A timely topic since we will hear one more Gospel on John 6.
Excellent post. This is the crucial center of the Church. The living presence of Christ in the tabernacle. We cannot seek him, directly speak to him, feel or touch him. But he is there in the brilliance of his cosmic presence. Indeed, it is just as well that we not see him since we’d be physically blinded by the brilliance of his radiance.
Atheists and agnostics who down through the ages have finally converted to the Catholic Church have come to accept this. And of course so have scores of nobel laureates, painters, sculptors, philosophers, scientists, writers, poets, and statesman and famous Anglican and Protestant converts, and converts from Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism.
This is why we must distinguish Catholics from Christians. In fact it not too much of a stretch to say that we don’t worship the same God. The God in the Eucharist is the God we Catholics adore and worship and all other brands of Christianity (35,000 and counting) do not.
Thank you, Salvation. This is one of those things where the separated brethren completely, utterly miss; the single biggest, and most important. Pray for their conversion; I do.
Protestant or Catholic, we should all be in awe. Proof, you can’t call error, Jesus knew/knows perfectly what to say. Just think, how divine, everything He ever said was perfect.
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Before we look at an analysis of the Greek text, consider this basic point about Christ’s own words at the Last Supper: If He had intended to mean that the bread and wine were merely SYMBOLS of His Body and Blood, He would have said so. He was speaking to uneducated men who hung on His every word and who would build His Church. Since it is an undebatable fact that the Church believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist universally for 1,500 years it would have been utterly scandalous and preposterous for Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, to speak the words that caused this belief if they were not actually true.
And now, the Greek, courtesy of John Salza, which refutes the (contrived) Protestant objection that the bread remained bread because Christ’s “this” refers to the bread: “The Greek transliteration of “This is my Body which is given for you” in Lk 22:19 is Touto esti to soma mou to uper hymon didomenon. Like many languages, Greek adjectives have genders (masculine, feminine, or neuter) which agree with their object nouns. The word ‘this’ (touto) is a neuter adjective. The word ‘bread’ (artos) is a masculine noun. This means that the neuter adjective ‘this’ is not referring to the masculine noun ‘bread’, because their genders do not correspond” (emphasis mine). “Instead, ‘this’ refers to ‘body’ (soma), which is a neuter noun. In light of the grammatical structure, Jesus does not say ‘This bread is my body,’ as the Protestant argument contends. Instead, Jesus says ‘This [new substance] is my body,’ or more literally, ‘This [new substance] IS the body of me.’