Each Easter season, the Liturgy carries us through the Bread of Life Discourse found in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. We are all familiar with the setting, but this familiarity carries with it a danger of missing the point of why the Church chooses these passages as part of her Easter celebration. Of course, in a very real way, because the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of our faith, it is always in season. But it is the connection between the Eucharist and the Resurrection that the Church wishes to highlight. Our Lord repeatedly issues the command to eat His body and drink His blood and for apologetical reasons that can grab our attention. But each time He does, He attaches it to the promise of the future resurrection. This creates an intrinsic link between the Eucharist and the resurrection of the dead that is worth further examination.
To grasp why this is so, we can turn to St. Augustine. In the Confessions, Augustine recounts the time that he heard the voice of Christ saying “I am the food of strong men; grow and you shall feed on me; nor shall you change me, like the food of your flesh into yourself, but you shall be changed into my likeness” (Book VII, Ch. X). St. Thomas interprets this passage as referring to the spiritual nature of the food that is the Eucharist. Bodily food is changed into the substance of the person nourished and supports life as such. Spiritual food changes the man into Itself and supports the spiritual life as such.
The Sacrament of the Passion
The Eucharist as both the Sacrament of the Passion and “true food indeed” transforms us into Christ according to which “a man is made perfect in union with Christ Who suffered” (ST III, q.73, art.3, ad. 3). It is Christ Who is really present in the Eucharist and it is Him Whom we receive, but we receive Him with particular reference to His Passion. This reception allows us to not just “spiritually” unite ourselves to Him in His Passion, but so that we truly participate in it. And it is from this that its fruits are truly available to us; or we should say one fruit in particular—a share in the bodily resurrection. In short the Eucharist conforms us to Christ in His Passion so that we might share in His resurrection. The Eucharist is then ordered towards the Resurrection, but only by sacramentally passing through the Passion of Christ.
By highlighting the end of the Eucharist, it helps us to understand two further aspects of this “hard teaching”. First, when Our Lord says that it is the spirit that gives life and not the flesh He does not mean that we should take what He says symbolically and unite to Him spiritually. Instead He means that it was, as St. Thomas says, “the Cross [that] made His flesh adapted for eating” (ST III, q.3, art.3, ad.1). It is His resurrected, impassible body that gives life, not the passible, mortal body that they see. In other words, the Eucharist, because it is the Sacrament of the Passion, would not have achieved its full meaning until “Christ our Passover had been sacrificed.” This is why Pope Innocent III said the disciples at the Last Supper “received His body such as it was ” (De Sacr. Alt. Myst. iv), that is, mortal and passible. It was not until after the Resurrection that they would have received His immortal and impassible body.
Why It is Necessary
The second point has to do with Christ’s insistence that, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you shall not have life in you” (Jn 6:54). It is difficult not to read this as imposing some sort of necessity that links the Eucharist to salvation. But this is an often-misunderstood teaching because it requires a bit of explanation. In fact, this is one of the doctrines that the Calvinists attacked when they broke away from the Church, saying that the Eucharist was not necessary for salvation.
The Council of Trent made a series of distinctions to help throw this teaching into relief. First, as Scripture testifies, Baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation (c.f. Mk 16:16). The necessity of the Eucharist is of a different kind—what the Church calls the necessity of precept. This is a teaching that “is hard” but must be accepted, meaning that the believer must do as Our Lord commanded. This is why the Church withholds it until one reaches the age of reason. It is also why there is no absolute necessity like Baptism. Young children do not need the Eucharist in order to be saved.
This distinction arises because Baptism, the Sacrament by which we are made to be “in Christ” and incorporated into His Mystical Body, deputizes the believer for divine worship, which means the offering of sacrifice to God. This includes the offering of the Church’s sacrifice of the Eucharist. So Baptism, like all the Sacraments, is ordered toward the Eucharist. It essentially completes Baptism.
The moral necessity of receiving the Eucharist then is abundantly clear, but it is not clear how often one should do so. In order to fulfill the precept, the Church obliges the faithful to receive it at least once a year during the Easter season (Canon 920). But it is doubtful that one who only receives once a year will be able to preserve himself in a state of grace for very long. The Eucharist is meant to provide supernatural nourishment for the soul so that when it is deliberately avoided for a long period of time, the person will almost necessarily begin to fill up on the junk food that the world has to offer.
This moral necessity absolves young children prior to reaching the age of reason from receiving the Eucharist. It also absolves those who are so mentally handicapped that they cannot make a simple act of faith in the Real Presence. But what about non-Catholic Christians? Are they all pretty much like the disciples who walked away from Jesus over this hard saying?
Recall that we are bound by necessity of precept. That implies that we are aware of the precept and understand it. The person must not be culpably ignorant, although what that actually looks like is up to God. What we can say for sure is that it will be a miracle if someone is saved without receiving the Eucharist regularly. The natural means by which God grants the supernatural gift of perseverance is through the Eucharist. God can circumvent those natural means via a miracle, but how often or even if that happens we cannot know. That is why the man who does not regularly receive the Bread of Life but knows that He should is, in essence, testing God by demanding a miracle.
The Word of God Made Flesh rarely repeated Himself. The Bread of Life Discourse is a notable exception as He commanded His disciples four times to eat His body and drink His blood. This repetition wasn’t directed towards those disciples who “returned to their former way of life,” (Jn 6:66) but to those who continued to follow Him. We should be constantly aware of just how dependent we are upon the Bread of Life and approach Him as such.