The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,

“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Jesus said to them,

“Amen, amen, I say to you,

unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,

you do not have life within you. 

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood

has eternal life,

and I will raise him on the last day. 

For my flesh is true food,

and my blood is true drink. 

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood

remains in me and I in him.”

I encourage you to read last week’s reflection, but in summary I discussed how the self-emptying or self-limitation of God in the act of creating time, space, and all there is allows God to be both apart from creation (transcendent) and present in creation (immanent). Because all of creation, our finite reality, exists within and is sustained by the infinite love of God, creation, or created things, can mediate God’s divine presence. Although in Jesus, in God entering time and space directly, the full revelation of God was made known to us, other created things can offer us something of the revelation of God’s presence. The Creator can be known in a limited way through his creation. The Catechism teaches, “God speaks to man through the visible creation. The material cosmos is so presented to man's intelligence that he can read their traces of its Creator. Light and darkness, wind and fire, water and earth, the tree and its fruit speak of God and symbolize both his greatness and his nearness” (CCC 1147).

This is why I think of Catholicism as such an “earthy” religion. We use stained glass, mosaics, statues, candles, vestments, rosary beads, medals, prayer cards, blankets, bottles of holy water, crucifixes, bread and wine, oil and water, incense, bells, words, music, and gestures to allow God to speak to us through visible creation. God speaks to us most fully through the seven sacraments, but many of these other things we call sacramentals because in a lesser way God communicates to us through them. Again, the Catechism states, “The sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.” There is a lot to unpack in that definition that is beyond the scope of this reflection, but I have always been partial to St. Augustine’s definition of a sacrament as “a visible sign of invisible grace.” God’s life, though invisible, is given to us in the visible sacraments. More than that, Jesus, himself, can be thought of as the primordial sacrament. He is the visible sign of the invisible God, fully and completely, in the flesh. After his ascension and with the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Church can be understood, then, as the sacrament of Jesus Christ. She is the visible sign of the invisible and glorified Jesus by which we encounter him. The Church is the body of Christ. 

Jesus became man and God entered history because of his freely chosen expression of love in kenosis, in his self-emptying sacrifice. This self-emptying or self-limitation is the pattern of God’s love from the act of creation to the incarnation, to the cross, and now, to the Eucharist. God has chosen vulnerability for love of us. Pope Francis said, “Finally, the Eucharistic bread is the real presence. This speaks to us of a God who is not distant, who is not jealous, but close and in solidarity with humanity; a God who does not abandon us but always seeks, waits for, and accompanies us, even to the point of placing himself, helpless, into our hands.”