“For My Flesh is True Food”: Tradition, Fulfillment, and the Words of Institution

On Holy Thursday, Christians around the world commemorate the Last Supper, that sacred event when Jesus took bread and wine, and gave it to his disciples saying, “This is my body. … This is my blood.” As Catholics, we believe these immortal words of consecration cause the bread and wine to truly become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ Himself. 

St. Thomas Aquinas offers a philosophical basis of how this is possible in his famed account of Transubstantiation - an account that has informed the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. On the Thomistic account of transubstantiation, the substances with the identity of bread and wine are transformed, via the words of the priest standing in the person of Christ (in persona Christi) into substances with the identity of Christ’s own Body and Blood that have the accidental (or non-substantial) properties of bread and wine. It becomes something new, even though it looks, smells, feels, and tastes the same as before; and this is metaphysically possible since the identity of a substance is not necessarily tied to the physical properties of that substance. 

How precisely this particular change of identity occurs, however, is not fully explicated in this philosophical account. As with so much of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical work, we cannot prove by reason alone what is of faith, but we can know by reason that what is of faith is not contrary to reason. So, the Church affirms that the full explanation of this change cannot help but be shrouded in mystery at its roots. They affirm, though, that an ontological change occurs and propose it to us for our belief.

So much for the “how” - or, at least, as much as the Church says we can understand of it. But what about the why? Why should we believe that this is what happens - that bread and wine literally become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus? It is undoubtedly a controversial claim, one rejected by a wide number of Protestants, including Martin Luther.

One answer often given is, “Jesus said so - and He says what He means and He means what He says.” The words of institution are recorded in Scripture. This argument is usually accompanied by many additional references, such as John 6:53, where Jesus is quoted as saying, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.”

One can then appeal to the tradition of the Church, reaching as far back as St. Paul himself (1 Corinthians 11:26-27), as well as many of the Church Fathers (e.g., St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Justin Martyr, St. Augustine of Hippo, etc.). The terminology of ‘transubstantiation’ may not have been codified until later centuries, likely influenced by Aristotelian understandings of natural philosophy that are most famously explicated in St. Thomas Aquinas’s syntheses. Nevertheless, it is clear that many (though perhaps not all) of the earliest Christians believed what was commemorated and consumed in their earliest gatherings was Christ’s Body and Blood itself.

I think, however, there is a deeper, yet seemingly underappreciated, explanation of why the Church insists on this Doctrine - one that goes well beyond the philosophy of medieval scholasticism and even beyond the Church Fathers. Instead, this appeals to the Church’s roots in Judaism.

The Passover and Peace Offerings in the Jewish Tradition

Recall Jesus’ words at Matthew 5:17: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” I myself cannot help but recall this especially now, given how we hear so many times in the various Passion narratives in the Gospels how the events of Good Friday happened so as to fulfill the words of the prophets. 

Further, of course, we know Jesus’ crucifixion took place near the Passover. At the first Passover, God, through Moses, commanded the Israelites living in captivity in Egypt to kill a lamb and mark the lintels of their houses with its blood so that the Angel of Death, the last plague, would pass over their houses and afflict only the homes of the Egyptians. 

And they ate the lamb. It was not killed then discarded.  It was not merely symbolically represented in the Passover meal. They literally ate the lamb of the sacrifice.

Of the several types of sacrifices that were offered by the Israelites, as reported in the Torah, the Passover sacrifice is typically classified as a peace offering (zebach sh'lamim). According to the Jewish Virtual Library, a peace offering is “an offering expressing thanks or gratitude” - in this case, to God for graces given. An unblemished sacrificial victim (Leviticus 3:1) is to be selected as a token of God’s bounty and ritually offered to God - first, for the sake of thanking God for His goodness in causing such a bounty; second, for the sake of confirming the fellowship of all those offering the sacrifice together, specifically where all in that fellowship are bonded together by a shared  gratitude to God for His benefits. After the ritual sacrifice, the fellowship among each other and the fellowship of all with God is said to be confirmed by the sharing of a meal featuring the offering that was sacrificed (e.g., a lamb). By analogy, it is like making a meal made of all the finest produce generated on a farm and sharing said meal with everyone who helped to cultivate said produce - as a way of honoring both what was cultivated and those who contributed to its cultivation, most especially God without whom nothing would be.

In the case of Passover, and every commemoration of the Passover thereafter, the thanks was for God’s life-saving graces - first, in the face of that last plague in Egypt; more broadly, in His promises to and covenant with and among His people from time immemorial as noted in the Scriptures. The meal featuring the Passover Lamb that was slain, offered for the same purpose and in remembrance of the same events and the same promises and covenant, bound the community together with a common purpose and a unified voice of thanksgiving - ultimately, even across generations of people. The meal shared was the ultimate point of the peace offering, as it were, not the killing in so many words. There is nothing like breaking bread together to celebrate and forge bonds in community and under God; hence, it is an offering of and for peace in our relationships with God and with each other.

In the broad view, however, the ultimate life-saving graces are not safety from this or that disease or calamity. Rather, they are the graces by which our souls might be saved - that is, the way by which we might gain eternal life, rather than damnation for sin. The ultimate life-saving graces must come in the fulfillment of the promises and covenant God made with His people time and time again: to send a Messiah who would take away the sin of the world and show us the way to the Father, a Savior by whom and through whom the penalties of sin would not prevent one from ultimately being reunited to God in eternity. Such goodness, such graces for promises made and kept, would certainly be worth a peace offering and a meal.

Offerings for Atonement in the Jewish Tradition

Peace offerings were not the only kinds of traditional sacrificial offerings outlined in Leviticus. There were also burnt offerings (olah), grain offerings (minchah), sin (or purification) offerings (chatat), and guilt (or reparation) offerings (asham). The point of these (the latter two in particular) were for forgiveness from sin and guilt of intentional and unintentional faults against God’s commandments and a restoration of God’s favor and blessing. In ancient times, the ultimate sin and guilt offerings were offered in a special way at the Temple every year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, where the High Priest symbolically laid all the sins of the people of Israel upon one of two goats (called the “scapegoat”) who was, ultimately, to be cast out of town and killed by being thrown off a rocky precipice; the other was ritually sacrificed. 

Again, the ultimate point was not the sacrifice or the killing itself in so many words. As Eleonore Stump writes in her beautiful work, Atonement, “... the animal sacrifices of the Hebrew Bible should not be understood as an attempt to get God to do what the human person offering the sacrifice wants God to do. Rather, those animal sacrifices are a means by which the person offering the sacrifice can deepen his trust in God and his closeness to God by giving his own life symbolically in giving the life of the sacrificed animal.” (p. 398-399) Such trust and closeness, or union, are hallmarks of interpersonal relationship.

In the cases of sin and guilt offerings, the sacrifices were meant to show one’s genuine desire to make things right in one’s relationship with God where faults have distorted, broken, or violated said relationship. God promised closeness and blessing and, ultimately, a Messiah for those who would follow his statutes. To disobey or forget said statutes would be to reject God’s promises and do damage to one’s relationship with Him. Giving from one’s own goodness is a way to show one wishes to become “at one” again with God - a useful way to understand what the word “atonement” ultimately means. 

To put things (perhaps too) simply, when one is sorry for benefits gained that have violated or harmed a relationship, one gives up that benefit, or something of even greater value (up to something symbolizing his very self in the most important relationships), to start to make the relationship right again, to rebuild bonds of trust and mutual love. 

All this is to say that, in the Jewish tradition, it is through offering a genuine sacrifice that one shows true openness to forgiveness and atonement. Without this openness, forgiveness and atonement are impossible, as one party in the relationship needing repair remains closed off, as it were. Sin is fundamentally a breaking of relationship, and this can only be expiated via sacrifice. 

We can reason further, then, that the sin of the world in its entirety can only be expiated via an ultimate sacrifice, offered once and offered for all.

Jesus Christ: Priest and Victim

As Catholics, we believe that Jesus Christ, the great High Priest (Hebrews 4:14), offered to God the ultimate scapegoat: Himself. Through willingly entering His passion unto his death, Jesus Himself offers and Himself becomes the ultimate sin and guilt offering, the ultimate fulfillment of the promises and the covenant God offered and that was so often remembered and renewed. In so doing, He also fulfilled the words of John the Baptist: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29) Through “one man,” Adam, “sin entered the world,” says St. Paul (Romans 5:12) As the “second Adam,” (1 Corinthians 15:45), we believe Jesus is the Messiah, the one through whom all sin and its associated punishments are expiated and redeemed - and overabundantly so, insofar as even death itself is defeated through His Resurrection.

So, as Catholics, we believe God has given us the ultimate life-saving graces - that is, the means by which to obtain eternal life. Indeed, Jesus obtains this means for us, so long as we come to be united to Him, in the way the tradition has prescribed: through an offering. Specifically, it is the offering by Jesus Christ Himself, insofar as He is the great High Priest, God-Himself-made-man, of Jesus Christ Himself, as He is the Lamb of God. 

Again quoting Stump in Atonement, “... because Christ’s atonement enables a person in grace actually to be united to Christ, Christ’s giving of Himself includes also the giving of the lives of all those united with Christ. And so, in being united to Christ, the person in grace gives his life to God in love. … the point of the sacrifice is not to give God a present to win God’s pardon, or to provide a condition for God’s forgiveness or any other form of benevolence towards human beings on God’s part. Instead …Christ’s giving of himself in sacrifice to God is a matter of helping human beings to come to God. … Christ’s passion and death count as a sacrifice … in the mode of sacrifice presented in the best traditions of the Hebrew Bible.” (p. 399)

The Christian community has reason for a peace offering and a meal, as it were, for as long as they journey on this earth in space and time. God has kept his covenant with us; we must rejoice and be glad in this and remember to live our lives so as to obtain what has been promised to us. And what else could be that “unblemished” peace offering but the sinless, spotless Lamb of God Himself again? What else could be the finest and first fruits of all creation (1 Corinthians 15:20), the most perfect offering of all things begotten of God, but God-Himself-made-man, the Word made flesh, the Splendor of the Father?

On Catholic belief, therefore, all the traditional offerings of the old covenant are united and fulfilled in the sacrifice by Jesus Christ Himself of Jesus Christ Himself. He is, at once, the ultimate sin offering, the ultimate guilt offering, and the ultimate peace offering as prescribed by the tradition within which He came to the world, the tradition through which the promises and covenant of God were most fully communicated and maintained. We believe He is the Messiah, the Promised and Anointed One, and the Lamb of God: the fulfillment of the Law (which, of course, included the prescriptions for the sacrifices and offerings mentioned above) and the Prophets (as the one whom they foretold). 

Accordingly, when He said, “This is my body. … This is my blood,” He was essentially identifying Himself as the sacrifice itself. By taking Jesus at His word here, we are not being strict Biblical literalists in one place to suit our own purposes. Rather, we are affirming Jesus’ place within His tradition, one that outlines the meaning of creation and God’s action and interaction with this quite literally from “the beginning …” We are affirming an entire understanding of reality and our place in it within which offerings were made to viscerally signify and remind us that relationship with God and with each other is at the basis of all reality and our lives and actions within it. 

“Do This In Memory of Me”

In a peace offering, like that of Passover, what is sacrificed is quite literally what is eaten. It is not the case that the Passover Lamb was killed, then discarded. It was not merely symbolically represented in the Passover meal. No: they literally ate the lamb of the sacrifice. For us Catholics, Jesus Himself, the unblemished victim of the ultimate peace offering is what we consume - Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity - whenever we partake of the Eucharist. At any given Eucharistic celebration at any time, we step outside of our own place and time and are placed in the upper room, as if every priest from every Mass past, present, and future speaks with Jesus Himself those words of institution: “This is my body. … This is my blood.” (Hence, the Church’s insistence that the Priest on the altar acts in persona Christi.) The sacrifice is not killed, then discarded. It is not merely symbolically represented. Quite literally, we believe, the sacrifice is what Jesus says it is: Himself.

When we celebrate the Eucharist today, similar to God’s command to the Israelites to commemorate the Passover and remember the old covenant, we follow a command: “do this in memory of me.” (Luke 22:19) We remember “the new covenant” (Luke 22:20) that Jesus institutes, which fulfills the old one but does not abolish it and, thus, sets the terms of our hoped-for union with God in heaven for all generations in time after Him. And we share a meal from this sacrifice together, all of us who come to the Lord's table ideally united as a community in our gratitude to Christ for the gift of Himself that grants us the greatest gift of all: true hope for the salvation of our souls.

As noted above, the sacrifice itself is not as central as the meal in said peace offering. But, without the sacrifice, there is no meal. Further, by identifying Jesus Himself as the sacrifice itself, we affirm a belief in an indispensable continuity with the tradition of which Jesus Himself was the fulfillment. In so doing, we place our own community as a Church in that same continuum. (For this reason, among others, any past and present anti-Semitism perpetuated by the Church herself is egregiously wrong and cries out for atonement; such wrongs themselves are an affront to who Christ Himself claimed to be and what He claimed to do for us.)

More generally, it is through affirming continuity with this tradition that we express our connection to and dependence on a community extending well past our own time and space. Accordingly, we affirm an entire worldview extending all the way to the foundation of the world that teaches us that dependences on and relationships with God, the world, and each other are woven into the very fabric of our being. This is why, in the words of the Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et Spes so often repeated by Pope St. John Paul II, “Man … cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (§24) Our very existence and our very salvation are rooted in gift - that is, in offerings of and from another, which are far from the individualistic and atomistic worldviews so prevalent in our world today.

May we, this Holy Thursday, reaffirm our commitment to the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Sacrament as the ultimate peace offering - and vow that, just as Christ has given and continues to give His very self to us and for us, we may “become what we receive” (St. Augustine of Hippo, Easter Sermon 227) and come to offer our own lives, given as a gift to us, as a gift to God in His service.