This is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival

by Robert Barron

Love, in the theological sense, is not a feeling or a sentiment, though it is often accompanied by those psychological states. In its essence, love is an act of the will, more precisely, the willing of the good of the other as other. To love is really to want what is good for someone else and then to act on that desire. Many of us are kind, generous, or just, but only so that someone else might return the favor and be kind, generous, or just to us. This is indirect egotism rather than love. Real love is an ecstatic act, a leaping outside of the narrow confines of my needs and desires and an embrace of the other’s good for the other’s sake. It is an escape from the black hole of the ego, which tends to draw everything around it into itself.

We must never keep the account of the fall far from our minds when we consider these events. 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).

Scott Hahn, who has made a careful study of covenant in the Bible, makes an important distinction between covenant and contract. Though the two have certain features in common—most especially the delineation of mutual obligations—the signal difference is that a contract determines “what is mine” while a covenant determines “who is mine.” But the covenant has to be sealed by a sacrifice because we live in a world that is off-kilter. Prior to the fall, the human pledge of fidelity to God would have been effortless, a sheer joy; but after the fall, it must come at a cost, and through a painful reconfiguration of the self. It is this inner sacrifice that is expressed symbolically through the exterior offering of grain or animal.

As we saw, from Abraham through David, Yahweh pledged that he would be Israel’s God and Israel would be his special people. However, despite God’s fidelity, the covenant consistently came apart due to the people’s sin. What the first Christians discerned was that in Jesus the long-desired covenant was finally fulfilled, that divinity and humanity had indeed embraced, that God’s will and the will of faithful Israel had fallen, at last, into harmony. And this is precisely what, in their more philosophically accented language, the fathers of the Council of Chalcedon were saying.

For Christians, Jesus is not simply a wise teacher by whose words one abides (like Confucius) or an ethical exemplar whom one might strive to follow (like Gandhi or St. Francis) or even a bearer of definitive revelation to whom a person might feel beholden (like Muhammad); rather, Jesus is a power in whom we participate, a field of force in which we live and move and have our being.

Is this a hard doctrine? At the conclusion of the Eucharistic discourse, delivered at the synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus practically lost his entire Church: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’” (John 6:60). Again, if he were speaking only at the symbolic level, why would this theology be hard to accept? No one left him when he observed that he was the vine or the good shepherd or the light of the world, for those were clearly only metaphorical remarks and posed, accordingly, no great intellectual challenge.