Therefore you have Jesus still in his body, holding his body in his hands.”
Represents, figurative. Long before Jesus had said,
“I am the bread of life” (John 6:35,48). But he wasn't made of flour and water and baked in an oven.
“I am the true vine”. (John 15:1) Neither was he a plant despite seeming to say so to the rigidly, literalistic mind.
One wrong idea produces another, that the bread and wine retained all the characteristics of bread and wine until....well who knows.....did the wine have a funny taste or the bread become a bit chewy?
“Plus, also let's not forget the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes in this context.”
Let's not forget the fish remained fish and the bread remained bread, one didn't turn into the other or anything else.
“Whatever the Eucharist is, it is a *miracle*, so trying to put into this nice little box of human spatial conception is not necessarily the best idea.”
Since the Bible was written for humans their spatial conceptions are important for understanding it.
Figurative expressions have meaning (notwithstanding some who apparently think "figurative" often means "meaningless"). Note the structure of the three different expressions: the first term is (in I.A. Richards' terminology) the "tenor" -- the "principal subject of the metaphor"; the second term is the "vehicle" -- the "borrowed idea, or what the tenor resembles."
For example, in "The sun is a red balloon," the tenor is the sun and the vehicle is the balloon (i.e., characteristics of redness and roundness are being attributed to the sun).
Christ is like "bread of life," because He is life-sustaining; He is like a vine because life-giving "sap" flows from and through Him; "bread" and "vine" say something about Christ, illuminate one aspect.
In the words of consecration, conversely, if it were figurative, "My body" would be the vehicle and say something about "This" -- the bread (which would be the tenor). Note He does not say "My teaching", but "My body." What exactly do you think "body" illuminates about "This [bread]"?
Nonsense, “represents.” Talk about doctrine made up of whole cloth. Scripture nowhere says the Eucharist merely “represents” His body...it says the exact opposite. This is purely the doctrine of men and not God.
Christ uses metaphors in some places,and he doesn’t in others? Looking at the whole context of John 6 (read the Greek), the institution narratives, and the Pauline epistles, it strains credulity to infer that he was being figurative.