BILLTESKA

This is My Body.
What the Truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold.

Thomas’s great hymn conveys his theology: the bread and wine are changed into human flesh and blood, but our senses can’t discern the change. Bread and wine cease to be; Body and Blood take their place. Thomas explained this in terms we no longer use or think in: Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accidents. All the senses can relate to are the accidents. We can never get to what stands under the appearance, the substance itself. Thomas found this distinction useful: by divine command, the command of the Son by Whom all things were made to begin with, the substance of bread and wine is replaced with the substance of Flesh and Blood, the accidents of bread and wine remaining. After the consecration, the elements still appear to us to be bread and wine, but they are NOT as they seem. We know that they are really Flesh and Blood, because we have heard Jesus Christ say so, and we believe it. What the Truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold. Many of us Anglicans also think this way. And we are free to do so, even if Anglicanism does not formally accept Thomas’s doctrine of transubstantiation, preferring to affirm the Real Presence and leave it at that, without bringing in any pagan philosophers to parse the Mystery for us.

There are other possible positions: Luther’s consubstantiation, for example, holding that the substance of flesh and blood is added to that of bread and wine, which is not destroyed, but joined by the substance of Body and Blood. God’s Word is creative, not destructive, and the notion that God would destroy any creature is repellent. These explanations have to do with the objective elements on the altar. But there is also a subjective approach, in which the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ only in the mouths of faithful recipients of the Holy Communion. This is known as receptionism, and it is clearly to be found, also, within the “big tent” of Anglican tradition. It is pretty nearly explicit in the old Prayerbook rite. According to this view, we might just as well throw any remaining fragments into the garbage or feed them to the birds! They aren’t the Body of Christ unless someone receives them.

Well, we can dispute these things endlessly, (and isn’t that an exquisite irony, since the Sacrament is supposed to have something to do with unity? CommUNION!) But all these competing views have something in common: the assumption that somehow, somewhere, there is some kind of change. Jesus took bread and said This is My Body. We don’t think bread is the same as Body, so there must be a change. But Jesus didn’t say anything about a change. He simply said this is My Body. The ideas of transformation, or metamorphosis, or transubstantiation or trans- anything is our interpretation. It just has to be a change because bread is NOT Body.

Now, I hardly think that what I am about to say is going to settle anything, but let me make two observations: 1) we don’t think of the cosmos in Aristotle’s terms anymore; and 2) Jesus said this IS My Body. Let’s look at number two a bit more closely, back to what He didn’t say.
·He didn’t say “this represents My spiritual presence”
·He didn’t say “this is a symbol of your unity with one another”
·He didn’t say “this is a symbol of my Love and sacrifice for you” (although [He did invite us to attach this meaning by saying that as long as we “do this” we “show forth his death until he comes”]
·He didn’t say “This is my human Flesh and Blood, but it only appears to be bread and wine.”
·He didn’t say “By My creative command, which brought heaven and earth into being in the beginning, I am now going to change this bread into My Body.

No. He simply said This IS My Body. What if it’s just that simple – literal, even. What if the bread He holds in His hand is His Body, without any objective change at all? What the Truth hath spoken. That for truth I hold. Oddly, it may be easier for modern consciousness to adore the Mystery this way than it was for Thomas, with his Aristotelian convictions about the reality of substance – convictions that necessitated some kind of change in the substance.

For our modern mythology, reality – thingness – is much more wondrous, a reality more mystical and miraculous. We would say that Thomas was certainly on to something when he said that things were not as they appear. For us nothing is as it appears, in fact, because for us there is no such thing as substance. We no longer speak of matter, only of energy and mass. There is no substance in the bread that needs changing, only vibration.

Unlike Aristotle and the Angelic Doctor, we live in a world in which we hear simultaneously sounds generated on the other side of the world, sounds that pass through walls and mountains. And we have been able to demonstrate the insubstantiality of matter by turning the so-called “substance” of inert matter into light – in a military project code-named Trinity – and then unleashing it on our enemies on the Feast of the Transfiguration, the feast of the Uncreated Light. Maybe minds like Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s would have thought about the Sacrament differently, had they known what we know and seen what we have seen.

What do we know? That matter is a form of starlight. All is frequency and oscillation. We may call the moment of Creation the “Big Bang” but it is really about Light. God’s fiat lux is really nearer the mark. The same God Who said in the beginning Let there be light now says This is My Body.

What this? The bread? OK, but what, exactly, IS the bread? Is it not the Light of the Big Bang, congealed over the æons into gas and liquid and finally mineral elements, which then by the Holy Spirit begin to live and return to the light as they change to vegetation and food for animals, and grain that is further changed and worked by humanity into a new sustenance? So bread and wine become the perfect symbol. Yes, symbol, but in the sense of representative. Bread and wine participate in creation, inseparable from the entire cosmos. What God says of the bread and wine in His hand He says of the whole universe: this is My Body.

His Presence is no less real, no less particular in our view than in Aquinas’s, but in the end his view may be just as vast. I am struck by the felicitous custom of enshrining the Sacred Host in a sunburst of precious metal. God is Light, according to the bible, on the authority of one called the Beloved of the Lord, the Lord Whose Body is displayed as an explosion of dazzling light, as in the Beginning. Perhaps there is no change at all. He said this is My Body, not I hereby change this into My Body. Perhaps what is changed is not the substance of the bread, but the consciousness of Adam – our consciousness. Maybe that’s what Thomas meant: the change is in us, not in a subjective, receptionist sense, but in that we come to see objective Reality for what it is: supersubstantial – beyond substance. The sacramental transformation is the faith that pierces through the veil of appearance



And in the end, brought by these meditations to the limit of utterance, to the vestibule of the Light Itself, St. Thomas put down his pen, left his great Summa unfinished, and declared that “all I have taught or written is as straw and chaff compared with what has been revealed to me.”

God is All-in-all, in Whom we and all things live and move and have our being. God is Light. Could it be that the Body of Christ is the cosmos itself, filled with the Holy Spirit – the universe of energy and relationship called out of nothingness when God said LET THERE BE LIGHT?