Real Presence?

A Question About the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist

Q. We were speaking about the difference between receiving communion in a non-Catholic vs. Catholic church. Someone had mentioned that God is present in all things already, so why then would the Catholic Eucharist have to be changed into the actual body and blood of Christ if God was already there? If He's already present in the actual bread and wine, what would be different?

This is a terrific question. It’s terrific because it goes right to the heart of what the Church is doing when we celebrate the Eucharist, and it connects the act of Eucharist to every other Christian action. It’s terrific because it demonstrates your willingness to delve deeply into the Church’s claims about who and what we are, to wrestle with them until they make sense to you. This is what the RCIA is all about.

Here’s my short answer. The bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ because we need extra help to recognize how God is present and active among us. All created things tell us something about God’s presence by being what they are. So normal bread and wine tells us that God is present to us like things that feed us and give us joy. But this isn’t enough. The consecrated bread and wine don’t just reveal that God is our food and drink: they reveal that this food and drink is Jesus’s body and blood given for the sake of the world out of an infinite love for humankind.

Moreover, the Eucharist is the Church’s fundamental act of worship. It’s where we offer God the best of what we have. Bread and wine is a fine offering, but it’s not quite our best, and left to ourselves we don’t really know how to offer these gifts anyway. So, in the Eucharist, Jesus (present in the activity of the priest and the presence of the gathered faithful) offers to God the best gift we have: Jesus himself, God incarnate and the perfect man. In the Eucharist, we join with Jesus in a perfect act of loving self-surrender to the God who is in love with us. This act of worship heals us, restores us, gives us life. And by receiving what we’ve offered to God, we receive Jesus himself, as food and drink. Ordinary bread and wine wouldn’t quite cut it.

But here’s a much longer response.

Let’s think about presence for a moment. Imagine you walk into your living room and see your roommate sleeping on the couch. In that moment, you are both unquestionably present in the room, but your modes of presence are different. To the sleeper, you might as well not be there. You’re present, but she’s unaware of your presence. You’re present physically, but you’re not present to her consciousness. Then she wakes up, and you immediately become present to her not just physically but consciously. Note that you didn’t do anything to change your mode of presence to your roommate: this had entirely to do with a shift in her waking state. You’re the same.

Then (bear with me) you start talking about your dead great--great grandmother. You tell stories about her. You show your roommate a picture of her. In some sense, we’d want to say that your great-great-grandmother is present to you both: through picture, through story, through memory, not through her own actions but through yours. And your great-grandmother is not present physically, and you two are not present to her .

And then your dog runs into the room. Dog is present. You and your roommate are present. But because Dog lacks a human capacity to articulate complex thoughts, desires, memories, and goals, you can’t be present to it in the same way as you can be present to your roommate. And your great-great-grandmother can’t be present to your dog at all.

So we have at least three ways that we can be present. We can be present to others physically. We can be present to others consciously, to various degrees. We can be present to others through memory or story-telling. All of these modes of presence have to do with our capacity to understand and to communicate. You can read your grandmother’s memoir and her thoughts become present to you, though she isn’t physically or consciously present. You can read this memoir to your dog, but to no avail -- your dog can’t grasp human presence. And so on.

Thanks for being patient. Now let’s turn to God. How is God present to us? First of all, Catholics profess that God is the Creator. For us, this doesn’t primarily mean that a long, long, long time ago God decided to put the universe in motion, with the seeds of emergent probability and evolution and so on (though this is also true.) Rather, saying that God is the Creator means that God is responsible for the sheer fact of existence, at every moment, of every created phenomenon. We don’t just say that God created the cosmos; we say that God upholds the existing cosmos at all times. God is not one more created being alongside us. God isn’t a higher being or a super being or the first thing that existed. God is beyond all of these things. If the entire cosmos never existed, God would still be God. We can talk more about this, and especially about how created beings can still have agency and responsibility, but my fundamental point is that when we’re talking about God, we’re talking about the One immediately responsible for there being anything at all.

This means that we are present to God at every moment. God (to use Scriptural language) knows our words before we say them. Our innermost desires are present to God. Every aspect of our being is present to God, because God is the one causing them to exist.

However, God isn’t immediately and fully present to us . In fact, we can’t conceive of God in terms of immediate presence. A created being simply cannot comprehend the ground of its existence. Indeed, if you put every created reality all together, the sum of them wouldn’t begin to make God fully present. God is infinite, beyond the capacity of created things to reveal fully For God to be completely present to us, we would have to be God as well. (More on this later -- this is the beginning of the Christian mystery.)

But God can be present to us in every created thing, because God is somehow at work in every created thing. All things disclose something of the nature of God: butterflies, storms, eclipses, words of love. None of these things makes God entirely present, and all of them together still wouldn’t. But we can come to know something of God simply by seeing and understanding what’s around us.

Now think about Jesus. Catholics profess that Jesus is God Incarnate. In Jesus, God became present to the world in a radically new way -- present in and through every act of this perfect human being. As Jesus walked, preached, and healed in Palestine 2000 years ago, he revealed himself as God to those around him. But it took the disciples a long time to come to profess that Jesus is God. And even when they professed it, they couldn’t quite comprehend what they were saying. The disciples, their identities and the cores of their being, were truly present to Jesus, but his true identity was only partially present to them. It had to be revealed, gradually. In order for God to become present to the disciples, they had to become more like God.

Think back to our dog example. For your dog to understand you, to truly get you, it would have to become more human. Otherwise it only understands things in dog terms. The same is true (in a qualified sense) for us and God.

But after his death and resurrection, Jesus ascended to the Father, sending the Holy Spirit in his place. The Holy Spirit transformed the community of disciples into the Church, the new presence of Jesus to the world. During Jesus’ earthly life, God was present to the people of Judaea through his human presence. Now, after his ascension, God is present to the people of the world through the presence of the Church, the community of Christians throughout the world and throughout history who reveal Jesus in their lives.

Almost to the Eucharist, I promise. Here’s what we have so far. God is present to the world as the Creator, but we can’t comprehend this, and sin makes it even more difficult. To save us from this problem, God became present to the Jewish people through the incarnation of Jesus. When Jesus ascended to the Father, he continued to be present to the world by sending the Holy Spirit to create the Church, which St. Paul calls Jesus’ Body. And for the people of the Church, the sacraments were given as a way to manifest Christ’s ongoing presence and work among us.

We are always present to God, but God is only present to us according to our capacity to receive God’s presence. In Jesus, God becomes human specifically to cater to our limited capacity to receive God. In his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus, the perfect human, united himself with us all and offered us to God as an act of worship. Jesus is God’s gift to us, and we are Jesus’ gift to God. But in order to be a good gift, we need to be better than the selfish, short-sighted, broken people we are. We need to be happy, joyous, full of life and empty of spite. That’s God’s ongoing mission through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

This brings us to the Eucharist, the most important sacrament. In the Eucharist, Jesus’ love for the God he called Father and his love for us are revealed. During the liturgy, we tell the story of his betrayal, his suffering and death, and his resurrection. We see that Jesus is God’s gift to us, and despite our best efforts to reject this gift, God continues to give. In the Eucharist, we ask the Holy Spirit to bring about the presence of Jesus through bread and wine, so that we (in whom Jesus is alive, for we are the Church, Christ’s body) can offer Jesus (present under the appearance of bread and wine) to God in thanksgiving. Jesus becomes present to us a s food, as the means by which our bodily existence is sustained. Without real food, our bodies die. Without Jesus, our souls die. The Eucharist is the presence of Jesus as bread and wine offered to God in thanksgiving.

Because we’re humans, we need God to be present to us in lots of ways: in the beauty of the earth, in the understanding that comes from prolonged study, in the fruit of significant relationships. Because we’re broken humans who don’t trust God, we need God to be present to us in ways that make God’s trustworthiness r eal , active , right here right now . The Eucharist does this. In the Eucharist, God becomes our food, our drink. We take and eat w hat God is , so that our being and God’s being can co-mingle and become the same. Because, in the end, the whole point of Jesus’ work is to make us the same as he is: God.

So yes, God is already present in the ordinary bread and wine that wait in the back of Church before Mass. God is present in the bread and wine that non-Catholic Christians use for their own communion rituals. God is present in these things because God creates and sustains them from moment to moment, willing their existence out of love and delight for all partial reflections of God’s own being. But when a priest whose apostolic succession links him bodily to the Church throughout the world and history asks the Holy Spirit to make the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, and when he invokes Jesus’ own words at the Last Supper, then God becomes present to us, not just creator of bread and wine, but as the lover of all humankind, as the one who held back nothing for a people so confused and scared that they let the government and religious authorities murder him. God’s presence to us in the Eucharist is a specific kind of presence, one tailored to Catholics who believe and profess what the Church teaches. God can be present to anyone in bread and wine, but God is present to the faithful in an incredibly special and intimate way. Participating in this intimate sacramental presence makes us more like God, as we join Christ in offering ourselves to God for the sake of of the world. This act of worship is what Christians are fundamentally about. Our Eucharistic practice is a model for our lives. We’re always to be giving ourself, in union with Jesus, for the sake of a world sick with confusion and fear. The Eucharist tells us who we are and what to do, and for this reason we return to it Sunday after Sunday, praying with the Church throughout the world, “We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your resurrection, until you come again.”