Episode 135: The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
In today’s episode, we look at two details from the second reading and Gospel reading for this upcoming Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. The first detail, which is Christ’s command for the apostles to “do this in remembrance of me,” is a source of much debate between Christians concerning the nature of the Eucharist, whether it’s the real body and blood of Jesus or merely a symbolic representation. The second detail, which is Luke’s description of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fish in Luke 9:11b-17, prepares us to understand at least one miraculous element that’s present in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
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Hey everyone,
Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.
I’m Dr. Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
In today’s episode, we’re going to look at two details from the second reading and Gospel reading for this upcoming Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. The first detail, which is Christ’s command for the apostles to “do this in remembrance of me,” is a source of much debate between Christians concerning the nature of the Eucharist, whether it’s the real body and blood of Jesus or merely a symbolic representation. The second detail, which is Luke’s description of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fish in Luke 9:11b-17, prepares us to understand at least one miraculous element that’s present in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
Let’s start with the detail from the second reading, again, taken from 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. Paul writes,
I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,
that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over,
took bread, and, after he had given thanks,
broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying,
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup,
you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.
Now, as I said before, the detail that I want to focus on is Jesus’ command, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Many Christians see the command to “remember” as evidence that all Jesus did here was institute a mere symbolic representation of Jesus’s offering on the cross, a ritual that we perform to call to mind or remember what he did. That’s it!
This, of course, is directed at the Catholic Church’s teaching that the Eucharist is “the making present and the sacramental offering of [Christ’s] unique sacrifice” (CCC 1362), a sacrifice that involves the real presence of Jesus’ actual body and blood.
So, how might we respond to this objection?
The majority of what I say here in response is in written form in my book Meeting the Protestant Challenge: How to Answer 50 Biblical Objections to Catholic Beliefs.
The first thing to say that is the Greek for “do this” suggests that Jesus intends the apostles to offer the Eucharist as a sacrifice.
The Greek for “do this” is touto poieite. The verb poieō means “do” or “make.” But there is good reason to think that it in this context it is charged with sacrificial overtones.
In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament), the word poieō is used in reference to offering sacrifices. For this reason, the Revised Standard Version (and others) translates the verb as “offer”:
- “Now this is what you shall offer [poieseis] upon the altar: two lambs a year old day by day continually” (Exod. 29:38).
- “Draw near to the altar, and offer [poieson] your sin offering and your burnt offering, and make atonement for yourself and for the people” (Lev. 9:7)
- “I will offer [poiesō] to thee burnt offerings of fatlings, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams” (Psalm 66:15).
Prominent Protestant scholar J.N.D. Kelly affirms the sacrificial undertones of poieō in his book Early Christian Doctrines:
It was natural for early Christians to think of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. The fulfillment of prophecy demanded a solemn Christian offering, and the rite itself was wrapped in the sacrificial atmosphere with which our Lord invested the Last Supper. The words of institution, “Do this” (touto poieite), must have been charged with sacrificial overtones for second-century ears; Justin at any rate understood them to mean, “Offer this.”[i]
If Jesus is commanding the apostles to poiete the Eucharist, and that verb elsewhere in Scripture refers to offering sacrifices, it’s reasonable to conclude that Jesus intended his apostles to “offer” the Eucharist as a sacrifice.
This at least shows that the Last Supper had a sacrificial character to it, thus proving wrong the idea that the reenactment of the Last Supper was meant to be merely a remembrance and not a sacrifice.
Secondly, the act of remembrance that Jesus commands may not apply to the apostles but may refer to what the Father does when the Last Supper is offered as a memorial offering.
The challenge’s interpretation of the command to “do this in remembrance of me” assumes that Jesus is instructing the apostles (and by extension the believer) to be the ones doing the “remembering.” But it’s possible that Jesus intends to ascribe the act of remembrance to God the Father instead.
The Greek word for “remembrance,” anamnesis, is used in the Bible to describe sacrifices that prompt God to engage in an act of remembrance. For example, in Numbers 10:10 of the Septuagint, the sacrifices of peace offerings are said to “serve you for remembrance [anamnesis] before your God.” The NIV translation makes it a little clearer: the peace offerings “will be a memorial for you before your God.” Notice that God is the one who remembers in response to the offering that the Israelites make.
Similarly, we read in Acts 10:4 that Cornelius’s prayers and alms ascend “as a memorial before God.” The act of remembrance occasioned by such an offering is not ascribed to Cornelius, but to God.
Given this use of anamnēsis in the Bible, and given that Jesus commands the apostles to “offer” the Last Supper as a sacrifice, it’s reasonable to conclude that Jesus meant for the apostles to offer the Last Supper to prompt the Father to remember Jesus’ death on the cross and the salvation that he won for us. This would be in keeping with the biblical practice of memorial offerings.
Of course, the language of prompting the Father to remember Jesus’ death on the cross is anthropomorphic (a description of God with human-like qualities). God the Father is unable to change and thus can’t move from a state of not remembering to a state of remembering. But the biblical language of God “remembering” is meant to convey that God wills to continually bestow the graces of the cross in response to the eucharistic offering.
The late Lutheran Bible scholar Joachim Jeremias recognized as much in his book The Eucharistic Words of Jesus:
[T]he command for repetition [of the Lord’s Supper] may be translated: “This do, that God may remember me.” How is this to be understood? Here an old Passover prayer is illuminating. On Passover evening a prayer is inserted into the third benediction of the grace after the meal, a prayer which asks God to remember the Messiah. . . . In this very common prayer, which is also used on other festival days, God is petitioned at every Passover concerning “the remembrance of the Messiah,” i.e., concerning the appearance of the Messiah, which means the bringing about of the parousia.[ii]
Since the act of remembrance that Jesus commands doesn’t necessarily have to be directed to the apostles, but may instead describe a memorial placed at the Father’s attention, this challenge does not disprove Catholic belief in the Real Presence.
However, let’s suppose that Jesus intended the apostles to be the ones doing the remembering. This still wouldn’t disprove the Catholic understanding of the Last Supper. The reason is that the type of remembering that Jesus commands is a liturgical remembrance that actually makes present the event remembered.
Above we quoted the Catechism to say that the Eucharist is the “making present and the sacramental offering of his unique sacrifice.” The reason it gives is that “In all the eucharistic prayers we find after the words of institution a prayer called the anamnēsis or memorial” (1362; emphasis in original).
It goes on to explain why the anamnēsis proves what the Church claims about the Eucharist making present Christ’s sacrifice:
In the sense of Sacred Scripture the memorial is not merely the recollection of past events but the proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God for men. In the liturgical celebration of these events, they become in a certain way present and real. This is how Israel understands its liberation from Egypt: every time Passover is celebrated, the Exodus events are made present to the memory of believers so that they may conform their lives to them.
Is there any reason to think that what the Catechism claims is true? For starters, let’s consider the ritual words for Passover itself, which God commands in Exodus 13:8,14:
And you shall tell your son on that day, “It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt…” And when in time to come your son asks you, “What does this mean?” you shall say to him, “By strength of hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage.”
Notice that the father must say, “when I came out of Egypt…the Lord has brought us out of Egypt.” The father is instructed to insert himself and his family into the events that the liturgical celebration commemorates, no matter how much time has passed since the days of Moses.
This ancient view of the Passover was pre severed even within rabbinical Judaism. The Mishna Pesahim, a treatise that deals with laws for the Jewish Passover and the Passover lamb offering, says, “In every generation, a Jew is obligated to regard himself as if he personally had gone out of Egypt” (10.5). The Pesahim goes on to instruct,
Therefore we are bound to give thanks…and to bless him who wrought all these wonders for our fathers and for us. He brought us out from bondage to freedom, from sorrow to gladness, and from mourning to a festival-day, and from darkness to great light, and from servitude to redemption; so let us say before him the hallelujah (10.5).
Given that this view of the Passover ritual is something that was present at the time it was instituted, and after the time of Christ, it’s reasonable to assume that this view was also present at the time of Christ.
So, for the ancient Jews, the Passover meal wasn’t merely a theoretical or abstract remembrance of God’s past saving deeds. They viewed themselves as participants in the events the meal recalled, because they viewed those events being mysteriously made present in their liturgical commemoration. Bible scholar Max Thurian explains the Jewish belief this way:
As they ate…the Jews could re-live mystically, sacramentally, the events of the deliverance and Exodus from Egypt. They became contemporaries of their forefathers and were saved with them. There was in the mystery of the paschal meal a kind of telescoping of two periods of history, the present and the Exodus. The past event became present or rather each person became a contemporary of the past event.[iii]
Robert Louis Wilken, an American historian and former Lutheran minister who is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity emeritus at the University of Virginia, in his book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (New Haven: Yale University, 2003), 34, states the same thing. He comments, “Those who celebrate Pesach [Passover] are not spectators, they are participants.”
Jesus’ instruction to view the Eucharist as a memorial, therefore, doesn’t have to refer merely to a mental recollection of his sacrifice on the cross. It could be that Jesus intended the “remembrance” (anamnēsis) of his saving act on the cross to be of the same kind as the Jewish liturgical remembrance. The difference being that the anamnēsis for the New Passover meal, the Last Supper, would take on a new meaning. Rather than commemorating and making present the Jewish Passover, it would commemorate Christ’s Passover (see CCC 1364) and make it present.
We have good reason think that Jesus intended this connection, because he instituted the Eucharist within the context of the Passover meal (Matt. 26:17-19), thus making the Eucharist the Christian equivalent of the Passover. Paul affirms this view in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8 when he writes, “For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival.”
When we take all of this into consideration, we can conclude that the anamnēsis instruction in Luke 22:19 doesn’t pose a threat to the Catholic belief that the Eucharist offers the actual body and blood of Jesus.
J.N.D Kelly concurs, stating that the act of remembrance is not merely a mental recollection, and thus not contradictory with the Catholic view. Again, in his Early Christian Doctrines (pg. 196-197), Kelly writes, “The bread and wine, moreover, are offered ‘for a memorial (eis anamnasin) of the Passion,’ a phrase which in view of his identification of them with the Lord’s body and blood implies much more than an act of purely spiritual recollection.”
So, Jesus’ command “do this in remembrance of me” does not disprove the Catholic understanding of the Last Supper to be the making present of Jesus’ offering of his real body and blood.
Let’s now turn to the Gospel reading and look at the detail there. The passage is taken from Luke 9:11b-17, which is Luke’s description of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fish. The detail that I want to focus on is Luke’s record of how Jesus distributes the loaves and fish to the crowd. Luke writes in verses 16-17,
[T]aking the five loaves and the two fish,
and looking up to heaven,
he said the blessing over them, broke them,
and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd.
They all ate and were satisfied.
And when the leftover fragments were picked up,
they filled twelve wicker baskets.
Many of you listening probably have seen The Chosen, and in particular the episode that tells this story of the multiplication of the loaves and fish. Spoiler alert . . . Recall, Jesus has the disciples gather the twelve baskets first, put pieces of the loaves and fish in the baskets, and then they find the twelve baskets full of loaves and fish after which they begin to feed the crowd with those twelve baskets full.
But notice this is contrary to Luke’s record, as well as John’s record in John 6. Luke records that Jesus gave “them [the five loaves and the two fish] to the disciples to set before the crowd.” And then Luke says the “fragments” were picked up. Given the flow of the narrative, it’s fragments of the five loaves. John makes this explicit in his account. He writes in 6:13, “[T]hey gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves.”
So, it’s not that Jesus created new pieces of bread. Rather, the five barley loaves fed the thousands. How did this play out?
Seemingly, as Peter pulled a piece off of what we can call loaf #1, the quantity of the bread did not decrease, or at least as he pulled pieces off to distribute some quantity of the bread remained, enough for Peter to continue feeding multitudes of people. And, of course, the same for loaf #2. As Andrew pulled pieces off of his loaf, enough quantity of the bread remained such that Andrew could feed hundreds. And the same happened for the other apostles who were distributing pieces of the remaining loaves.
Now, why is this apologetically significant? Well, I’m not sure that it’s apologetical significant per se. But it does provide us an insight into the nature of this miracle, and the miraculous dimension of the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
In the Eucharist, we believe that God preserves in being the sensible qualities of bread and wine—what we see, touch, taste, and smell. Well, another quality of bread that doesn’t belong to its essence is the precise quantity of bread. Even the quantity of the host is preserved in being by God after consecration, such that the consecrated host is the same “size” as the pre-consecrated host.
Perhaps you can see how this miracle and its precise nature, as we’ve described it, relates to the Eucharist. As Jesus exercised divine power to preserve in being the quantity of bread without it decreasing, so too Jesus exercises divine power to preserve in being the quantity of the host in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
Jesus’ miracle of the multiplication of the loaves is meant to help prepare us for the type of miracle that Jesus will perform in the Eucharist: the preservation of the quantity of bread in being even the substance changes.
I suppose we could even say this understanding of the miracle serves an apologetical purpose insofar as, according to John’s Gospel, Jesus performed this miracle before he gave us the teaching that he would give us his flesh and blood to eat and drink. The miracle is a hint to what Jesus will do in the Eucharist—something miraculous. And this in turn cuts against the purely symbolic view of the Eucharist.
Conclusion
Well, my friends, that’s all I have for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The readings for this upcoming Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Year C, provides us with a couple of details that are relevant for doing apologetics:
- We have Jesus’ instruction to do this in remembrance of me, which, when understood properly, actually supports the Catholic view of the Eucharist rather than disproving it, and
- We have the Gospel reading revealing to us the precise nature of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, which in turn prepares us for the mystery of the Eucharist, and even inclines us to accept the Eucharist as something more than merely a symbol.
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I hope you have a blessed Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Year C. Until next time, God Bless.
[i] J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (New York: Harper Collins, 1978), 196-197. Cited in
Jimmy Akin, The Father’s Know Best, 299.
[ii] Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1966), 252; emphasis in the original.
[iii] Max Thurian, The Eucharistic Memorial, trans. J. G. Davies (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1962), 1:19; Quoted in Christian E. Wood, “Anamnesis and Allegory in Ambrose’s de Sacramentis and de Mysteriis,” Letter & Spirit: The Bible and the Church Fathers: The Liturgical Context of Patristic Exegesis, vol. 7 (2011): 56-57.