The word sacrament means pledge, or mystery. It does not occur in the Bible, any more than do words like Trinity, substitutionary, prelapsarian, or inerrancy. Christian vocabulary is full of words that have come into use as the Christian mind has gone to work on what it finds in the Scripture.

The Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood is the great pledge, given by the Lord to His Church, for as long as history lasts, of the reunion of form and matter, or spirit and flesh. Put more directly, it presents to us His death, by which He redeemed the world from sin and death and from the ruin brought on by the Fall. The “rebuilding,” or reunion, of things from this rum was inaugurated by God in the Old Testament, manifested at the Incarnation, and will be completed at the Parousia. It is pledged and kept present to us in the Eucharist which is both memory and anticipation. It recalls Christ’s body, broken for us, and it looks forward to His glorious reappearing. “In remembrance of me . . . till He come.”[20] Both phrases are necessary.

The “remembrance” that inheres in the Sacrament is more than mere recollection, however. The English word does not quite catch the whole of what lies in the word anamnesis, which Christ used when He gave the bread to His disciples as His Body. The word suggests a remembering that is also a making present. Many Christians limit the significance of the Eucharist to the idea of recalling bread and wine as aids to memory and devotion. They are certainly at least that, but from its earliest days the Church understood this Eucharist to be Sacrament, mystery.

There is no mystery in a mere aid to memory. The Church, as it pondered what the Lord might have meant in the strange formula, “This is my body,” attached great weight to what He said. As with the doctrine of the Trinity, what is not spelled out as such either in the Gospels or by Saint Paul was articulated by the Church very early as what is indeed there in the Scripture. The same is true of this doctrine; no single New Testament text spells out the whole rich treasury of Eucharistic faith.

All springs from the Lord’s own stark and mysterious words, not only at the Last Supper itself, but those recorded in John 6:

. . . my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world. . . . I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? 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. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. . . . This is that bread which came down from heaven. . . .[21]

It is possible to draw the sting from these words by spiritualizing them. The Jews who were so maddened by His words would have been placated if He had agreed to do this. In response to their consternation, He only drives the scandal home: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” The “except ye” here is precisely the same as in the third chapter of John regarding the new birth. Neither the heavenly birth nor the heavenly food is optional. One cannot get around this point in Scripture.

Those who avoid the scandal here by spiritualizing the Lord’s words can indeed hold up their end of the discussion if the letter of the text itself is alone consulted. But in so doing they dissociate themselves from the understanding that the Church has brought to these words for two thousand years. We find that the vast testimony of godly teachers, including some who themselves had been taught by the apostles, speaks of the Eucharist in these sacramental terms.

Ignatius of Antioch, in his epistle to the Smyrnaeans, spoke of “those who hold strange doctrines. . . . They abstain from eucharist and prayer, because they allow not that the eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ.”[22]

Justin Martyr, who, like Ignatius, was close in time to the apostles, said, “We do not receive these as common bread or common drink. But just as our Saviour Jesus Christ was made flesh through the Word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we have been taught that the food which has been eucharized by the word of prayer from Him is the flesh and blood of the Incarnate Jesus” (First Apology, 66,2). Irenaeus, shortly thereafter, put it thus: “. . . the bread, which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly” (Contra Haereticos, 4, 18, 5). Athanasius, to whom we are all indebted for defending the orthodox Faith against Arianism, said, “But when the great and wondrous prayers have been recited, then the bread becomes the body and the cup the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Sermon to the Baptized). Likewise, we find the other witnesses to the faith speaking this way: Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, and countless others.

Much later on, John Wycliffe said that the change that occurs at the Eucharist “effects the presence of the body of Christ. . . . Not that the bread is destroyed, but that it signifies the body of the Lord there present in the sacrament” (De Eucharistia, 100f.).

The Bohemian Reformer John Hus spoke likewise, “The humble priest doth not . . . say that he is the creator of Christ, but that the Lord Christ by His power and word, through him, causes that which is bread to be His body; not that at that time it began to be His, but that there on the altar begins to be sacramentally in the form of the bread what previously was not there and therein.”

The Reformers also used language that acknowledges great mystery here. Luther wrote in his Small Catechism, “What is the Sacrament of the Altar? It is the true Body and Blood of Christ, under the bread and wine.” Calvin spoke this way of the matter, in his Short Treatise on the Holy Supper:

It is a spiritual mystery which cannot be seen by the eye nor be comprehended by human understanding. Therefore it is represented for us by means of visible signs, according to the need of our weakness. Nevertheless, it is not a naked figure, but one joined to its truth and substance. With good reason then, the bread is called body, because it not only represents, but also presents it.

Many Christians, alarmed by language like this, dismiss Christ’s Eucharistic pledge with a quip about His not being a literal door even though He said, “I am the door,” supposing thereby that they have dispelled the mystery of the Eucharist. Twenty centuries of Christian testimony carries no weight with them. It is not uncommon to hear it urged that the Church—virtually the whole Church—went off the rails while the apostles were still alive and that only a modern remnant has a true understanding of the Eucharist, which is that it is no mystery at all but only an aid to memory.

To take this view is possible. Millions of devout Christians do. And God Himself alone is the keeper of the mystery. How, precisely, we may speak of bread and wine as Christ’s Body and Blood is as baffling as how we may speak of Jesus as both man and God, or of His mother as a virgin, or of the Bible as the Word of God. The matter will not yield itself either to chemistry or logic. The attempts to reduce Christ’s gift of the Eucharist to something that we can reasonably cope with are like the attempts made by modernist Christians to reduce outrages like the Resurrection and the Ascension to figures of speech that convey abstract truths.

The human mind, and perhaps especially the “spiritual” mind, has a deep-running suspicion of anything that really does bridge the gulf between spirit and matter. The Sadducees hated the threat of this very thing which surfaced in Christ’s claims about Himself. The Jews were scandalized when He said that He would give them His flesh to eat. All transcendentalists, logicians, Buddhists, and Manichaeans hate this sort of thing. We must keep spirit and matter in two different realms, they urge. Spirit is material and may not be supposed ever to come upon matter, even though just this seems to have happened at the Annunciation, with the starkest results.

The Sacrament of the Eucharist is, of course, one step away from the Incarnation itself, where the thing signified (The Word) and the signifier (Jesus) were absolutely one. Symbol and sign and metaphor strain towards this union; Sacrament presents it, but the Incarnation is that perfect union. Again, it is a scandal. God is not man, any more than bread is flesh. But faith overrides the implacable prudence of logic and chemistry and says, “Lo!”

Two fragments of hymnody may take all of this complexity and place it somewhat closer to our grasp, if we may speak at all of “grasping” a mystery. The first is a small quatrain, attributed often to Queen Elizabeth I, that gives faith’s testimony as it approaches the Eucharist:

     His was the word that spake it,

     He took the bread and brake it;

     And what his word did make it,

     That I believe and take it.

The second, and older, fragment, is from Saint Thomas Aquinas’s magisterial Eucharistic hymn, Pange Lingua:

     Word-made-flesh, true bread he maketh

          By his word his Flesh to be,

     Wine his Blood; when man partaketh,

          Though his senses fail to see,

     Faith alone, when sight forsaketh,

          Shows true hearts the mystery.

     Therefore we, before him bending,

          This great Sacrament revere;

     Types and shadows have their ending,

          For the newer rite is here;

     Faith, our outward sense befriending,

          Makes our inward vision clear.23

Christians who distrust Saint Thomas’s supernally high view of the Sacrament as veering perhaps too close to magic will note his stress on faith as the key. This mystery, like all of the gospel mysteries, may be held only by faith, even though it, like the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension, exists quite apart from faith, “out there” in the real world,

When we begin to reflect on things in this manner, we may begin to see that the apparent distance between the simplicity of the Last Supper and the complexity of the liturgy—even of High Mass—is only an illusion.

How can this be?

In the simple act of taking bread, and of blessing, breaking and giving it to His disciples, the Lord gathered up all the mystery of the gospel: that the Word must become flesh, and that this flesh must be broken for the life of the world, and that unless and until we, His followers, participate in this mystery we have no life in us. Nothing less than this is intimated at the Last Supper, and nothing more than this is celebrated in the liturgy.

At that supper table with His friends, Jesus revealed Himself for what John the Baptist had hailed Him as long before: the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. Here is My body. Here is My blood. This is the whole Old Testament now brought to its fulfillment. And you, My friends, are invited, not only to be spectators or merely to recall what I am doing. You are invited, at this table, to participate in the mystery. When you feed on something, it becomes your very substance. I am uniting you with My own self-offering here.

Suddenly the language of table and altar, so often the occasion for a quarrel, becomes rich with the mystery of the divine charity. Far from being matter for debate and division, it spreads before us the amplitude of Redemption. The altar, the place of holocaust, has become the place of feasting. But the food of this feast is the broken bread and the shed blood. To say that the altar has been merely “replaced” by the table is to stand at one remove from the mystery of the gospel. To say that it has become the table, or better, united with the table and fulfilled in it, is to step somewhat closer to what must always remain impenetrable to our mortal understanding. For this reason, Christian piety has given the name sacrament—mystery—to what the Lord inaugurated in the upper room.