I think you are dead on
That is why I dont participate as much anymore just read alot.
I think this is a really good point… The original post really caught my interest yesterday, but I didn’t have time ro respond at the office. When I thought about it further, I remembered I’d answered these same questions several times before, so sometimes it’s like…what is the point?
But here goes…
As to how precisely Christ could say to his disciples “take and eat this…”, it seems to me that the key there is that Christ stood at that moment both in and out of time and space. God made man was really and trully present, but He also existed as God before and after this moment marked on the timeline of history.
If it were not a difficult mystery, He would not have lost the followers He did over this as documented in John 6. I think we often make it more complex than it is, though. If we simply think of it in terms of God declaring value A equal to value B, then we find a way to understand it, or, at least, accept it. After all, if God calls a door a window, who are we to correct the Creator of the universe? I’d suggest we accept what He says as true, and try to work our feeble minds (yours perhaps less feeble than mind) around the idea. (Aristotelean idea of substance and “accidents” is also helpful to me, at least.)
As far as what becomes of Protestants who don’t “drink of the blood” or “eat of the body”, we have to pray for them and trust in God’s love and faithfulness. The CCC points out that they may, in a sense, be Catholics in a way that they themselves don’t understand or grasp. Still, it’s true that they don’t have the Eucharist. I don’t believe they are lost, but it is certainly troubling.
Here are some notes that might be helpful from a presentation I did in May. (As I may be using bits and pieces of this again for other presentations or articles, please don’t use without permission.)
In C.S. Lewis’ ***Letters to Malcolm, ***this great Anglican writer expresses his deep confusion and ambivalence regarding the mysterious nature of communion and the Eucharist. It is indeed difficult to get one’s brain around. In truth, we can’t get our brains around it.
As Protestants, we always believed in a literal interpretation of Scripture, but we sure didn’t feel that way about the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John or 1 Corinthians 11:27-29, which reads as follows.
"Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgement on himself."
After all, one doesn’t talk about a mere symbol this way, but that’s all we understood as Protestants.
As we learned more and more about the Catholic Church, however, we began to realize how profoundly mistaken we had been.
When Christ commanded that we eat His flesh and drink His blood, they were indeed troubling and mysterious words.
The words were deeply troubling to everyone who heard them.
It would have been unlike Christ not to correct any misconception regarding a matter of such grave importance to the life of the Church.
No where in the Bible or in the writings of the Church fathers is the Eucharist explained away as a mere symbol.
As Saint Augustine wrote of the Eucharist in
Confessions, "
I am the food of full-grown men. Grow and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead you shall be changed into me."
When we are privileged to receive the body, blood, soul, and divinity of our savior in the sacrament of the Eucharist at Mass, we are becoming more and more like the men and women God intended us to truly be, created in the image of God.
There is also a sense that we are exiting the human timeline for a moment as we are joining with all Catholics—past, present, and future.
