Does the Eucharist merely “represent” the Body of Christ?
The Lord did not say, “This is a symbol of my body, and this is a symbol of my blood,” but rather: “This is my body ... and this is my blood.” “For what now lies beneath the aforementioned species is not what was there before, but something completely different, and not just in the estimation of Church belief but in reality, since once the substance or nature of the bread and wine has been changed into the body and blood of Christ, nothing remains of the bread and the wine except for the looks, beneath which Christ is present whole and entire in his physical ‘reality,’ corporeally present, although not in the manner in which bodies are in a place.”
This is not something that the Church has invented.
We should examine in detail the words our Lord pronounced, “This is my body.” The word needs not to detain us. Some bent upon escaping the plain meaning of the words used, say that the phrase means “This represents my body.” It sounds very close to desperation! No competent speaker would ever talk like that, least of all our Lord, least of all then.
The word “this" deserves a closer look. Had he said, “Here is my body,” he might have meant that, in some mysterious way, his body was there, along with the bread, which seemed so plainly to be there. But since he said, “This is my body” –this which I am holding, this, which looks like bread but is not, this, which was bread before I blessed it– this is then his body. Similarly, this, which was wine, which still looks like wine, is not wine. It is now his blood.
Of course, if any man had said these same words before a piece of bread, that bread would have continued being so; but it was not any man who said these words. It was God who uttered these words and explicitly commanded the apostles to repeat that action forever.
The Holy Eucharist acts in the soul in the same way that ordinary food nourishes the body. Life in the body begins with generation, and then our body grows to full maturity, while we keep receiving food for our sustenance. Similarly, there is a spiritual generation into the life of grace: the sacrament of baptism. There is growth in that life: the sacrament of confirmation. All the while, however, we need spiritual food. In this case, our food is the Eucharist.
The external form of food is most appropriate to signify the union with Christ that is effected in this sacrament. However, there is a discrepancy in the comparison of the Eucharist with food. Whereas food is assimilated by the person fed, in the case of the Eucharist the person receiving it becomes assimilated into Christ, and becomes more “like Christ”.
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