Over the past five Sundays, we’ve been reading the ‘Bread of Life Discourse’ from Chapter 6 of St John’s Gospel in which JESUS announced the Holy Eucharist. Although this Sunday we return to reading the Gospel of St Mark, as a conclusion to our meditation on the Holy Eucharist, I thought it worth writing a few words about Holy Communion and the resurrection of the body at the end of time, because the two are connected.

St Paul tells us, if we don’t believe JESUS rose bodily from the dead, then our faith is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14). Therefore we must believe that which has been revealed. Despite this, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) states, “On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body” (#996), because while all religions believe in the immortality of the soul, this teaching of the resurrection of the body is unique to Judeo-Christianity. We believe it is not only our soul that will live forever, but also our body.

When JESUS rose from the dead, it wasn’t merely that He came back to life. He came back to a new life in a glorified Body, and that Body can never suffer or die again. It still bore the wounds of His Passion, it could still be touched, He could still eat and drink, (Luke 24:39-42), but it was not bound by the normal rules of time and space. We read in the Gospels that after the Resurrection, JESUS could pass through walls and doors and appear anywhere at will (John 20:19), yet He wasn’t a spirit or a ghost (Luke 24:39). He had been resurrected to a new life and in a new type of body, yet it was the same Body in which He suffered and died. This is the type of body that is promised to us – a glorified body.  

JESUS has been telling us over the past few Sundays that He is the Bread come down from Heaven, and that this Bread is His true Flesh and Blood, and whoever eats It will have eternal life and be raised up on the last day (John 6:53-56). And He showed us at the Last Supper how this was possible by saying over the bread and wine, “This is My Body … This is My Blood” and then commanding the Apostles to “Do this in memory of Me.” When we receive Holy Communion at Mass, we consume JESUS’ resurrected and glorified Body, His glorified Flesh and Blood under the appearance of bread and wine. This too is the same Body that hung on the cross, was laid in the tomb and then rose from the dead and is now seated at the right hand of the Father. If JESUS didn’t rise from the dead bodily, then how could we ever receive Holy Communion? “For My Flesh is real food and My Blood is real drink” (John 6:55). You can’t get more bodily than that!         

When we eat something, whether it be a pizza or an apple, it becomes part of us. However when we consume the Body and Blood of Christ, the opposite happens: He doesn’t become part of us – we become part of Him. This is how the Holy Eucharist becomes the cause of our resurrection. It feeds us with the divine life, it heals our souls and the effects of venial sin, and it enables our bodies to be divinized and glorified and resurrected in Him. As the Catechism teaches, the Holy Eucharist is “the seed of eternal life and the power of the resurrection” (CCC 1524). As His divinized and glorified Flesh and Blood enters into us in Holy Communion, we receive the capacity to be glorified and share in the divine life and to be resurrected on the last day. “Whoever feeds on My Flesh and drinks My Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:54). But be sure to receive Him worthily in a state of grace having confessed your sins, for as St Paul tells us, “He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the Body of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:29).

Fr Paul Gillham, IC