Flesh to Eat

Some great men and women leave their memoirs to posterity; others leave their libraries; still others leave monuments to their achievements or teachings in popular movements. Jesus was the only great spiritual leader to leave his “flesh to eat” and his “blood to drink.”
This assertion in this weekend’s Gospel might merit utter astonishment unless we understand something of Jesus’ motivation. Jesus never wanted to leave just a message of “good news,” he wanted to leave something to concretely demonstrate the permanence of his love! Specifically, he wanted to leave himself!
Jesus was very clear how he wanted to do this. He said, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you . . . For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” This is truly a remarkable concept, and it took his disciples quite some time before they really understood the magnitude of what Jesus meant. However, it wasn’t long after the ascension of Jesus that Eucharists began to be celebrated in earnest. The disciples came to know his actual presence “in the breaking of the bread.”
Needless to say, Jesus’ assertions on this subject posed a grave problem for the people of that time. The fact that some people took Jesus at his word is clear. Scripture tells us that when they heard what he said, “many walked with him no longer.”
However, the Eucharist has always been considered a living memorial of Jesus, Jesus alive and truly present to us in sacramental food. Theologians of all ages have been trying to explain how this could be. And no matter what the “explanations” have been, we inevitably fall back on the tremendous mystery of it all.
Regardless of all this, there is no mystery about God’s love! The primary revelation about God that we learn from Jesus is that God is absolute love! We know that God loves us with a passion beyond imagination, and that God’s compassion for us is limitless. Is it, therefore, not reasonable that God would want to communicate love for us in Jesus in the most intimate fashion possible?
Intense love craves intense union. And there are few ways of becoming more intimately united with someone than in the form and fashion of food. Nothing gets “closer” to us than the food we eat. When we digest a full-course meal, everything we eat becomes part of us, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, and blood of our blood. When Jesus says his body is real food and his blood is real drink, he is expressing from the depths of his love just how much he wishes to become part of us, body and soul. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them!” Think about it!