Your comment: “All this attempt to make bread and grape juice something changed, holy, mysterious, manipulated only by some selected cult leaders for their power over credulous ignoramuses is simply just puff, a product of a system meant to snare gullible slaves to be constantly milked of their substance by simony.” Your comment is NOT the truth.
The words of Jesus “This is my Body” “This is my Blood” is the TRUTH.
You can either follow Jesus with the Truth or not. Attempting to rationalize the words of Jesus is not truthful and leads to rejecting Jesus.
I truly hope that you find God’s Truth and follow it.
Jesus said that He was the door, the vine, the bread, the way.
Can we then presume that you, as a Catholic who demands that we take everything literally, believe that Jesus is made from wood?
Or has green leaves growing out of Him?
Or His body is made from bread dough?
Or that He is made from dirt?
He also said that He was drinking the fruit of the vine> Why don’t Catholics believe that what He was drinking was wine instead of blood?
Do you really believe that Jesus would break the very Law that He said He came to fulfill but drinking blood in violation of every command concerning blood that God ever gave us?
If you are going to take Jesus words so seriously, remember that He also instructed His disciple to not be called *Father* nor to call any one *Father*. Why do Catholic disobey a clear concise command of Jesus when addressing their religious leaders?
Obviously, your mindset clealy misses the point. I both Know Him, and follow Him, because He came, like Lochinvar, and carried me out of and away from Sin as a master and the burdens of sinfulness as the reward. My life verse is Psalm 107:2 --
Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom He hat redeemed from the hand of the Enemy."
I do meet with others every Lord's Day, summoned to reverence and remembrance, shewing the Lord's death til He come, and by command seeking others who will thus worship Him in Spirit and in truth, and rejoicing in their salvation by a Faithful and Gracious Savior.
In this forum, considering this challenge to discover "The Whole Gospel," the Lord has sent His True Agents to call you away from the emblems of Cain's Table, Agents who are commissioned to earnestly contend for The Faith once delivered to them, the hagioi, ones being made holy by the Lord Jesus Messiah. Their desire to see you convicted of your need for His Real Presence in your life, conferred only by once and for all time allowing Him to assume your sin account in exchange for being credited with His Righteousness.
Do you, like the noble Berean saints, have an open mind to His offer for your soul as laid out in the Holy Scriptures? Here's the offer:
"In fact not one has completely ascended into Heaven except
The One Who descended out of Heaven, namely The Son of Man
Who continually exists in the Heaven. And according as
Moses lifted high the serpent in the desert, in this way it
is absolutely necessary for The Son of Man to be lifted
high in order that eveyone who is persistently committing
trust unto Him not perish, but continually have eternal
absolute life.
For The God so loved the world, so that He gave His Only Begotten Son, in order that everyone persistently committing trust unto Him not perish, but have Eternal Absolute Life. For The God did not send His Son into the world in order that He judge the world, but in order that the world be saved through Him. The one persistently committing trust unto Him is not being judged. But the one not persistently committing trust already has been permanently judged because he has not permanently committed trust unto the Name of The Only Begotten Son of The God" (John 3:13-18, A Precise Translation, freely available from Happy Heralds, Inc. (click here)).
This verse promises that the Gift of Salvation of The God is permanent, from the moment you trust Him and He takes over and keeps you.
Your religious system does not and cannot promise that. You need to come out of it and be saved, with an ewternal security starting now, if perchance God will open the eyes of your understanding.
If you mean that showing them leavened bread, artos, and giving them the fruit of the vine in a cup, whas absolutely seen and verified by those present that Jesus did not chop off a finger and give it to them. The bred He gave them represented the Word of God, which was written by His direction, and represents His Will. Obvious to them, they were not zombies trying to eat someone's face.
Likewise, the fluid in the cup was pressed liquor of the grape, because of its color reminding them of the blood he was yet to shed during His Passion. He could not possibly have cut his arm and bled into the cup. And he said that the next time he shared it with them it would be the new wine: "I will drink it with you new in the Kingdom."
Your interpretation violates every rule of hermeneutics, the science of interpretation of what the words you hear or read really mean. It also throws plain scientific observation right out the window, and no one has yet been able to define what might have happened if your theory is correct (and it cannot be). What the disciples saw made plain sense that what he shared was bread and wine, and to them it made common sense, therefore in their later teaching of churches, they taught no other sense. Show me wherever in the scriptures it ever plainly shows that the bread or wine became something else, or acquired some heretofore never-seen qualities offending the power of seeing and reasoning that God gave us.
My mind is open to see if there is a unifying literal interpretation of Scripture that you can find supporting your claim.
They, the Bereans, searched the Scriptures daily to see if it be so. Will you approach this issue with an open mind to the counsel of Scripture alone?
The The words of David “Be it far from me, O Lord, that I should do this: is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives? therefore he would not drink it." (2 Samuel 23:16-17) is the TRUTH. David explicitly said that potable water was the blood of men who basically gave their lives out of love for him, and thus he would not drink it, but poured it out on the ground as an offering to the Lord. Obviously for this to be true than some sort of transubstantiation. But those fundamentalists insist this was figurative language! They can can either follow David with the Truth or not. Attempting to rationalize the words of David is not truthful and leads to rejecting the One whom David prophesied of.
In confirmation of this we have the words of Joshua, showing that men can be nourishing bread: “Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us” (Num. 14:9)
Likewise, seeing that it was either eat the flesh of men or be eaten, David said that his enemies came to “eat up my flesh,” (Ps. 27:2) and that workers of iniquity ”eat up my people as they eat bread , and call not upon the Lord.” (Psalms 14:4) The Promised Land itself feared as “a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof.” (Num. 13:32)But once again those fundamentalists insist this was figurative language!
Then we have the disciple whom Jesus loved referring to Jesus transubstantiating Himself as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” and as “the door of the sheep," and "the Light of the world” the true "vine," all of which yes, once again, those fundamentalists insist this was figurative language.
Yet they deny that John 6 is speaking literally because (they claim) that in Scripture believers always obtained spiritual life by believing the words of the gospel, these being spirit, and life, (Acts 15:7-9) but that no soul ever obtained spiritual life by literally physically eating anything, directly contrary to the absolute imperative statement of Jn. 6:53! Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. (John 6:53)
And that the way Jesus lived by the Father, which He taught was analogous to how believers would live by Him, As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. (John 6:57) , was by obeying His word, which is what man is to live by, (Mt. 4:4) But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. (Matthew 4:4) and thus the lover of metaphors, John, records that the Lord said that doing the Father's will was His "meat." Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work. (John 4:34)
And that John himself only testifies to eating and drinking Jesus as referring to wholly receiving the Lord Jesus and then living for Him, as this what he teaches elsewhere in his gospel and letter, and his description of the Lord's supper is hardly that of the synoptic gospels, not even describing any eating or the Lord giving feed, except to Judas Iscariot, and never recording what Catholics insist are the words of consecration.
And then they go all through the rest of the NT in search of any description of the Lord's supper being that of the centerpiece of worship and sacramental grace as a sacrifice for sins by the hands of a distinct sacerdotal class of clergy called "priests," and eaten in order to obtain spiritual life, and find none! Only the seemingly informal breaking of bread, and with the only manifest description of the Lord's supper (outside of Jude's "feast of charity" in v. 12) being that in which union with Christ and each other is the focus, and the "body" at issue is that of the church.
But those fundamentalists, while they reject the aforementioned references to OT and NT use of eating or drinking as being literal, yet they also hold that all the OT historical accounts are literal, and that the NT writers also treated them thusly, contrary to so much esteemed Catholic scholarship. But trusting the one true crurch to provide us with the Truth then we know we are safe.
/sarcasm
I truly hope/pray that you find God’s Truth and follow it.
They are words of truth, but they are in figurative language, not literal language. Here's more of that figurative language, and a nice spiritual song to illustrate it:
How can Jesus be a loaf of bread and a fountain of living water both at the same time? with wine in a cup as His blood to remember Him with?
Only figuratively speaking, that is how! These are spiritual truths for instruction and edification of simple (but not ignorant) people!