DAY 139
CHALLENGE
“The Real Presence can’t be true—Jesus would be commanding cannibalism! The Bible also tells us that we are not allowed to consume blood (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 17:14; Deut. 12:23).”
DEFENSE
The Real Presence does not imply cannibalism.
Cannibalism involves chewing another person’s flesh, swallowing it, and extracting nutrients from it by digestion. None of that happens to Jesus’ flesh when a person receives the Eucharist. Jesus’ body and blood remain whole and undigested under the appearances of bread and wine.
Only the appearances are altered by consumption, and when they cease to have the appearance of bread and wine, the Real Presence ceases. God may make “the body and blood of Christ enthroned gloriously in heaven” (Paul VI, Credo of the People of God) simultaneously present in the Eucharist, but they are in no way damaged. Therefore, no cannibalism occurs.
The Old Testament prohibition on consuming blood forbade its normal consumption—where blood was eaten and digested as a food. Christ’s blood is not digested, and so the Eucharist does not violate the Old Testament prohibition on blood consumption.
This prohibition was part of the dietary regulations that kept Jews culturally and religiously distinct from their pagan neighbors. Glob- ally, many cultures use blood in cooking (e.g., blood sausages like the “black pudding” eaten today in England), and Jesus removed these dietary restrictions when he “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19).
The reason the Israelites were prohibited from consuming blood was ritual: The blood represented the life of the animal, and so it belonged to God, the giver of life. Such ritual requirements are gone today, and now God gives us spiritual life through Jesus and the reception of his blood. Jesus declared: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).
If consuming the Eucharist were cannibalism, then saying the elements are merely symbolic would not solve the problem. In that case, Jesus would be commanding us to symbolically cannibalize him. This would be as problematic as making the symbolic commission of any intrinsically evil act (e.g., sodomy, rape) part of a sacrament.