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I find your explanation repugnant.

Personally, I try to be careful about my emotional reactions to theological matters. Mind you, I don't read minds. Nevertheless, speaking in the abstract and not about you or anyone in particular: When one is in grave error, sometimes the truth can appear to be offensive or repulsive. Contempt is sometimes a sign of conviction. Satan uses our desires to trick us with his lies. Bitterness about the past is one of his favorites devices for his deception.

Perhaps we can both pray for each other, and for ourselves, that the Lord will bind Satan from permitting bitterness to seed the sin of hatred and contempt among Christians who love the Lord. Where there is charity and hope, there goes the Lord and those with faith in Him. May the Lord give us the grace to follow Him in his ways of infinite compassion and mercy without ever sacrificing the truth.

Jesus and Paul were speaking spiritually about what Jesus was about to accomplish on the cross.

I don't understand, my friend. How could they be speaking merely spiritually when the cross was very much a physical, tangible event? Was it not both an event of the flesh and of the spirit? Of course it was.

How else could we take St. Paul's warning to us in 1 Corinthians 11:23-32? He says, "to eat and drink without recognizing the body of the Lord" is to eat and drink judgment on one's self. I don't know how he could be any clearer than that.

In the early Church, everyone who wrote anything about the Eucharist believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the elements of Communion. Ignatius was the second bishop of Antioch and died a martyr at about the same time the Apostle John died. Speaking of the Docetist heretics, who denied the humanity of Jesus, he wrote, "They confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again" (Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans). Just as we saw in John 6, Ignatius also equated the flesh of the Eucharist with the flesh of the Cross.

Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp who remembered Polycarp's firsthand stories about the Apostle John. He used the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist to prove the resurrection of the Christian dead: "The Eucharist becomes the body of Christ" (Irenaeus, Against Heresies). "How can they say that the flesh which is nourished with the body of the Lord and with his blood passes into corruption and partake not of life?" These translations, by the way, are from The Ante Nicene Fathers, a Protestant translation published by Eerdmans.

I challenge you to find anyone in the first three hundred years of the Church whose beliefs were even remotely related to Protestant notions concerning the Lord's supper. For a full millennium of Christianity, there were no exceptions to this belief of the early Church in the Real Presence. It was the universal teaching of the entire Church. Not until Rationalism had started to transform the thinking of Europe would any movement call into question the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Rationalism was condemned in the Second Lateran Concul in A.D. 1215.

In addition, what does it really mean when Christ says to eat his body and drink his blood in remembrance of Him? It means to eat His body and drink His blood as a sacrifice. If you look at Psalm 110:4, yu will see a prophecy, "The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: 'You are a priest forever, in the order of Malchizedek." Now, by definition, a priest orders a sacrifice. What did Melchizedek offer? He offered bread and wine, which he brought to Abraham as an offering (Gen 14:18).

Now here is the next logical question: When did Jesus offer bread and wine as a sacrifice? The only instance recorded in the Gospels is the Last Supper. Isn't it logical, then, that unless one can point to another time Jesus fulfilled this function of the Malchizedekian priesthood, Jesus saw the Last Supper as the institution of a sacrifice? Otherwise the imagery of Psalm 11o:4 is emptied of meaning.

If we understand the Mass as a Sacrifice, this helps to explain why 1 Corinthians 11:24-25 quotes Jesus as saying during the Last Supper, "This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me." The Greek word for "remembrance" in this passage is a very technical word. Interestingly, it is also a relatively rare word in Scripture. Outside of its uses in the Last Supper, it is used only one other time in the New Testament. This is in Hebrews 10:3, where the remembrance is the act of carrying out a sacrifice. "Those sacrifices are an annual reminder [remembrance] of sins." I invite you to check your Greek Old Testament, and you will find the word used only twice. Both times the remembrance is actually a sacrifice: "Put some pure incense as a memorial...to be an offering" (Lev 24:7) and "Sound the trumpets over your burn offerings and fellowship offerings, and they will be a memorial for you" (Nb 10:10).

This Greek word "remembrance" is more than just "think about me by recalling this event to mind." It is a word fraught with sacrificial overtones, used in the Bible to mean "remind yoruself of something by participating in a sacrifice." What a strange word for Jesus to use if he did not intend to set up the Eucharist as a sacrifice. In fact, Jesus' choice of this rather rare word is unexplainable if he did not view the Last Supper as a sacrifice.

But let's not end on a note of hostility, my Brother in Christ. Perhaps you will join with me in a prayer for discernment of the truth in the sacred scriptures. May the Holy Spirit take the lead.

Our Father, who art in heaven,
sacred is Your Word.
Your kingdom come,
Your Words be heard on earth as they are in heaven.
Give us today Your Sacred Word.
Forgive our neglect of it in the past
as we forgive those who neglect us.
Lead us toward an encounter with You
each time we delve into the Scriptures.
For Your presence, Your power,
and Your glory
are ever present among us
now and forever.

Amen.