Signs & Wonders

      What is the connection between our Lord’s uncompromising words in John 6 and His later institution of the Mass and Eucharist as described in the Gospel accounts of the Lord’s Supper in the Upper Room the night before He died?  The Church has ever understood the occasion of the latter as the explanation of the former:  that it would be the means of consecrated bread and wine that He would give us His flesh to eat and His blood to drink, and by that means we would share intimately in Christ’s life and all that He is and all that He accomplished for us.  We are speaking, that is, of a Sacrament.

      But what, exactly, is a Sacrament?  A number of definitions or descriptions is provided by different catechisms, all of them pointing to the essential truth.  One of the most succinct and workable definitions is the following:  a Sacrament is an outward, visible sign that effects what it signifies, that is, an inward, hidden reality, namely grace.  One of the Reformation criticisms of the Catholic understanding of a Sacrament was that such a view of Sacrament was all but a caving into magic.  Far from it, is the Catholic response:  magic is the human attempt to manipulate material things for the purpose of achieving power over them, over others, and over nature itself.  In contrast, the Church understands a Sacrament as God’s “manipulation” – better to say elevation – of matter for the means of dispensing God’s grace (the gift of participation in the divine life). 

      Perhaps here it would be good to distinguish a Sacrament from any mere miracle per se.  A miracle is, like a Sacrament, a sign, just as St. John repeatedly refers to all the miracles of Jesus recorded in his Gospel.  But a miracle effects a change in nature – by supernatural power – that is clearly visible to the human senses:  water into wine, a few loaves of bread into a vast quantity of bread, the sick immediately healed, the dead coming back to life, etc.  Indeed, Jesus’ miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish is actually a sign of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, Jesus having performed this miracle to ready His hearers for what He then had to say – something vastly more important than merely feeding, by means of supernatural, divine power, a multitude of people with bread that would only give them a bit more natural life.  “Now,” our Lord is saying, “on to the far more important thing of Bread that will give the one who eats It eternal life.”  The same connection can be seen in Christ’s very first miracle of turning water into wine, which He accomplished in the setting of a wedding feast – again, a miracle that was itself a sign of something far more important than having enough drink for one’s guests.  Here the water into wine is a sign of Christ’s institution of the Sacrament of Matrimony:  the water of the natural institution of marriage, known all over the world at all times of human history, becoming the wine of the Sacrament of marriage for His followers.  Marriage, the means of the joyful continuance of human life and love and family, would now become even more – the outward, visible sign that effects what it signifies – the means of grace for the Christian couple who are faithful to each other; and their bond of matrimony becomes the means of this grace, a sharing in God’s own life, Who has “married” Himself to His people.

      A miracle, by divine act, is the correcting and the directing of nature to its proper end:  the ridding of the human body of illness that there might be health, the overcoming of that unnatural thing we call death, the gentle spring rain of water on the vineyards that by a divine action immediately comes to fruition in a noble vintage – mere water, so necessary for human life, becoming something other, and better, the fruit of the vine that not only nourishes man but also makes his heart merry.  The natural processes of bodily healing, the warding off of death, and nature’s production of nutrition are all, in the case of a miracle, acted on by God to speedily and unerringly develop in the way first intended by God (before sin invaded our hearts and world).  But Sacraments accomplish far, far more and effect much more than nature could ever do:  miraculously multiplied bread can only satisfy for so little a while, but the Bread from heaven, Christ’s Body, can, and does feed us, as the Source that it is, with divine, eternal life.  As Jesus Himself warned those for whom He had performed this miracle:  “Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you…” (John 6:27).

      So those who heard Jesus’ amazing words, recorded in John 6, and interpreted them as suggesting cannibalism, were in error.  And those today who in reacting to this misunderstanding and then interpreting Christ’s words only as symbolic or metaphorical are also in error.  The answer, the only answer, is the Church’s two thousand year old teaching that Jesus is speaking of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood:  the outward, visible signs of bread and wine, that effect, as He Himself instituted it in the Upper Room, what they signify – Christ’s Body and Blood, the means He has given us of sharing in His very life and being, “the food which endures to eternal life.” 

      The defining term that grants us insight into how this “miracle” of the Eucharist is effected is transubstantiation, a term that Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Mysterium Fidei proclaims as necessary for a proper understanding of the Eucharist – that at the consecratory prayers at Mass the whole substance of bread becomes the Body of Christ, and the whole substance of the wine becomes the Blood of Christ, while the outward signs (accidents) of bread and wine remain in order that we might receive Him.  Properly and worthily received, then, the Eucharist communicates to us the grace of an ever deeper participation in the divine life, something beautifully summed up by the priest’s prayer at the offertory when he mingles the water and wine, a sign of the natural being taken up into the supernatural:  “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”