Transubstantiation question

[Frankenfurter]

Can it be said that, in the Eucharist, the Bread and Wine become Jesus in the same way that the Divine Son became Man in the Incarnation?

It’s a wonderful personal insight into the eucharist. The eucharist is rich and deep and surely there is enough depth in it to support your insights. Thank you for that. You can always play it safe and just let folks know that this is your own personal insight. You can help them understand that if they pray about the eucharist too they will likely have their own insights - it is that rich and personal. I’ve never heard that one myself but I love it.

Too much technical stuff with accidents and stuff loses the magic of the eucharist I think. Much of that discussion is wrapped in philosophical terms from the middle ages too that do not relate very well to modern thinkers.

If I may, let me share my own personal thought on the eucharist too. Suppose Jesus had given us the gift of himself in a physical form instead of a sacramental one? Can you imagine the evil, the wars, the intrigue in possessing such a thing? Instead Jesus gives us himself in the most fragile, inexpensive, easy to access, impossible to exploit way, only accessible to the humble and the faithful. It is divinely brilliant and outsmarts evil.

It is more important I think to understand why Christ gives us himself this way rather than trying to understand the divine mechanism in our terms.

Your point is clearly valid. If God can become man, then the eucharist can become the body of Christ. Now, we enter into: why would God do such a thing? And the world can spend eternity contemplating that.

Great insight. I love it!

 

[Blue_Horizon]

Can it be said that, in the Eucharist, the Bread and Wine become Jesus in the same way that the Divine Son became Man in the Incarnation?

Not really.
In the Eucharist the visible accidents of bread and wine are in a sense “abnormal” because, unlike in every other case of sensible nature, the substance that should be there to support them is missing. That is why we do not properly call them bread and wine after consecration. They are held in place to be visible to us only by a “miracle”. For the bread and wine is truly no longer there.
Also, the substance of Jesus’s real body is present yet we cannot see it (whether that means all the accidents of Jesus’s body are there or not is an esoteric and debated point).

Now the historical Jesus was nothing like this.
Nothing was missing, nothing was held in place by a miracle.
If his divinity could not be seen it is simply because the divinity is not material (it is Spirit) and has no substance/accidents composition anyways.
What unites The Divine and human natures in Jesus is His Person.