How bread and wine become the means by which God enters our existence in the Eucharist

In the Eucharist, the most ordinary things of ordinary, everyday life, bread and wine, and the most ordinary of everyday actions, eating and drinking, become the means by which God enters into our lives, to make us sharers in his life, and thereby make us all sharers in the same life, namely, his. Bread and wine are, of course, naturally symbolic of life, long before they became the sacramental signs of Christ’s divine life.

It is not difficult to see why. The cultivation of wheat is one of the greatest of all humankind’s civilising innovations, beginning in the sixth millennium BC and now covering more than 600 million acres of this planet’s surface. It is now thought that the original by-product of wheat was not bread, but beer. Demand for beer, it seems, not for bread, first induced humans to cultivate wheat. But whichever came first, beer or bread, bread remains essential to physical sustenance for vast swathes of the human race and is, as such, a profound symbol of life itself. As for wine, in the Old Testament there is no richer or reassuring symbol of stability, contentment and peace than the vine and its fruit’s potential to “rejoiceth the heart of man”, as the psalmist says.

Significantly, God’s first intervention on behalf of his people wandering hungry in the wilderness was to feed them, to sustain them on their journey by giving them each morning manna, bread, from heaven. But at the Passover meal, celebrating Israel’s liberation and exodus from slavery, which Jesus shared with his friends on the night before he allowed himself to be judicially murdered, something entirely new happened. He took the bread and wine of the Passover, the staples of life, nourishment and contentment, and identified himself with them.

In other words, at the Last Supper, he identified himself as sustenance for his people, given to them (and us) like the manna from heaven, for our journey. This sustenance, however, satisfies a hunger far deeper than physical hunger. Love and friendship are what we hunger for more than anything else, a hunger that can be satisfied only by unconditional, unending love. All the things of this earth, in separation from him, leave us hungry: only he, the giver of all that we prize, can satisfy our deepest hunger. This sustenance is thus his own self. So, when Jesus says, “This is my Body, which will be given up for you” – or, more directly, “This bread and this wine are me for you” – his words are unmistakably words of unconditional, unending love.

Isn’t that what we are saying when we tell someone, and mean it, that we love them? Jesus becomes our bread of life, in other words, out of love for us. So it is that bread and wine, the staples of bodily sustenance, become in the Eucharist the unconditional love, Jesus Himself, that satisfies our deepest hunger. The Eucharist, in other words is quite literally a communion of love: “the love that moves the Sun and the other stars” (Dante); the love that created everything that exists; the love that reached out to us from all eternity to share his life with us. Normally, of course, the food that we eat becomes part of us. But in the Eucharist, we become part of what’s given to us.

So, St Augustine can say: “He gives us his body to make us into his body.” Bread and wine are changed into Christ Himself: but the equally profound mystery of the Eucharist is that we, too, are changed. We become his body, the Church, by becoming sharers of his life. The ultimate point of the Eucharist, then, is communion, with God and one another. It is the primal act of love by which Christ Himself, God made man, shares his life with us in friendship. It is the sacrament of friendship. St Thomas Aquinas sums this up with his usual clarity: What is entirely proper to friendship is to live with one’s friends…and that is why Christ, who promised us his bodily presence…did not want to deprive us of that presence during our pilgrimage, but by his body and blood joins us to himself in this sacrament…Thus this sacrament is the sign of the greatest love and the greatest hope, because it is intimate union with Christ. (ST 3a 75.1) The greatest love, but also the greatest hope: the Eucharist is also the sacrament of hope. Hope looks to a future that will be the fulfilment of everything for which we have hoped and longed for in this life.

In the Eucharist, we find ourselves at “the still point of the turning world” (Eliot), at the heart of the mystery that is the world’s creation and existence and “its trajectory through history to its final end in the eternal love that created it.” (Denys Turner). All this is summed up in one of the prayers that St Thomas composed for this feast in 1264, at the request of Pope Urban IV, the O sacrum Convivium, O Holy Banquet: This is a holy banquet indeed, in which Christ himself is made our food, the memory of his passion is told again, grace fills the mind and heart, and there is given to us an assurance of the glory that one day will be ours.