Not just a Symbol

Food for the Journey

When the soldiers came to Jesus, says Saint John, they saw he was dead, so they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance, penetrating the drowned lungs and the heart. Immediately blood and water flowed forth. John himself is the eyewitness.

The water is the baptismal drowning of sin, and the blood the wine of the Eucharist that gladdens our sinful hearts. Jesus himself said he would pour out his blood for the remission of sins. It is the living wine that he offered to all, if they would humble themselves to accept it, whether or not they could understand it. So after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, he said to the people that unless they ate the flesh of the Son of Man and drank his blood, they would not have life within them. If we believe that the Eucharist is merely symbolic, we confine it to earth, we measure it in time, and we consign it to death. But when the Apostle was granted the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, he saw the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb, an eternal Eucharist – and a pure river of living water flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.

“Come to me”

The heart of Jesus, once opened, does not close again; and the wine he gave to the Apostles at the last supper flows for ever, because it is love’s wine. We cannot understand this in earthly terms, nor are we strong enough to do without it. We faint along the way. We sin, and fall short of the glory of God. Whenever we try to save ourselves by the force of human intellect alone, whenever we try to turn stones into bread, we end up grinding our teeth in hunger, hearing from afar off the joy of the feast within a city whose gates open always, and only, for love. Then we should heed the consoling words of Jesus. “Come to me,” he says, “all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.” Or, to the Samaritan woman at the well, “I will give you living water.” Or, to the Apostles on that solemn night before he died, “Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.”

Here and now

The drama of the life of Jesus, his Death, his Resurrection, his eternal self-giving, which is an eternal descent to feed the sinner and wash him clean, is the theme of the lovely Eucharistic hymn “Here, O My Lord.” The speaker knows that the Lord is near and present and visible in the sacrament, but he is also weak and hungering for God:

Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face;
Here would I touch and handle things unseen;
Here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace,
And all my weariness upon thee lean.

The word “here” is plaintive and insistent. The communicant cannot wait for death. He needs the Lord now, here, just as a man on a long journey needs bread for the way. He doesn’t want a symbol; what good would a picture of bread do for a hungering man? He wants the reality. He wants the Lord.

The second stanza continues the insistent prayer:
Here would I feed upon the Bread of God;
Here drink with thee the royal wine of heaven;
Here would I lay aside each earthly load,
Here taste afresh the calm of sin forgiven.

Jesus never said that if we turned to him he would eventually ease us of the burden of sins. His love is too demanding for that, too impetuous. Precisely because his kingdom is not of this world, it can be here and everywhere among us, now. We do not look for some abstract “Christ” of our imagination to stand as the goal of human endeavor. Jesus the Christ is not a theorem or the solution to an equation. He is our Lord. We look for Jesus, and behold, he is really among us, under the appearance of bread and wine.

The sacrament that does not end

If we understand that, then for us to take the Eucharist is to love the Lord. But we are so weak that our love must be as a child’s: we must allow ourselves to be loved by God, to be fed and taken care of. All our strength is as brittle as the trunk of a dead tree, but when we lean on the arms of Jesus – those arms that calmed the wind and the waves, and that were nailed in mighty powerlessness to the cross – we have all the strength we need:

I have no help but thine; nor do I need
Another arm save thine to lean upon;
It is enough, my Lord, enough indeed;
My strength is in thy might, thy might alone.

In the end, the here of the believer, bound to his sins and to a body destined to die, is transferred to the here of Jesus’ sacrifice. On my own, I am beaten by time along the way, stripped naked, bleeding, left for dead. I turn instead to the Lord, and to the sacrament that does not end, because it is the sacrament of love:

Mine is the sin, but thine the righteousness;
Mine is the guilt, but thine the cleansing Blood.
Here is my robe, my refuge, and my peace;
Thy Blood, thy righteousness, O Lord, my God.

- Anthony Esolen is professor of English at Providence College, a senior editor of Touchstone Magazine, and a regular contributor to Magnificat. He is the translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy and author of Ironies of Faith. [Copyright Magnificat]