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.

Why is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to them? The fundamental determination of good and evil remains, necessarily, the prerogative of God alone, since God is, himself, the ultimate good. To seize this knowledge, therefore, is to claim divinity for oneself—and this is the one thing that a creature can never do and thus should never try. To do so is to place oneself in a metaphysical contradiction, interrupting thereby the loop of grace and ruining the sacrum convivium (sacred banquet).

It is practically impossible to read any two pages of the Bible in succession without coming across the language of God’s anger, but we mustn’t interpret this symbolic expression literally, as though God passes in and out of emotional snits. The divine wrath is a theological symbol for the justice of God—which is to say, God’s passion to set things right.

in even the most benign of sacrifices, some living thing was destroyed. According to the scholars of Hebrew religious practice, the destruction of grain or animal was meant to signal the sacrificer’s offering and rending of himself. The offerer says, in effect, that what is happening to this animal—as in the case of the Abramic sacrifice we have been considering—should happen to me if I fall out of friendship with God; or, as this animal’s lifeblood is poured out, so I symbolically pour out my own life in devotion and thanksgiving.

Jesus at the Jordan was identifying himself totally with the condition of sinners, announcing his intention to bear their burden and assume their guilt.

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matt. 4:3). One of the most elemental forms of spiritual dysfunction is to make the satisfaction of sensual desire the center of one’s life.

all of the baptized participate in the Mass in a priestly way. They do this through their prayers and responses but also, the document specifies, by uniting their personal sacrifices and sufferings to the great sacrifice of Christ. So a father witnesses the agony of his son in the hospital; a mother endures the rebellion of a teenage daughter; a young man receives news of his brother’s death in battle; an elderly man tosses on his bed in anxiety as he contemplates his unsure financial situation; a graduate student struggles to complete his doctoral thesis; a child experiences for the first time the breakup of a close friendship; an idealist confronts the stubborn resistance of a cynical opponent. These people could see their pain as simply dumb suffering, the offscourings of an indifferent universe. Or they could see it through the lens provided by the sacrificial death of Jesus, appreciating it as the means by which God is drawing them closer to himself. Suffering, once joined to the cross of Jesus, can become a vehicle for the reformation of the sinful self, the turning of the soul in the direction of love.

Thomas Aquinas and the mainstream of the Catholic tradition remain uneasy with that section of the anti-Berengarian oath that speaks of crunching Christ’s body with one’s teeth. In Aquinas’ more precise language, when one consumes the Eucharist, one crunches the accidents of the bread with the teeth, not the body of Christ, since Christ is being received substantially but according to his sacramental species, not his proper species.

I tell people to be very careful when they approach the Eucharist. 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. When the communicant says “Amen” and receives the proffered host and chalice, he’d better be prepared to live an eternal life.