The Episcopal Church, where I make my spiritual home, has moved into the cycle of ordinary time, and for today's Gospel highlight's the call of St. Matthew, the raising of Jairus' daughter, and the healing of the woman with the persistent haemorrhage (you can read that here). My parish, however, is one that is characterized as Anglo-Catholic, that is, on the extreme Catholic end of the Anglican spectrum, so today we are in the middle of the Octave (8-day season) of the Feast of Corpus Christi (which started last Thursday). So, instead of the lection above, our parish will be listening to Jesus' statement that His Flesh and Blood are food and drink (Jn. 6.41-56).
In its context, Our Lord had just miraculously fed several thousand people. Thinking that if they hang around Jesus they would never have to toil for their food again (a big draw for those barely making it by), Jesus gave them a level set stating that physical food is one thing and will not prevent anyone from passing away when the time comes, but spiritual food, His Body and Blood, is the one food that will guarantee eternal life.
The religious experts who happened to be hanging around (oh, let's call it for what it is, spying on and policing Him), expressed significant doubt and incredulity. They fell to arguing about the plausibility, first, getting past the taboo of cannibalism, second, getting past the physical issue of there being enough of Jesus to go around, so to speak. Jesus brooks no opposition; unless one partakes of Him, they will not gain eternal life at the Resurrection of the Dead on the last day.
Frankly, we have not stopped arguing about this even among Jesus' followers. The Protestant Reformation was one of many attempts to rationalize this statement and make it palatable to reasonable people. The fact of the matter is that it cannot be rationalized. Jesus stated that His Body and His Blood is required for someone to have Him indwell them and them to indwell Him and thus have eternal life. So how do we get around the limits imposed by the fabric of the Cosmos?
First, we need to remember our Nature was corrupted by the Fall. It essentially died and is replicating bad copies of itself with every human birth. Second, God the Son took on this Nature in Jesus Christ to redeem, renew, and recapitulate this Nature so that it would no longer be corrupt and dead. Third, in order for us not to go down the path of our old Nature and eventually snuff out when it becomes exhausted, we need to take on that new Nature, first in our baptism, where we share in Jesus Passion, Death, and Resurrection through the action of the Holy Spirit with the physical signs of immersion and arising from the waters (and this is indeed a real and present imposition of a new Nature upon ourselves). Fourth, we need to nourish that new Nature with the constant communion with the sacrificed yet risen Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, through the action of the Holy Spirit with the physical signs of bread and wine.
Good grief...that's a bit complicated. People of the centuries have tried to explain the mystery, the most famous being St. Thomas Aquinas, who employed the tools of Aristotelean metaphysics to come up with the explanation called Transubstantiation. If you hold to an Aristotelean metaphysic, that is an excellent explanation, but if you don't, it doesn't quite work. The fact of the matter is that we have a great mystery, a work from outside Creation impacting Creation at the most fundamental of levels, and any explanation we have only scratches the surface of the miracle, the wonder that happens whenever we sacrifice in thanks bread and wine and the Holy Spirit in turn changes it, beyond what any metaphysical explanation can approach, into Jesus Himself, come to us to feed us and sustain us and empower us to live in Him and He in us.
So yes, today we pay special homage to the fact that God has not left us on our own, that He has given us a new Nature that will live beyond our corrupted old Natures, that participating in His Passion and feeding upon His Sacrifice, we too will rise as He did.
Christ is truly present here, come, let us adore Him.