=============================================================
Wow, your post certainly demonstrates massive loads of chutzpah, that's for sure!
You say you believe in Jesus, but then you either completely throw out, or severely distort much of what God reveals in Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, John 6, and 1 Corinthians 11, basically telling Jesus you believe in Him, except when you don't believe in Him, such as here, and here, and here, and here, and here..."
St. Paul's warning is aimed directly at people who believe/don't believe/believe/don't believe/believe/don't believe/ regarding what our dear Lord plainly taught about this important life-giving teaching, depending instead on what their own preconceived erroneous notions are.
When I see the scriptural contortions and distortions and twistings and misinterpretations, and the tap-dancing and shimmying around the truth that some people make themselves go through in order to try to dodge and avoid the plain biblical teachings about the Holy Eucharist instituted by God Himself, I find it both shocking and very saddening.✝============================================================✝
"Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself."
1 Corinthians 11:27-29✝============================================================✝
Man shall indeed live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, but man has to not just hear that word, but man also has to respond to that word. For example, when Jesus said to "Repent!", the hearers didn't just have to hear that word, but they also had to actually do something in response: repent.
Likewise, when Jesus tells us in so many different places in the Holy Scriptures that we are supposed to observe the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, and precisely how we are supposed to observe that Sacrament, and what it truthfully involves (whether we understand it or not), He expects us to actually do something in response to His words, not just have warm and fuzzy thoughts and feelings about them.
I've 'discerned' that Rome's silly little wafers are NOT the body!
Matthew 26:26-29 And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. (27) And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; (28) For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. (29) But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.2] Mark 14:22-25
Mark 14:22-25 And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. (23) And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. (24) And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many. (25) Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.3] Luke 22:15-20
Luke 22:15-20 And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer: (16) For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. (17) And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: (18) For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. (19) And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. (20) Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.4] 1 Corinthians 11:23-26
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: (24) And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. (25) After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. (26) For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come.
John 6 is omitted from this list because it does not institute the Lord's Supper. It happens relatively early in Jesus' ministry, and is a watershed discussion of what it means to believe in Jesus, summarized well here:
2. Declaration of purpose in the institutive passages:John 6:35 And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.As Jesus clearly teaches through the bread metaphor, the body and blood of Jesus, given for us, become to us a way to feed spiritually on Christ. But not according to fleshly eating, which misunderstanding He corrects in verse 63, but rather according to spiritual eating, by which He means, as verse 35 makes clear, having faith, believing on Jesus, who He is, what He has done for us, what He will do for us. Believing IS eating.
As stated above, not one of the institutive passages introduces a sacramental view of the Eucharist (literally, the Thanksgiving). Rather the declared purpose is two-fold: First, to commemorate Jesus, not only in His death, but the whole Jesus, "in remembrance of me," and second, to proclaim His death till He comes back. To suggest there are other formal purposes is to add to the word of God. Therefore we can be certain that the stated purposes are sufficient to understand why we are supposed to conduct this sacred meal. If we say that there is a further purpose of conferring sacramental grace, critical to our salvation, which the Holy Spirit failed to mention here or anywhere else in Scripture, we make ourselves out to be wiser than the Holy Spirit, which would be an extremely unwise position to take.3. Objections to the sufficiency of the declared purposes:
a) "The Eucharist is necessarily sacramental because after the blessing it becomes the true substance of the body and blood of Christ, which in turn from John 6 is known to confer eternal life if eaten corporeally, and because we know this salvation to be by grace, therefore the act of corporeally eating Christ is sacramental, i.e., it efficaciously confers a state of grace. The evidence for this corporeal realism, and the premise which supports the rest of the logic, is the expression 'this is my body.'"
Response 1: When Jesus says, "this is my body," that is not the language of one thing "becoming" something else. The verb for becoming, ginomai, was not used here. But saying "A is B," using eimi, the simple verb of being, does fit very well the standard way of stating a direct metaphor, both in Greek and in many other Indo-European languages. Therefore, concluding by a special pleading that the simple "is" necessarily implies all that transubstantiation describes is a non sequitur. The conclusion does not follow from the premise. A metaphor is not only a perfectly valid way to understand those words, but is the default and most ordinary way to understand such an expression.
Example: If I point to a white dot on my GPS map of Illinois, and say "This is Springfield," no sane person reading this paragraph is going to think I literally mean the white dot is actually a city called Springfield with thousands of people milling around in it on the surface of my GPS screen. And because it is so obviously NOT literal (corporeal), it automatically triggers a metaphor recognition process in the human brain, and can be immediately identified BY EVERYONE as a visual metaphor. The pixels remain pixels, but in our mind we're automatically directed to think about the real Springfield.
Response 2: Jesus does not acknowledge a substitution of substances, but actively refutes that a substitution of substance has occurred. When He says in Mark, "I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine," He confirms the substance of what He gives them to still be the fruit of the vine, even after the blessing. This is more than acceptance of accidents. An accident is by definition not essential to fulfilling the platonic archetype. A chair made of wood and a chair made of rock are both still chairs. Choice of material is irrelevant. The fruit of the vine could be composed of any number of incidental materials, even materials that change over time. But it still remains identifiable as "fruit of the vine," so it retains it's platonic "substance," according to what Jesus says here. This directly refutes the Aquinian theory.
Response 3: Corporeally eating Christ is never asserted in John 6. The main objection of Jesus' audience was their misapprehension that the eating was somehow corporeal, but even they did not have a unified understanding, because a sharp dispute was going on amongst them. Verse 63 is a direct response to that controversy, and in it we have Jesus directly refuting the corporeal view of eating Him.
b) "When Paul reprimands the Corinthians for failing to 'Discern the body' of the Lord,' he is referring exclusively to the bread and wine. Therefore we know the bread and wine are, in substance, the body and blood of Christ."
(27) Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. (28) But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. (29) For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.
More could be said. Many books could be written. But if we do as he said, remember Him, and proclaim His death till He comes, and do so worthily, with a full and proper love for our brothers and sisters in Christ, every one of them our better, no matter what their circumstances, we honor His word.Response: What was the reason Paul brought up the Lord's Supper in the first place? Certain individuals had conflated the sacred meal with their pagan drunken parties, which is bad enough, but had also used the eating as an occasion to exhibit a piggish selfishness, consuming the meal before the poorer brethren arrived, leaving them go hungry, as if they were unimportant to the body of Christ. "Non-essential personnel." This loveless, thoughtless behavior was causing hurtful divisions within the fellowship, and was a direct rejection, in practice, of the unity of faith and love God desires for His people:
1 Corinthians 12:12-14 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. (13) For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. (14) For the body is not one member, but many.From which we see again one of Paul's main themes for this epistle, that the body of Christ should not be divided, because Christ has given us a sufficient basis for being one body. Christ is our head. We are His body. Furthermore, Paul has already been working to teach this theme of unity based on our shared experience of the Eucharist:
1 Corinthians 10:16-17 The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? (17) For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.So the context is not a discourse on Aristotelian substances. Instead, Paul has a pastoral objective, to make these fighting, rude, and crude Corinthians to get what it means to be unified in that one true bread. Hence the emphasis on koinonia, translated "communion" above, meaning "fellowship," as opposed to arcane and impersonal concerns over substance. When he chides the party animals for "not discerning the Lord's body," he is not discussing some gnostic awareness of the hidden world of substances, or platonic forms, versus the world of appearances. That would be 1) completely offtrack from his pastoral objective of unity, and 2) would be a step toward gnostic heresy, in which a subjective mystic experience of the gnosis takes precedence over the plain and open teaching of spiritual truth.
It helps to realize the word "discern" here is diakrino, which shares the same base word as many of the other "judgment" terms used in this passage. As such, it does NOT mean to mystically detect a magical or sacramental quality of the bread. Paul is really telling them they need to make a thoughtful distinction between their private reckless parties versus the body of the Lord, which is present in the fellowship of the believing community during the sacred meal. The elements of the meal call us to remember Him, His unselfish sacrifice on our behalf, His prayer that we should all be one, that we should prefer another's needs over our own. It is when we fall short of that standard of love, and are heartless toward each other, that is when we become unworthy to partake of that meal which proclaims till the end of the age the Gospel of God's selfless love and forgiveness in the death of Jesus Christ.
In other words, we have to choose. What does the Lord's Supper mean to us? Free food? A private gnosis of mystic union with the divine? Or love one another as Jesus loved you?