality? Let us consider the power of even our ordinary human speech. Some
words carry a denotive or descriptive value: they tell us what is the case. But other words,
spoken by the right person in the right context, have a transformative value. Thus, a properly-
deputized and uniformed umpire of the National League shouts the words Youre out! as a
player slides into third base, and those words have in fact changed the course of the game. Or
an authorized officer of the law says, Youre under arrest, and whether you like it or not, you
are, in fact, under arrest. Or a parent can speak words of recrimination and critique that reach
so deep into the heart of his child that that child is forever affected.
Now let us consider the word of God. If even our puny words can change reality, the
divine word constitutes the reality of things in their deepest ground. Indeed, the Bible teaches
that God makes the world through an act of speech: Let there be light, and there was light, etc.
According to the scholastic philosophers, it is not the case that God know the world derivatively
as we do, so that his knowledge follows upon the being of things, but rather that his knowledge
comes first, so that he knows (or speaks) things into being. The prophet Isaiah communicates
this truth as follows: As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return
without watering the earthso my word does not go out from me in vain. For the New
Testament writers, Jesus is not one more in a long line of prophets; rather, he is the Word itself
made flesh, the very Word by which the Father fashions the universe. Therefore, we should not
be surprised that his speech has dramatically transformative power: Lazarus, come out! And

the dead man came out. Little girl get up! And she got up. Pick up your mat and walk, and
the man picked up his mat and went home. Jesus is not one more speaker of the divine word;
he is the divine word and thus what he says, is.
On the night before he died, Jesus sat at table with his disciples. In the course of that
meal, he took bread, broke it, and said over it, This is my body, which will be given up for you.
Toward the end of the supper, he took a cup of wine and pronounced over it the words, This is
the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. If he were merely a
human being, his words would appropriately be taken to have a symbolic value, but since he is
God from God, light from light, true God from true God, his words do not merely describe or
assign meaning; they create; they make something new. To put this in classical terms of the
Churchs theology, Jesus words affect a transsubstantion of the bread and wine into his body
and blood. This technical term designates a change of reality at the deepest ontological level,
even as the appearances of bread and wine remain unchanged. Although this might strike us as
a bit of philosophical sleight of hand, we must remember that philosophies both ancient and
modern reverence the distinction between appearance and reality and affirm that the two
sometimes diverge in dramatic ways. When we gaze up into the night sky and spy the most
distant stars, we are, in point of fact, looking, not at the way things are, but rather as they were,
for the light from those stars takes enormous amounts of time to reach our eyes. Or to use a
more mundane comparison, often a first impression of a person is at wide variance from the
substance of that person, who he really is. The Churchs conviction is that, precisely because of
the transformative value of Jesus words, the appearance of the Eucharistic elements is not
indicative of their deepest reality.

Matthew 26

If the Emmaus story speaks to us of the meal aspect of the Eucharist and the sixth
chapter of John of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, then Matthew 26 tells of the
dimension of the Eucharist most overlooked today, namely, the sacrificial. Though sacrifice is a
concept strange to many in the contemporary West, it was taken for granted by ancient peoples.
Indeed, anthropologists have suggested that if a modern person were transported by time
machine to the first century, what would strike him most would be the prevalence of religious
sacrifice. The logic of sacrifice is actually rather straightforward. One takes an aspect of Gods
good creation and returns it to the Creator as a sign of gratitude or an expression of communion
or as a reparation. At least in the Biblical context, the sacrificer does not labor under the
assumption that God needs this sacrifice in any way. Indeed, how could the Creator of
everything in the world possibly stand in need of any feature of the world? But the sacrifice
benefits the one who makes it, establishing the right relation between him and his Creator. For
the Jewish sages of the intertestamental period, Adam before the Fall was construed as the first
priest, for he stood in the attitude of adoratio before God, literally, mouth to mouth with him,
all of his energies and purposes aligned to Gods energies and purposes. Once we understand
this, we see that sin is rightly conceived as bad worship, the placing of something or someone
less than God in the place of God. Read through chapters three through eleven of the book of
Genesis to see what happens as a result of this faulty praise: violence, jealousy, murder,
imperialism, etc., all of the permutations and combinations of human dysfunction.

What was the Creators manner of dealing with this problem? He called Abraham and
through him formed a people after his own heart, a priestly people, who knew, above all, how
to give him right praise. The wager of the Lord, as the prophets and patriarchs of Israel knew,

was that the orthodoxy (lit. right praise) of Israel would attract the other nations of the world,
so that all the peoples would eventually be gathered unto God: Mt Zion, true pole of the earth,
there all the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord. We notice that all of the great covenants of
Israel, those of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, are all accompanied by sacrifice, the
slaughter of an animal and an offering unto God. Why the necessity of blood? As Matthew
Levering has put it, in a world gone wrong, there is no communion without sacrifice. In a
perfect world, in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, there would be no need of bloody or
painful sacrifice, since adoration would be effortless. But once we have been bent out of shape
through bad praise, orthodoxy will cost. Cultural anthropologists tell us that the attitude of the
ancient Israelite presenting a blood sacrifice would be along these lines: what is happening to
this animal by rights should be happening to me.

Nowhere was sacrifice on clearer display in ancient Israel than in the great Temple of
Jerusalem, constructed by Davids son Solomon. To this place came, for nearly a thousand
years, pious Jews seeking reconciliation with God. It is absolutely no accident that Solomons
temple was adorned, inside and out, with depictions of trees, plants, animals, even the planets
and stars, for it was meant to represent the recovery of the Garden of Eden, the knitting back
together of a disintegrated creation. Now despite a millennium of sacrifice, it remained clear
that Israel was a spiritually imperfect people. Listen as the prophets regularly rail against the
corruption of the Temple and the infidelity of the covenant people. And therefore, Israel began
to dream of a perfect act of sacrifice that would finally and completely bring divinity and
humanity together. For evidence of this, look at chapters 51-53 of the book of the prophet
Isaiah, those mysterious passages dealing with a suffering servant who by his stripes would
heal the nation. And for the result of this sacrificial suffering, turn to the thirty-first chapter of
the book of the prophet Jeremiah: Behold the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make
a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Jacob. It will not be like the
covenant I made with their fathers This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time, says the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will
be their God, and they will be my people (Jer. 31:3133). The intimacy between Adam and God,
lost through sin, would be re-established through a bloody sacrifice, a necessarily painful
realignment.

It is only against this textured background that we will begin to understand the priestly
and sacrificial reading of Jesus given consistently by the Gospels. In all four Gospels, we are
compelled to see Jesus through the lens of John the Baptist, whose parents both had a priestly
lineage and whose ministry was essentially priestly in form. In the desert, John was launching
an alternative Temple movement, offering the forgiveness of sins usually sought in the Temple
and providing a sort of Mikvah bath of preparation for those willing to enter into communion
with the Lord. When this desert priest spied Jesus coming for baptism he exclaimed, Behold,
the Lamb of God! To first century Jewish ears this description would have been unmistakably
clear: here is the one who has come to be sacrificed. In line with this hermeneutic, Jesus, again
and again, presented himself under a priestly rubric. One typically came to the Temple and its
priests to have ones sins forgiven, to be instructed in the law, and to be healed. Jesus ministry
was, from beginning to end, one of forgiveness, teaching, and healing, and this is precisely why
he could say, in reference to himself, you have a greater than the Temple here. It is also why,
at the climax of his life, he could enter the holy Temple, the place where God himself was
believed to dwell, and could say, I will tear down this place and in three days rebuild it,
referring thereby to his own body. He was implying that he himself would be the suffering

servant, that he himself would be the place where, through bloody sacrifice, divinity and
humanity would be brought together.

With all of this context in mind, let us turn to the great text in the twenty-sixth chapter of
Matthew, which describes the institution of the Eucharist. In this passage, we certainly see the
themes of meal and real presence, but we also see, with unmistakable clarity, the motif of
sacrifice. We are told that Jesus asks his disciples to go into Jerusalem and prepare a Passover
supper. At the heart of the Passover meal, of course, was the eating of a lamb, which had been
sacrificed, in remembrance of the lambs of the original Passover whose blood had been
smeared on the doorposts of the Israelites in Egypt. Making his Last Supper a Passover meal,
Jesus was signaling the fulfillment of John the Baptists prophecy that he, Jesus, would be the
definitive Lamb of God.

After blessing and breaking the unleavened bread of the Passover meal, Jesus
pronounced these words: Take and eat; this is my body. And then taking the third cup,
toward the end of the supper, he said, Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the
covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins. The language of
body and blood offered on behalf of others has, of course, an obvious sacrificial overtone. But
this emphasis becomes even clearer when we meditate on the image of the disciples drinking
the blood of Jesus from a cup. When someone came to the Temple to offer sacrifice, he would
cut the throat of the animal, and a priest would catch the victims blood in a cup before carrying
it in for the holocaust. Who could miss the implication that Jesus is referring to his own shed
blood and that he is, effectively, commissioning his disciples as priests of this new ritual. And
we must not overlook the explicit reference that Jesus makes to Jeremiah 31:31, speaking of the
new covenant for the forgiveness of sins. All of the covenants and their accompanying sacrifices
will be drawn together and recapitulated in the final covenantal sacrifice of Jesus.

The great actions of the cleansing of the Temple and the Last Supper were intended to
provide the interpretive key to what Jesus would do on the last day of his earthly life. Indeed,
without the symbolic matrix of those two events, the death of Jesus would be no more than a
Roman crucifixion. But once we understand that he himself is the Temple, we can see that his
body is both the sacrificed lamb and the scapegoat upon whom the sins of the entire nation
have been placed. And we can see that his blood is blood that the high priest would sprinkle
around the Holy of Holies and on the people on the Day of Atonement. We can appreciate that
the crucifixion of Jesus is the sacrificial act by which a sinful humanity is painfully brought back
on line with the purposes of God: by his stripes you are healed. Just after Jesus died, a Roman
soldier pierced his side with a spear and out flowed blood and water. The Church fathers read
this as a symbolic indication of the water of baptism and the blood of the Eucharist, but there is
another dimension to the symbolism that no first century Jew would have missed. In the typical
prophetic manner, Ezekiel had criticized the corruption of the Temple. Indeed, he envisioned
the glory of the Lord leaving the holy place and relocating itself to the East. But then he
prophesied that one day the glory of Yahweh would return to his Temple and on that day water
would stream from the side of the building for the renewal of creation. The water surging from
the side of the dead Christ is the fulfillment of Ezekiels prophecy: the perfect sacrifice has been
made; the Temple has been restored; renewing waters accordingly come forth.

In the pre-conciliar period, Catholics were accustomed to referring to the Eucharistic
liturgy as the sacrifice of the Mass. Though it is certainly good that we have an enhanced and
more textured understanding of the Mass as meal and communion, it is regrettable that we are
less attuned than our forebears in the faith to the sacrificial element. For every Mass is a

representation of the sacrifice of Jesusnot for the sake of God, who has no need of itbut for
our sake. We participate in the act by which divinity and humanity are reconciled, and we eat
the sacrificed body and drink the poured-out blood of the Lamb of God.

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