Robert Barron - Really, Truly, and Substantially Present
Peace be with you. Friends, we're reading, of course, these weeks from the sixth chapter of John, this pivotal section of the New Testament where John lays out his Eucharistic theology, and we come today really to the sort of rhetorical high point of this discourse where things really come to a head like, what is Jesus talking about? So it's very important for us. The church asks us every third summer to do this extended meditation on this passage because we're dealing with the pivotal sacrament, one of the most important moments in the life of a Catholic so we pay really close attention. Listen to this now. "Jesus said to the crowds, 'I am the living bread come down from heaven.'" He talked about manna centuries before. "I'm the living bread. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world".
Now, we might be accustomed to that. We've heard this for 2,000 years within the Christian tradition, but imagine His audience. Imagine an audience of first century Jews hearing this language. Well, listen to what they say. "The Jews quarreled among themselves saying, 'How can this man give us His flesh to eat?'" we have to move into their frame of mind. If you look in the Old Testament, there are frequent prohibitions against the eating of an animal's flesh with blood. I'm going to just give you a couple. Genesis chapter 9, verse 4, "Every movie thing that lives shall be food for you, but you shall not eat flesh with its life," that is, its blood.
Here's Leviticus 3:17, "It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations. You must not eat any fat or any blood". Here's Deuteronomy 12:23, "The clean and the unclean alike, you may eat. Only be sure you do not eat the blood". This prohibition against eating flesh with blood, see, was a way of honoring God because blood was seen as life, and life was the proper preserve of God, and so we wouldn't take it upon ourselves to do that. So imagine now a people who've been shaped for centuries by these laws, it's basic to the kind of purity and dietary code of ancient Israel. And Jesus says again, listen, "The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world".
So they're imagining, "He wants us to eat His flesh, which obviously has blood in it. I can't do that in regard to an animal. How in the world a human being"? Not only is it disgusting to them, but it's religiously offensive. It's religiously repugnant to use language like this. So here, everybody, follows, and this is why I call it the rhetorical climax of this discourse, so the statements made summing up Jesus' teaching and the visceral negative reaction to it, so you'd expect, okay, if they're just misunderstanding here what He means, they're just misconstruing His language, that He would clear it up. Remember when He spoke to Nicodemus, "Unless a man be born again," and Nicodemus, "Well, how can a man go back in His mother's womb"?
Well, I mean, Jesus just sort of sidesteps that because that's silly. He's not talking at that level. So why doesn't He do a similar clarification here? Because listen to what He says. "Amen, amen. I say to you". That's code for "Listen up. This is really important and really true". "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life". Now, I've pointed it out before to you, and I've written about it. The Greek here is very instructive because the usual word you'd use in Greek for to eat, the way human beings gather around a table to eat, is phagein. He doesn't use that verb, though. He uses the verb trogaine, and trogaine is the way an animal would eat. It means something like to gnaw on. So they've objected to the sort of physicalistic realism of this.
"What do you mean eat your flesh and drink your blood"? He doesn't explain it away. He doesn't appeal to metaphor. No, He heightens the language. "Amen. Amen. I say to you, unless you gnaw on the flesh of the Son of man," and then He adds, lest they miss it, "and drink His blood". Because as I say, they had all these prohibitions against eating flesh with blood, so in case they forgot, He reminds them, "And drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh, drinks my blood has eternal life".
This is it, everybody. It seems to me this is the ground of what we call in the Catholic tradition, the doctrine of the real presence, that Jesus is not simply symbolically present, present through metaphor. He's really, truly and substantially present under the signs of bread and wine. That's why we say it. I think it's articulated most fully here in John 6. You know, Vatican II, in case you think this is some kind of old-fashioned doctrine, think again, Vatican Council II affirms Christ's presence in a number of ways. So Vatican II talks about indeed the presence of Christ in the Word proclaimed. It's true. It's why we process with the scriptures and we sing and we incense the scriptures. It affirms the presence of Christ in the gathered community. "Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I'm there in their midst".
Vatican II affirms the presence of Christ in the poor. And the person of the priest at mass. That's why in a higher liturgy, we will incense the person of the priest, because He, in a sense, embodies the presence of Christ. All these are real presences, that they're not phony presences. But then Vatican II distinguishes between all of those and the qualitatively different mode of presence in the Eucharist, which again, is real, true and substantial. Not that the other ones are inauthentic, but there's a qualitative difference between all those other modes of presence and this one. You know, Thomas Aquinas famously said that, "The virtus Christi, the power of Christ, is present in all the other sacraments".
Think of the water of baptism. Think of the oil used at confirmation, at a marriage, at a wedding. I mean, Christ's power is present in all those sacraments. But then he says, "In the Eucharist, ipse Christus is present". That means Christ himself. Not just his power. That's in all the sacraments. Christ Himself. Here's a clue, by the way, for Catholics, especially listen to me. After we baptize a baby and we bless the water, we baptize a baby in the water, but we don't save the water and genuflect in front of it. No, it was a bearer for that time of the virtus Christi, the power of Christ. After confirmation, I've got the little stock of oils. I don't put that in a tabernacle and kneel down. No. For the time of the ceremony, it was a bearer of the virtus Christi. It's not ipse Christus. But the Eucharist is. But the Eucharist is. Unless you gnaw on the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.
It's why you can't say the Eucharist, "Oh, it's really one wonderful provocative sign among many". Like, "Hey, I know you're into the Eucharist, but I'm really into Christ's presence among the poor". "I know Eucharist means a lot to you, but, hey, I'm really into Christ's presence in the Scriptures". No, no, you can't play it that way. It's not one presence among many. They're all the other ones, and then there's the Eucharist. John Paul II, "Ecclesia De Eucaristia, the church comes from the Eucharist".
I wouldn't say that about any other sacrament, but I can say it about the Eucharist, which is the very body of Christ. Okay. Having made that clarification based on what Jesus says in John 6, how come we don't react the same way the Jews at the time reacted? I mean, I said, "Okay, I guess I understand what you're saying here, but it seems like so much nonsense. I mean, what do you mean? I go to mass and these words are said, and this still looks like bread to me and like wine to me. What do you mean it's really the presence of Christ"?
Well, here's, everybody, an important clarification. In regard to the Eucharistic change, we're never talking about something that's empirically verifiable. The church says, "Jesus is really, truly and substantially present". What does that mean? That means at the deepest center or ground of its being, that bread has changed into the substance of the body of Christ, even as, to use the classical language, the accidents remain, just a fancy way of saying the appearances remain. The point there is you're never going to discern this change by analyzing the Eucharistic elements like, "Oh, oh, I saw it. I saw it". Or, "Let's put that under a microscope, and see what we can see". No, no. The change is not an empirically verifiable level.
And here's the interesting thing. In a way, it's indicative of the prejudice of our time, that we tend to conflate the real and the empirical, right? We're very scientifically-minded. So what's real, well, what the sciences can measure. What our senses can see, and what the sciences can measure with their instruments, that's the real. Everything else is kind of, I don't know, squishy, subjective, indefinite. But that's an impoverishment that we have today. Prior to the modern period, people understood all these different levels of reality. They understood a kind of ontological hierarchy. There is indeed the level of being that we can see with our senses and measure with our instruments, but being is not limited to that. God help us. In fact, even the sciences talk about lots of things that are real, but we can't see.
Now a fortiori, think of mystics and philosophers, poets, theologians, who talk about dimensions of reality that are eminently real, but that we can't see. You can't see a number, for example. You can see a number of things. "Oh, there are seven things over there". The number seven, what does it look like? What's it smell like, the number seven? How do you analyze it with a microscope? You can't. The number seven or the quadratic formula, those are pure abstractions. Those are invisible realities. And so the church speaks of the substance, call it the deepest dimension of the reality of a thing that has changed, in this case.
Joseph Ratzinger said, "God has seized those elements, the bread and wine, at the deepest root of their being, and has now made those appearances pure bearers of His presence. The change not empirical, but the change at the substantial level". Something I've shared, and I'll close with this, I've shared before with you, is in the biblical imagination, things are what God says they are, right? God speaks, and then things happen. That's a poetic way of saying that God's knowledge grounds the reality of things. God doesn't look at the world and, therefore, know it the way we do. Rather God knows the world, and, therefore, it is. What God says, is.
Who's Jesus? Well, if He were just one prophet among many, one more religious philosopher, well, then He could speak high metaphorical language, and we'd find it fascinating. But it's not who He is. Jesus is God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Therefore, what He says, is. "This is my body. This is my blood," God thereby seizing these elements by the very root of their being and making them bearers of His presence. That's our Eucharistic faith. That's the rhetorical climax of this discourse. That's the hinge upon which everything turns. And God bless you.