Eucharistic meditation

John 6:53-56: Jesus therefore said to them, Truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourself. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.

We saw this morning that we must abide in Jesus if we want our prayers to be effective. Abiding in Jesus means trusting Him, receiving His word and treasuring it in our hearts, obeying His commandments, particularly His commandment to love one another as He loved us, by laying down our lives for one another.

This table too is a place where we may abide in Him. Jesus says that He is the true bread from heaven, the true manna in the wilderness, come down from heaven to give life. By eating His flesh and drinking His blood in this meal, we remain in Him and have life. That means that participation in this table is one pre-requisite for effective prayer. If we want to see all the promises of God realized in our lives and in God's world, we must be regularly at this table.

There are two dimensions to this that we ought not miss. First, Jesus says that those who eat His flesh and drink his blood "abide in Me, and I in him." There is a mutual indwelling between Jesus and His people, just as there is between Father and Son. In fact, it's stronger than this: Our mutual indwelling with Jesus is not just "like" the Triune indwelling, but is a participation in that indwelling. By eating and drinking in faith, we are brought into and strengthened in our participation in the Triune fellowship. God is in us, we are in Him; Christ is in us through the Spirit and with Him the Father is in us and we in Him. In a sense, then, we don't offer our prayers from "outside" the Triune fellowship, but from within.

Second, Thomas Aquinas distinguished between the effects of natural and spiritual food. Natural food, he says, is transformed to become part of us. We eat bread, it's digested, and the nutrients enter our blood stream and literally become part of our flesh. Atoms and molecules of bread are transformed into body. Spiritual food, however, works the other way: Spiritual food does not transform into the eater, but transforms the eater into it. As we eat and drink Jesus, as we abide in Him at this table, Jesus is not being turned into us; we're being turned into Jesus, transfigured into new Adams in the new Adam, transformed into the likeness of his image from glory to glory.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, August 27, 2006 at 07:51 AM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.