This is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival

by Robert Barron

In the Palestine of his time, the table was a place where the divisions and stratifications of the society were particularly on display, but at Jesus’ table, all were welcome: saints and sinners, the just and the unjust, the healthy and the sick, men and women. This open-table fellowship was not simply a challenge to the societal status quo, but also an expression of God’s deepest intentions vis-à-vis the human race, the realization of Isaiah’s eschatological dream.

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis comments, “The deepest meaning of Christian discipleship is not to work for Jesus but to be with Jesus.”

The room of the Last Supper is Isaiah’s holy mountain, and the meal that Jesus hosts is the supper of rich food and well-aged wines. It is as though the longed-for future has appeared even now in time.

Jesus was inviting his disciples to feed on him and thereby to draw his life into theirs, conforming themselves to him in the most intimate and complete way possible.

If our trouble began with a bad meal (seizing at godliness on our own terms), then our salvation commences with a rightly structured meal (God offering us his life as a free gift).

It is never enough simply to eat and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus; one must become a bearer of the power that one has received. The meal always conduces to the mission.

One of the most elemental forms of spiritual dysfunction is to make the satisfaction of sensual desire the center of one’s life.

Though it has in recent years been lampooned as advocating a type of divine child abuse, the doctrine of the atonement stands at the heart of Christian faith and proclamation. The Father sent his Son into godforsakenness, into the morass of sin and death, not because he delighted in seeing his Son suffer, but rather because he wanted his Son to bring the divine light to the darkest place. It is not the agony of the Son in itself that pleases his Father, but rather the Son’s willing obedience in offering his body in sacrifice in order to take away the sin of the world.

Those who are gathered around the altar of Christ are not simply recalling Calvary; Calvary has become present to them in all of its spiritual power.

“As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). In other words, here and now, at the Eucharistic assembly, Christ makes present both the past and the future.

we are not repeating Christ’s sacrifice on our own terms and through our own initiative; rather we are, as we’ve said, re-presenting it, tapping into its power.

God the Creator of all things cannot possibly receive anything from creation that he needs. But God does indeed desire something for his human creatures—namely, fullness of life—and this comes when they surrender themselves in love to him.

Were the elements simply symbols—inventions of our own spiritual creativity and desire—they would pose no particular threat. But since they are the power and presence of God, they will change the one who consumes them.