Last week I wrote about confession, about how much of the sacramental life starts with being honest. But underneath the honesty is something stranger, something I still find myself circling back to. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you… my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (John 6:53 to 56).

I used to read that as a metaphor, something poetic to soften so it would make more sense. But the people listening to him that day didn’t take it as a metaphor either, and many of them walked away because of it. Jesus never called them back to explain he’d only meant it symbolically.

What I’m sitting with lately is that the foundation I’ve been building on Scripture and honest confession was always leading somewhere. It was leading to a meal. Not an idea about God, not a feeling about God, but Christ himself, given as food. I don’t fully understand it. I’m not sure I’m supposed to. But I’ve stopped trying to explain it away, and started trying to actually show up for it.

Today’s Bible Study

At the Last Supper, Jesus took bread and said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). What strikes me is the command tucked inside the gift, “do this.” Not just believe this, or remember this happened once. Do it. The Eucharist was never meant to be a memory I hold onto. It’s something the Church keeps doing, every single day, because he asked us to keep doing it. I think that’s part of what makes it a foundation. It isn’t behind me. It’s in front of me, waiting the next time I show up.

Recommended Reading

If you want to go deeper on this, Brant Pitre’s Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist walks through the Last Supper against the backdrop of Passover and the Jewish feasts that came before it. It reframed the whole thing for me, not as something Jesus invented out of nowhere, but as something he’d been pointing toward the whole time.