Reflections on the Eucharist - Part 2:THE EUCHARIST AS A SACRED MEAL AND AS FOOD

Last week we began our reflections about the Eucharist and the Mass by taking an overview of them; now we can get down to some particular ideas and questions. We can begin by exploring the Eucharist and the Mass as a meal; a sacred or special meal. This is a good starting point because the Eucharist is founded upon that “Last Supper” that Jesus celebrated with His disciples. So, let us reflect a bit more on meals and eating together and what we then understand by the Mass as a sacred meal.



Meals and eating are vital (literally!) to our human life. We eat to survive, of course, but also eating together is so much more than this: it is rich in meaning and symbolism. Eating together builds up connections and relationships, often we share memories and new ones are made, and we can build up bonds and strengthen ties and identity. This is why key moments or events in our lives are often sealed with some sort of meal: weddings, anniversaries, graduations.

So, it should not surprise us that God has taken this very human action of eating together with all its deeper significance and associations and chose it as the way of being with us and of building up our church family. In fact, God has done this over the ages. In Israel there were many types of sacred meal. Many meals involved giving thanks to God for the good things of creation and for all that He had done for His people. God sealed the covenant with His people with a meal (Exodus 24: 9-18) and the annual Passover meal remembered in a real and living way that God had rescued His people from slavery, that He had made them His people and that He had lead them to the promised land.


All this is also true for the Eucharist that we celebrate and that was instituted by Jesus Christ, where he used the staple food of bread and wine. We gather, we celebrate, we remember and give thanks for all that God has done for us, we deepen our bonds with God and each other (which is why we offer each other the sign of peace just before going to communion), we have our identity as disciples of the Lord (or, the Church, “the body of Christ”) strengthened and affirmed.

The high point is that we are fed by Jesus Christ himself: “this is my body, this is my blood”. In this feeding we also become like the one we receive. St. Thomas Aquinas once commented that the Eucharist differs from ordinary food. When we eat food and digest it, it becomes so to speak part of us. With the Eucharist, the opposite happens: instead we become part of the one we have received and consumed. Therefore we really do enter a “holy communion” with the Lord. And, of course, we are not worthy of such a great gift and that is why we echo the words of the centurion in the Gospel: “Lord, I am not worthy…” (Matthew 8: 8).

In our busy and hectic lives, we do not always have the opportunity with family or friends to sit down and to eat together and we can also easily forget the rich symbolism of the Eucharist as a sacred meal. There is a further danger. Most of us (though certainly not all) are blessed with plenty of food. We can even complain of too much food and huge portions, and there all those TV ads for food…and then for magic slimming pills or diets! It is so easy to take food and eating for granted. The same can be true for the Eucharist. We can forget what a great gifts it is, what is happens when we celebrate this sacred meal, what it means and, of course, who we are receiving.

Perhaps we can focus this reflection with a true story about a Muslim student at Boston College. He asked his professor “do Catholics really believe that the little white thing they receive is not bread but Jesus Christ?” “Yes” the professor replied and he gave the usual explanation about the real presence. The student interrupted this and said “forgive me professor, for I do not doubt God’s power to do this if He chooses, but this is not my problem. I went to Mass and observed the reverence of some, but also that others seemed unaffected or left early. If all that you say about the Eucharist is true, then I would not get off my knees!”

Let us end with another verse from St. Thomas Aquinas’ hymn:

O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living bread, the life of us for whom He died.
Lend this life to me then, feed and feast my mind,
There be thou the sweetness, man was meant to find.