On the night before he died, Jesus took bread, saying: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it: this is my body, which will be given up for you.” We find versions of these words in Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and received and passed on by St Paul in I Corinthians 11.

St John’s Gospel does not record these words at the Last Supper; John 13 instead focuses on Christ’s act of humble service in washing the feet of his disciples, and mentions the bread only in the context of Our Lord sharing bread with Judas Iscariot before the traitor went out to betray his Master. But John 6 has much to say on the subject of the Bread of Life. It begins with John’s telling of Jesus multiplying bread to feed a crowd of thousands. 

The next day, the crowd pursues Jesus in the hope of more free food. But Our Lord uses this as the opportunity to teach a lesson about something more important than bodily food. In a rich and complex text, John 6 speaks first about “the work of God, that you believe in him [Jesus] whom he [the Father] has sent” and then Jesus declares “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” A few verses later, Our Lord reiterates “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you”.

This was a challenging teaching and must have perplexed the listeners at the time. How indeed can they eat the flesh of the man standing before them in the synagogue? What could he mean by identifying himself as “living bread”? The text tells us that even the Lord’s disciples found this to be a “hard teaching” and that many who had been following him walked away at that point. Nor could they shrug off the Lord’s words as having some kind of metaphorical, mystical, meaning – for he chose to use some more graphic words which means we could fairly translate this passage as a call to “munch” his flesh (the Greek word is trogein) and “quaff” his blood!

After Jesus celebrated the Last Supper, things became clearer. This was how his followers were to feast on his body and blood, made present in the palatable form of bread and wine. So the Catholic tradition has always held that when a priest consecrates bread and wine, while there is no perceptible change visible to sense or to science, what the elements truly are changes at some deep metaphysical level.

The words of Jesus force each one of us into a battle between faith and common sense.

Common sense looks at a communion wafer and sees nothing but a disc of baked flour. Certainly, we can bless, break and share the wafer and tell the story of what Jesus did, so many years ago. No miracle is needed for us to simply speak and remember.

But faith – faith hears the words of Jesus. This is the same Jesus who fed 5000 people with a few loaves, calmed a storm, walked on water, raised Lazarus from the dead and himself appeared risen on the third day after being nailed to a Cross. This is the Jesus who took the bread and said “This is my body.” The power of God at work in Jesus is quite capable of making these words come true. A wafer of baked wheat which looks like bread, smells like bread, tastes like bread, is no longer bread but the Body of Jesus.

Surely that goes against common sense?

Perhaps… but common sense does not always lead us to the truth.

Common sense says that freely-moving objects slow down. But Isaac Newton saw beyond common sense. He realised that in empty space, things go at a constant speed, and came up with his famous Laws of Motion, Newton’s Laws, the principle on which classical physics is founded.

Common sense says that something goes faster if you throw it forward from a moving vehicle. But Albert Einstein saw beyond common sense. He realised that light moves at a fixed speed – always the same speed however fast or slow the lamp is moving. Einstein produced his famous Theory of Relativity, on which modern physics is founded.

Common sense says that something that looks and tastes like bread must be bread. But we are called to see beyond common sense, realising that Jesus has declared this to be His own body, and trusting His word over the evidence of our senses. This indeed needs a “spiritual revolution” in our minds. If you can bring yourself to reject common sense, you too will be as stupid as Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein.

Because we believe that what was bread has become Jesus, we show great honour to the Blessed Sacrament. We bow our knee on entering and leaving any place where the Lord’s Body is reserved; we keep a living flame burning there at all times.

Because we believe that what was bread has become Jesus, we have the great privilege of being able to pay a visit to Our Lord in any chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. Of course we can pray anywhere at all, and God hears us; but if we choose to go specially to such a place, we give God greater honour, and at the same time we make an act of faith that Jesus is truly present. We express this faith in a more public way by placing the Body of Jesus on the altar exposed for worship, or by holding a procession with the Blessed Sacrament in a public place.

St Thomas Aquinas, the famous 13^th Century Dominican scholar, also wrote hymns. During his lifetime, the Western Church began celebrating a feast day in honour of the Body of Christ, Corpus Christi. St Thomas was asked to compose the words for the celebration. One of his Latin texts was later translated into English, and you might be familiar with these lyrics: 

Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.

Take. Eat. Drink. Remember. The Lord’s commands have shaped Catholic faith and practice for 2000 years. I would like to give the last word to the monk and scholar Dom Gregory Dix, who wrote this in The Shape of the Liturgy (1964):

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of St Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei – the holy common people of God.

Revd Dr Gareth Leyshon is a parish priest in the South Wales Valleys, who read physics at Oxford and completed a doctorate at Cardiff (a study of the structure of distant galaxies) before entering seminary.

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