The Eucharist is in the Bible MUCH More Than You Think

The Eucharist as the Central Theme of the Bible

In this article, I will explain the uniquely Catholic concept of the Eucharist as the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ and its place in Scripture, as well as Christian theology overall. Through a method of interpretation that is centered around typology (the study of types — that is, foreshadowing in the Old Testament that is fulfilled in the New), I will attempt to demonstrate that the Eucharist is what the whole message of the Bible is centered around, and what Christ’s ultimate mission was — real, continuing, physical and supernatural communion with His body of believers on Earth. This is not in exclusion to His redemptive mission of dying on the cross for humanity, because that sacrifice is one and the same with that of the Eucharist.

Communion

The Eucharist is the Catholic version of ‘communion,’ which many Christian denominations take part of in their own way. The Catholic ‘version’ is unique, though, along with the Orthodox churches, in its understanding that the bread and wine used at Mass are literally transformed in a spiritual and miraculous way into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus (Source 1). Protestantism removed this ancient doctrine from the average Christian’s belief system, and its followers will often claim it is unbiblical. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence within Scripture (the staggering historical evidence aside) that this is how Jesus intended for the Eucharist to be understood. Not only is it as explicit as can be in the New Testament, through Christ’s words as well as St. Paul’s, but it is heavily and constantly foreshadowed in a specific way in the Old Testament that could only point toward the Catholic understanding, but not logically the Protestant one.

Typology

First, I want to outline what typology is, as it is vital to the Catholic method of interpreting Scripture, which results in their understandings of things such as the Papacy and the Eucharist. If the Bible is understood to be written by God in some fashion, and to have within it a coherent story throughout the dozens of books written over dozens of centuries, then typology is the thing which ties that narrative together, through a sort of ‘divine poetry,’ as it’s been called. Reading the Bible typologically is how Christ taught the apostles to understand it, how they taught it, and how it’s been read since the beginning of the Christian Church. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the Eucharist “the source and summit” of the Christian life, and the “sum and summary” of the faith (Source 2). Typology is why. Typology shows that throughout the Old and New Testaments, the Eucharist is always in the mind of God. He was planning for it from the very beginning.

The Catechism describes typology as such: “The Church, as early as apostolic times, and then constantly in her Tradition, has illuminated the unity of the divine plan in the two Testaments through typology, which discerns in God’s works of the Old Covenant prefigurations of what he accomplished in the fullness of time in the person of his incarnate Son” (Source 2). We can see this from verses such as Colossians 2:17, Hebrews 10:1, Romans 5:14, 1 Corinthians 15:45, 1 Peter 3:31, and finally, Luke 24:27, where Jesus Himself explains to His disciples all the things, “beginning with Moses and the prophets” that referred to Him in the Scriptures. The other verses feature Paul, Peter, and the author of Hebrews explaining typology, such as references to the Great Flood being a shadow of baptism, which saves humanity in a similar but more glorified fashion than the ark saved the physical lives of eight humans; or Adam being a ‘type’ of Christ, who fulfilled through redemption what Adam ruined through sin — a right relationship with God. Christ is called “the second Adam.” Because we can see that those who have the most authority in the Bible, namely Christ and the apostles, read the Bible in such a way, it is safe and necessary to understand Scripture in this way as long as it follows the same parameters that they set forth for us: namely, that the shadows prefigure things which were to be fulfilled later in a more glorified way, and that the ‘types’ nature of being a type does not take away from their primary importance of who they were or what they did in their own time. Of course, not everything can be applied and understood through typology. But, if the Bible is to be understood as the Inspired Word of God, then there are no coincidences in a book written by an All-Knowing Author, so if there are clear foreshadowings, and references to them later, it can be safely assumed they are meant to be understood typologically. Typology is a sort of set of subtle prophecies which often are not understood as prophecies until the fulfillment comes along, and then with hindsight vision, we can see how the foreshadowing was pointing forward to the fulfillment.

Typology in the Old Testament

So, what does this have to do with the Eucharist? Well, more than one could possibly imagine. I would not be surprised, after finding what I’ve found, if every book of the Old Testament, potentially every chapter, had some amount of typological inference pointing forward to the Eucharist. The amount of types that are blatantly explicit are remarkable. I’ll run through several here. Remember that all of these types are fulfilled, and could only be fulfilled, in the Eucharist if the Eucharist is to be understood as the literal flesh and blood of Christ.

We can start at the very beginning, where likely nobody would expect to find communion, a practice instituted by Christ in the Gospels, thousands of years later. In Genesis 3:22, we see God banish Adam and Eve from not only the Garden of Eden itself, but from the fruit of a tree less emphasized compared to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which they ate of to commit the first sin. This tree is the Tree of Life, which would allow them to ‘live forever.’ In fact, it says that the possibility of them eating of this tree is the precise reason they were not allowed to live in Eden any longer — they were not fit to each of such a pure, eternal, almost seemingly divine food. This of course, is fulfilled by the Eucharist because Jesus Himself describes the Eucharist to be the “bread of life,” which, if anyone eats it, they will have eternal life. Paul extends upon this by adding that those who wish to eat of that bread must examine themself, and if they are in sin, they are bound to become sick or die because of an abuse of this eternal food.

Going forward, we may recognize a similar shadow of the Eucharist in the story of Abraham and Isaac. The story is famous, so I won’t go through it. There are two important things to notice: First, Isaac asks his father where the lamb for sacrifice is, not knowing at that point that he is the intended sacrifice. Abraham answers that “God will provide Himself the lamb.” Second, the angel stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac and a ram is seen caught in the thicket, which He proceeds to sacrifice in Isaac’s place. Notice that the Hebrew Scriptures, written without commas, could be understood as saying either “God Himself will provide the lamb,” or “God will provide Himself, [as] the lamb.” They both work. Later, the latter option proved to be true when Christ sacrificed Himself, and He was referred to as ‘the lamb.’ Also, Isaac (note: a firstborn son, carrying his own wood to the top of a mountain on which Jerusalem and Golgotha were later founded) is saved, instead of being sacrificed, and a ram (symbolic of a king) caught in a thicket (a type of Christ’s crown of thorns) is sacrificed in his stead. This is fulfilled in Christ’s sacrifice for all of humanity. He climbed Golgotha with His cross, but was not spared. Instead, He finished that sacrifice, and it saved all of humanity, fitting perfectly into the typological paradigm of fulfillments glorifying their earlier types.

Third, Melchizedek. He was a priest who offered bread and wine to God in the Old Testament. This was a unique sacrifice, as back then, animals were sacrificed, though that type of priesthood had not been instituted yet. Melchizedek is known as the priest of “God Most High” — the truest and most perfect priest (Genesis 14:18)(Source 3) precisely because he was a priest how God intended the priesthood to be. The later instituted Levitical priesthood was brought about through the breaking of the covenant with God by His people. We are told in Hebrews that Christ is a ‘priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek,’ offering bread and wine in a more glorified and perfect way, in the same manner as the priest who foreshadowed Him. But Christ’s offering of bread and wine would not be glorified had it still been only bread and wine; bread and wine were offered by the Jewish priests every Sabbath. If Jesus merely offered bread and wine, He would not have fulfilled this Jewish rite, He would have only been repeating it. By transforming the bread and wine, He fulfilled that rite, by turning the practices of the Old Covenant into a new miraculous one, which He calls the New Covenant.

Fourth, and most importantly, is the Passover. The Jewish feast of Passover was huge. It was the focal point of the Exodus, in which God led His people out of slavery in Egypt in order to be able to worship Him freely and correctly, and every year afterward they would commemorate that event. It is clear in the New Testament that Jesus is supposed to be understood as the Passover Lamb. The fulfillment of this most explicit prophecy of Christ’s sacrifice for humanity. The Jews were led out of physical bondage through a seemingly irrelevant sacrifice of a lamb. Christ fulfilled this, by leading all people out of bondage to sin through His perfect sacrifice of Himself — He being the heavenly lamb. There is much imagery here: St. Justin Martyr, in “Dialogue with Trypho the Jew,” explained in the second century that even the way they cooked the lamb was a foreshadowing of the crucifixion (they roasted it on a spit in the shape of a cross); The lamb’s blood had to be spread on the doorpost of the home: If our bodies are the temple of God, then what is our mouth but the doorpost to it, which Christ commands we eat His blood with? But what is most important — crucial to the understanding of the Eucharist as we look into how Christ intended it to be understood — is that the lamb had to be eaten or the firstborn of that family would die. The Eucharist, to be a fulfillment of this, must be an eating of the body of the lamb, not just a symbolic action. If the family only symbolically ate the lamb, their firstborn would die (Source 4).

Lastly, in regards to the Old Testament, there is the manna, which is directly referred to as the sign which Christ was fulfilling with the Eucharist (John 6). The manna was supernatural food which rained down from heaven (along with quail meat) to feed the Israelites wandering in the desert. It sustained them, but was dropped every day only in quantities that would last that day. Note: bread and meat — bread/flesh from heaven. Christ, in John 6, refers to His body as being the bread which came down from heaven, a fulfillment of this type. For the Eucharist to be the New Manna, according to typology, which was how Jesus taught the apostles to understand Scripture, it could be nothing less than what prefigured it, which was already miraculous, supernatural bread from Heaven. Understanding it symbolically would simply not work in this system which God set up.

The New Testament’s Fulfillment of the Old

In the New Testament, it’s all made clear. Jesus explicitly says that the people must eat His body and drink His blood to have eternal life, and at the Last Supper He says “this is my body.” He doesn’t correct those who leave Him after hearing this difficult teaching. In John’s gospel, He emphasizes the carnality using words such as the Greek “trogo,” which elsewhere is only used to denote animalistic gnawing and chewing of actual meat, and He offers them a way of understanding the possibility of this miracle by considering the fact that it is His glorified body that He is giving them, which allows it to be veiled through bread and wine and multiplicable. They refuse to accept the teaching and He lets them leave because they heard Him right — the only time His disciples rejected Him for a doctrinal teaching.

Joe Heschmeyer explains the importance of what Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer as well. “And in the Lord’s Prayer, we’re to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt 6:11). That immediately sounds like the manna. But it gets better. As Pitre noted, in the English, instead of asking for our bread for “this day,” or our “daily bread,” we’re asking for our daily bread this day. It’s strangely redundant. It turns out that the Greek word here for “daily” is a hapax legomenon (epiousious) — we know of no use of it prior to Matthew 6:11 itself. And it turns out that it literally means “super-substantial.” So a more accurate translation would be like St. Jerome’s translation of these words into Latin, in which we ask for our daily, supersubstantial Bread. That makes clear that the New Manna we’re to eat is supernatural food. It also is in keeping with the rest of the Our Father, which consists of six other spiritual requests” (Source 3).

Finally, just as the first book of the Bible foreshadowed the Eucharist, the last book, Revelation, is centered around it as well. Revelation mentions the “Marriage Supper of the Lamb,” which is obviously a reference to communion with Christ in heaven, who is the Lamb, who’s supper is His flesh and blood, the “cup of consummation,” (marital language). This book is chock-full of liturgical language and actions showing how the angels in Heaven worship God. A reading of Revelation with this in mind quickly reveals that the Catholic Mass is in its essence, an imitation of the worship continually being offered to God in Heaven, because it uses the same liturgical cues, songs, actions, and prayers, and follows the same overarching themes: Overall, it is a meal, offered to God as a communion with Christ, the slain but triumphant lamb, and it takes its form in two sections, that of the reading of the Scripture (the scrolls being opened in Revelation), and then the eating of the Eucharist (the eating of the scrolls, eating the “Word of God” (Jesus)).

So the Eucharist clearly stands out as a overarching theme among the Scriptures included in the Bible, and as a central theme of what Christ’s mission was on earth. But more central than the crucifixion? No. It was part of that same mission. The Passover not only pointed to the Eucharist, but also to the crucifixion. During the Last Supper, in which 4 cups would be drank out of, Jesus only drinks out of 3, then leaves hastily to the Garden of Gethsemane, where He is arrested, beginning His Passion. Beforehand, he noted that He would not drink of the fruit of the vine (wine) before He drank it “anew in the Kingdom of Heaven” (i.e. after His sacrifice had been completed). But when He next drinks wine is on the cross before He is killed and resurrected. But Paul notes later that Christ’s redemptive work was finished when He conquered death through His resurrection. So what did Christ refer to when He exclaimed “It is finished!” before dying? The ancient language clarifies it. It actually means, literally, “it is consummated,” referring to the “cup of consummation,” the fourth cup of the Passover Liturgy, which Christ intentionally skipped earlier. So what was “finished” as He died moments later was not His redeeming of mankind, but the Passover sacrifice, fulfilled as the Eucharist, inextricably tied to the Passover sacrifice. So all the Messianic prophecies referring to Christ’s crucifixion ALSO refer to the Eucharist — this expands the amounts of references to the Eucharist by a whole lot. What was already heavily foreshadowed, is now doubly foreshadowed.

The New Moses

Christ’s mission as “fulfiller of the Old Covenant” was not lost on His followers. Jews who knew their Scripture would have expected the fulfillments that Christ brought, though not in the exact form He gave them. This is because Christ was fulfilling the role of “the New Moses,” who would come to restore glorified versions of the Old Covenant. Just as Christ is called the “New Adam,” or “Second Adam,” so, too, is He the “New” or “Second Moses.” This is one reason, apart from a revelation from Christ, that Paul is so easily able to switch from being a knowledgeable Jew to the foremost expert on Christ, theology, and typology. Paul knew the Scripture, and the Scripture pointed toward a New Moses who would bring a glorified Passover, a glorified Manna, and a glorified Exodus, among other things. As Christ fulfills these things, Jews who had an open mind and were looking for the right things in the Messiah came to believe that it was He. Which Scriptures point to this? There is simply not enough room here to get into it, so all I can do is list them: Deut 18:15–18; Jer 31:31–33; Hos 1:10–11; 2:16–23; Jer 3:15–19. There are much more, as well as many ancient Jewish traditions which support the ideas of these things returning in the fulfillment of the coming of the Messiah, but they would require explanation of context which there is not room for here. Suffice it to say, Moses himself, as well as other prophets, clearly were looking forward to another who would come to restore the things that Moses instituted, but not only restore them. What they didn’t expect, however, was that they would be not only restored, but because the Messiah they were awaiting was not only man, but also God, He would raise these things to a Heavenly status as He brought humanity itself to a Heavenly status.

Here are some things that Christ did that should make it abundantly clear that He was intending to fulfill this role of the New Moses, taken from my upcoming book which as of now does not have an official name: “Moses, who was the mediator between the Israelites and God, was born to deliver his people but had to immediately be saved from a tyrant, Pharaoh. Jesus, as mediator between all of mankind and the Father, was born to deliver all people from sin but had to immediately be saved from a tyrant, Herod. Both were sent to Egypt to avoid this death from a tyrant. They both fast for 40 days in the desert, and while Moses receives a new law on top of a mountain, Jesus gives a new law at the Sermon on the Mount. Moses needs help governing his people, so he appoints 12 princes, choosing 3 to be in his inner circle. Jesus appoints 12 apostles to help Him in His ministry, choosing 3 to be in His inner circle. Moses performs his first public sign in his authoritative position by changing the Nile to blood. Jesus performs His first miracle of his public ministry by changing water to wine. The logical conclusion here is to end with a final miracle, putting the whole thing full circle: Jesus changes wine to blood. It is on the other hand, illogical, or at the very least anti-climactic, to assume that this type ends with a symbol instead of another miracle, since these types and fulfillments tend to grow greater with their fulfillments, rather than narrower. In any case, Jesus, in performing such actions so similar to Moses’ was in effect telling the Jews, “I am the New Moses, come to inaugurate the New Exodus”” (Source 4). These things, along with the clear fact that Christ instituted a new Passover, a new Manna to go with it, and was the central figure of the new Exodus (check out the transfiguration, where Christ talks to Moses and Elijah (‘dead’ saints) about His imminent ‘departure,’ exodos in Greek), means Christ was indeed intending to fulfill the role of the New Moses, and by fulfilling it, raised those things within it, particularly the Eucharist, which held a central position among everything, to a new status — a miraculous one. If the Eucharist is not miraculous, then either God failed in setting up a system of typology which clearly is contradictory, or Jesus failed to meet the standards of that system which He Himself set up and lived to fulfill, claimed to fulfill, and taught His disciples about. These things are not possible, and to fit into the typological schema that Jesus and the apostles clearly believed the Bible was written using, the Eucharist cannot possibly be anything less than miraculous. If it is symbolic, it is not miraculous, but merely bread and wine representing something miraculous. If it is miraculous, and Christ said it is His Body and His Blood, then we ought to believe it is nothing less than His Body and Blood.

It logically follows that if God set up the Bible and salvation history to be pointing towards Christ, and the Eucharist literally is Christ, then the Eucharist is one of, if not the central theme of Scripture. So then, it is demonstrable that the Eucharist, understood as inseparable from the Sacrifice of Calvary which redeemed man, is the central, overarching, and connective theme of all Scripture held within the Bible. This is exemplified in the very name of the second set of Inspired Scriptures — the New Testament. Christ only uttered the words “New Testament” or “New Covenant” once — at the Last Supper, in reference to His Body and Blood. The Early Church, when compiling the Bible, literally named the volume after Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary and its manifestation in the Eucharist because it was so central to the message of Scripture overall. The New Covenant holds more within it than just these things, but they are undoubtedly the center of the Covenant. Without them, there would be no covenant, and Christ Himself demonstrates that fact by calling the Eucharist the New Covenant.

Sources

1. “The Real Presence.” Catholic Answers, www.catholic.com/tract/the-real-presence.
2. Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2012. Print
3. Heschmeyer, Joe. “Five Ways the Old Testament Foreshadowed the Eucharist.” Shameless Popery, 13 May 2011, shamelesspopery.com/five-ways-the-old-testament-foreshadowed-the-eucharist/. / Beale, Stephen. “Nine Ways the Eucharist Is Hidden in the Old Testament.” Catholic Exchange, 26 Oct. 2015, catholicexchange.com/nine-ways-the-eucharist-is-hidden-in-the-old-testament.
4. Pitre, Dr. Brant, and Dr. Scott Hahn. Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper. Image Books, 2016.