Become for us

In this episode, I reflect on the Eucharist as a profound celebration that unites us around the Lord’s table, where we are nourished by God’s love. I explore the mystery of what truly happens during the consecration, discussing traditional and modern theological perspectives. While theories like transubstantiation offer insight, I emphasise that the real significance lies in God’s transformative action among us. The Eucharist empowers us as a community to embody Christ’s love, reaching out to others and allowing God’s presence to shape our lives and mission in the world.

00:00:00 The Eucharist is surely meant to be a celebration that gathers people together, you know, to gather around the common table, to be fed and nourished by the Lord. To celebrate this connection, this abundance of God’s love, of God’s kindness. And yet the Eucharist, unfortunately, has become one of those places where all we have is this disagreement. All we have is the experience of so many people attempting to explain, attempting to to come up with some sort of theory that might make sense of of what happens when we take the bread and the wine and we pray over it as part of the Eucharist. Of course, the church, through Saint Thomas Aquinas had that theory of transubstantiation. And that, you know, is a helpful theory of what happens in this moment of this change, but unfortunately, it’s based on Aristotelian metaphysics, where we divide the world into things that are substantial and things that are merely accidental. Now, that’s not the way that we understand the world. So trying to impose a system of thought, a system of belief, into a theory doesn’t really work for us.

00:01:25 Other theories that have come along of trans signification or con substantiation. Other theories that have attempted to to make sense of what is happening in this moment. But none of those kind of really, I find very helpful for the reality of what happens, because clearly something significant does happen, that it is no longer simply the bread and wine that is there on the altar. After the Eucharistic Prayer, after the whole experience of the calling down of the Holy Spirit, which we’ve seen over the last few weeks. You know, in the prayer of Pentecost and the prayer of the Trinity, recognizing that in those moments something powerful happens. So what is it that actually changes? What is the experience that we are able to gather around? What is the thing that the changes us and and cause us into this, this moment? And I don’t have any particular theory that I’m able to offer to you, other than the reality that it’s God who is at work here. If God is able to do it, then surely he will do it out of that experience of love.

00:02:45 The just as he’s able to be able to feed the crowd in the gospel today, just as he’s able to control the wind and the waves, just as he’s able to have authority over unclean spirits. So he has that authority to change the ordinary into the extraordinary. Just as we believe that we ourselves have been created in the very image and likeness of God. So we are the proper subject matter, for God’s intervention, that we become that very meeting point where God is able to do this transformation within us. And what better way to do that than by feeding us with his very body and blood, his very soul and divinity, that he takes the ordinary in the bread and the wine as a sign of what he’s already doing within us in the moment of our baptism, in that moment when we were cleansed of our sins and we were initiated into the family of God, we became part of this community that is struggling and bumbling and and attempting along the way to become the people that God has called us to be.

00:03:57 And God is always longing that we might be his people, that God is always wanting us to be the ones who do the things that he does in the gospel today, to teach the people about the kingdom of God, to see the wounded and those who are in need of healing, and to reach out with arms of love and to bring transformation into the lives of people. The God is always inviting us to do that work. And of course, he feeds us to provide that power, to provide us with that opportunity to experience that grace and that goodness. So there is this hunger that is within us to be fed by his very body that we gather, because it’s in this moment, in this encounter, in this meeting, that God is able to bring about this transformation within us. The gift of the Eucharist is for us this power of the Lord. It’s why we pray in the second Eucharistic Prayer that simply, you know, let your Holy Spirit come down upon these gifts that they may become for us the body and blood of our Lord.

00:05:09 That’s this gift of the Eucharist. That’s what we were able to celebrate today. We don’t need to know exactly how it happens at a molecular level. We don’t need to have any particular theories that explain what happens in that moment, but just to trust that that is this power that happens. The God longs for us to be part of his people. He longs to be present within us. And there’s no more intimate way that he can be present to us than by changing ordinary elements of bread and wine to be the very presence of of Jesus, that we can take them, we can eat them, and we can slowly be changed by that power to change us and to transform us, to be his very body here on earth. Let’s pray. As we celebrate today that we may indeed recognize the presence of Jesus among us, that we may long to be fed and nourished by the word proclaimed, and by the bread, and the wine now become his body and blood, that we may be the people who are changed by that, in order that we can indeed then be his hands and feet in the world, changing and transforming our community to be the very presence of God in this place.