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Home  / News & Publications /  Michigan Catholic News / 2009 /  'The Body of Christ'

by Fr. Clint McDonell special to The Michigan Catholic
Published April 24, 2009

Gregg McIntosh | The Michigan Catholic "We are nourished by the Eucharist so that we can carry the grace of God into our world," says Fr. Clint McDonell, shown distributing the Eucharist at the Church of the Divine Child, Dearborn.

Flannery O'Connor's novel "Wise Blood" has been very much on my mind lately. Like any good piece of literature, it continues to run through one's mind even after putting the book back up on the shelf. "Wise Blood" is a story of sin and redemption, written in the starkest of terms, and while it is not an overtly Catholic novel, it is saturated with its author's Catholicism. As lines and episodes continue to replay in my mind from my most recent encounter with this book, I find myself more struck than ever by the words uttered by main character and itinerant preacher Hazel Motes. "Where," Motes ask, "has the blood you been redeemed by touched you?"

Motes asks that as a rhetorical question, trying to argue his erroneous view that there are no such things as sin and redemption. Rhetorical as the question may be, as Catholics we can answer it. We have, in fact, touched and been touched by the blood that redeemed us; we have been touched by the body broken for us because we have been touched by the Eucharist, the sacrament of the Lord's own Body and Blood.

Before going further, I must say that this article will be neither exhaustive nor even sufficient, for reasons the limitations both of this page and of my mind. Writing about the Eucharist is a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose: there's a great deal more than you can take and it's difficult even to know how to approach it. But let me try to zero in on the heart of the sacrament, and that is divine love. If we ask what the Eucharist is, we can say correctly that it is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ — and we get at the "what" of the Eucharist. Once we begin to confront the mystery of what the Eucharist is, we are left to wonder why our Lord would do such a thing for us. The "why" is found in realizing that the Eucharist is the continued expression of the same divine love that Jesus Christ showed us on the cross.

In the Eucharist, the Lord commits His own Body and Blood into our hands. Here we see how the Eucharist connects to the cross: Just as Jesus poured Himself out "even to death, death on a cross" (Philip¬peans 2:8), He continues to pour Himself out to us in the Eucharist. Jesus died once, rose from the dead and can never die again, St. Paul tells us (Romans 6:9), and yet He desires to give His life and all to us each and every moment. He loves us so deeply that He would die for us again in a moment if He could. How, then, does He express this love? It is through the Eucharist, in which gives us His Body and Blood, that He places himself once again into our hands, knowing that we will not love Him as He loves us, knowing that we may once again cry out "Crucify him!" and may even treat Him as Judas did. Knowing that these possibilities exist, Jesus loves us to the point of giving Himself to us so that we can eat His Body, drink His Blood and thus have life.

Gregg McIntosh | The Michigan Catholic "We are nourished by the Eucharist so that we can carry the grace of God into our world," says Fr. Clint McDonell, shown at the consecration at the Church of the Divine Child, Dearborn (right).

The Eucharist is given to us and this is clear when we receive it in Holy Communion. But before it is given to us, it is given for us to the Father. The Eucharistic Prayers which are used at Mass have in common—among other things—that they are all addressed to the Father in heaven. Unlike the other sacraments, the Eucharist does not need a recipient. Compare the Eucharist to, say, baptism: One cannot simply baptize without a person being baptized; baptism requires a recipient. The Eucharist does not require a recipient and it exists outside of the souls and hearts of the faithful in its own right. This makes sense if we, again, draw a parallel between the Eucharist and Christ on the cross. On the cross, Christ gives Himself up as a sacrifice and offers Himself to the Father whether the people for whom He offers Himself — and that is everyone — notice or not. Each time the eucharistic sacrifice is offered at Mass, that sacrifice of Christ on the cross is renewed, made here and now for all of us who could not be there then at the foot of the cross on Calvary. Barring time travel, we can never be part of the instant in history now past when Christ died for us, but we can be part of the eternal offering of the Son to the Father, the continual renewal of the very essence of what happens on the cross.

It is only once the Eucharist is given to the Father for us that it is then given to us in Holy Communion. In receiving the sacrifice of the Eucharist, that is the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, we share in the blessings of that sacrifice. We are nourished by the Eucharist so that we can carry the grace of God into our world, and at the same time we are incorporated more and more into the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. The nourishment we receive through the Body and Blood of the Lord works in two ways: one outward, directed to the world, as we are fed so that we have the necessary energy to witness to the Gospel; and one directed inward to the Church, which is fed by the Eucharist so that she may become "Christ come to full stature," to borrow St. Paul's words.

Regardless of the vantage point from which we look at the Eucharist, be it the sacrifice of the Mass, Holy Communion, the real presence of Jesus, the Eucharist in Scripture, etc., we ultimately always arrive back at the question of why our Lord would do such a thing. We always arrive back at the notion of divine love. The Son of God gives us everything that He is to build us up and to strengthen us; He gives everything that He is to redeem us; He gives everything that he is to "show the depth of His love" for us. He gives us the Eucharist so that He can remain with the people He loves even to the end of time. He gives the Eucharist so that we can say that the Blood by which we were redeemed has touched us.

Fr. Clint McDonell is the associate pas­tor at Divine Child Parish, Dearborn. He made his first Communion on May 10, 1986. Years later, on that same date – May 10, 2008 – he was ordained to the priesthood.