Summary of This Is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival by Bishop Robert Barron

Introduction

Bishop Robert Barron wrote this book “to accompany the Eucharistic Revival” project in the USA, which was born out of a response to a 2019 Pew study that revealed only 1/3rd of those questioned subscribed to the Catholic Church’s official teaching that Jesus is really, truly, and substantially present under the signs or appearances of bread and wine (2/3rds said it’s a symbol). In this summary, I skip over a lot of the lengthy biblical framework that Bishop Barron provides in hopes to more succinctly capture the essential point of the 3 aspects he tries to highlight in the book.

1: The Eucharist as a Sacred Meal

“The Eucharistic liturgy of the Church sums up and reexpresses the history of salvation, culminating in the meal by which Jesus feeds us with his very self” (27). It is the reversal of the broken meal in the Garden of Eden and the fulfillment of the sacred meals @ Passover (Exodus 12-13) & on Mount Zion (Isaiah 25): “If our trouble began with a bad meal (seizing at godliness on our own terms), then our salvation commences with a rightly structured meal (God offering us his life as a free gift)” (21).

Gathering at Mass

• “The opening move of the Eucharistic liturgy takes place before the ritual proper commences, when people from all walks of life, varying educational backgrounds, different economic classes, of all ages and of both genders gather in one place to pray. In principle, there is no block or obstacle to those who wish to come to the Mass… The gathered community, coming together to worship the Lord and to feed on him, is indeed the seed of a new way of being, the contravention of the divisions and hatreds that flowed from the fall. It is the new world emerging within the very structure of the old” (28).

The Confiteor

• “Just after the sign of the cross and the greeting, the people are invited to acknowledge their sin and seek the divine mercy; they say, “Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Kyrie eleison”… Jesus came, not for the healthy, but for the sick. He was Yahweh in person calling home the scattered sheep of the house of Israel, and that is why he was so gracious in his welcome to Matthew and his disreputable friends. And so we sinners (once we accept that we are indeed sinners) are forgiven and welcomed into easy intimacy with Christ at the liturgy” (29).

The Gloria

• At Sunday Mass and at more festive Masses, the Kyrie is followed by the great prayer of the Gloria, which begins with this line: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.” Peace is the result of coming together in a common act of worshipping God.
• “Aristotle remarked that a friendship will never last as long as the friends are simply in love with one another. In time, he said, such a relationship will devolve into mutual egotism. Rather, a friendship will endure only in the measure that the two friends fall together in love with a transcendent third, with some great value or good that lies beyond the grasp of either of them. This Aristotelian principle applies in regard to our relationship with God. The indispensable key to peace—that is to say, a flourishing friendship among the members of the human race—is that we all fall together in love with the transcendent Creator. Only when we give glory to God in the highest—above nation, family, culture, political party, etc.—will we, paradoxically, find unity among ourselves. To put this in more explicitly scriptural language, only when we sit together at the meal hosted and made possible by God will we truly sit together in peace” (29).

The Liturgy of the Word

• “Since Christ is, as St. John insisted, the Word of God made flesh, the entire Scripture—Old Testament and New—is the speech of Christ. Having been gathered by Jesus, we listen to him, as did the crowds who heard the Sermon on the Mount” (30).
• Jesus’ “open-table fellowship was not simply a challenge to the societal status quo, but also an expression of God’s deepest intentions vis-à-vis the human race, the realization of Isaiah’s eschatological dream. In fact, very often, Jesus’ profoundest teachings took place at table, calling to mind Isaiah’s holy mountain where a festive meal would be spread out and where “instruction” would go forth” (15).

The Offertory

• “The Mass, accordingly, is the richest possible expression of the loop of grace, God’s life possessed in the measure that it is given away” (30).
• “To speak of bread is to speak, implicitly, of soil, seed, grain, and sunshine that crossed ninety million miles of space; to speak of wine is to speak, indirectly, of vine, earth, nutrients, storm clouds, and rainwater. To mention earth and sun is to allude to the solar system of which they are a part, and to invoke the solar system is to assume the galaxy of which it is a portion, and to refer to the galaxy is to hint at the unfathomable realities that condition the structure of the measurable universe. Therefore, when these gifts are brought forward, it is as though the whole of creation is placed on the altar before the Lord. In the older Tridentine liturgy, the priest would make this presentation facing the east, the direction of the rising sun, signaling that the Church’s prayer was on behalf not simply of the people gathered in that place but of the cosmos itself” (31).

The Communion Rite

• “The participants in the Mass don’t simply listen to the teaching of Jesus; they don’t merely call his memory and spirit to mind. They eat and drink him, incorporating him into themselves, or better, becoming incorporated into him” (31).
• The Church is truly a Body, a living organism. Christ is the Head of the Body and the lifeblood of this Body is His grace (especially the Eucharist). As members of His Body, we are connected organically “that goes dramatically beyond the cohesiveness of even the most intense of voluntary societies. Just as the stomach (if I can extrapolate a bit from Paul) could not possibly remain indifferent to a cancer growing in an adjacent organ, so one member of the Body of Christ couldn’t possibly ignore the spiritual plight or physical need of another. And all people, Thomas Aquinas taught, are either explicitly or implicitly members of Christ’s Body. The radicality of Catholic social commitment—a concern for any and all who suffer—follows directly from the radicality of this distinctive ecclesiology” (32).

The Commission

• “Go forth, the Mass is ended!” The community that has been gathered around Christ, descended from the twelves Apostles, is the new Israel. We are to gather all the nations… the unify the world with Christ. That’s the real point and purpose of the sacred meal.

2: The Eucharist as Sacrifice

Sacrifice in the Old Testament

• No communion without sacrifice: The idea is simple. We take some part of the earth (symbolic of ourselves) and offer up back up to God in order to re-establish communion with Him: “The offerer says, in effect, that what is happening to this animal… should happen to me if I fall out of friendship with God; or, as this animal’s lifeblood is poured out, so I symbolically pour out my own life in devotion and thanksgiving” (40). In a world that has been “twisted out of shape,” it can only be straightened by a painful process of reconfiguration. That’s sacrifice.
• Hope for a perfect sacrifice: “Now, though covenant and sacrifice were defining elements of ancient Israelite religion, though the Jewish people understood themselves in and through these central themes, there is, throughout the biblical period, a nagging sense that the covenant has never been truly fulfilled and sacrifice never completely efficacious” (46). Israel hoped that Yahweh Himself would fulfill the covenant in a permanent way (Jeremiah 31:31-33)

Sacrifice in the New Testament

• Jesus is the Lamb of God: “In accord with our formula—no communion without sacrifice—Jesus, the covenant in person, will perforce be a sacrificed victim as well” (50). “The ultimate sacrifice of the Lamb of God. The final enemy that had to be defeated, if God and his human family could once again sit down in the easy fellowship of a festive meal, was death itself. In a very real sense, death (and the fear of death) stands behind all sin, and hence Jesus had to journey into the realm of death and, through sacrifice, twist it back to life” (53). “The battle plan of the Lamb of God was paradoxical in the extreme: he would conquer death precisely by dying… Dying on a Roman instrument of torture, he allowed the full force of the world’s hatred and dysfunction to wash over him, to spend itself on him. And he responded, not with an answering violence or resentment, but with forgiveness. He therefore took away the sin of the world (to use the language of the liturgy), swallowing it up in the divine mercy” (54).
• The Eucharist as Sacrifice: Jesus “undoubtedly knew that the horror of the Crucifixion would be so stark as to block any attempt to assign meaning to it. And thus, in the relative safety and intimacy of the upper room, Jesus calmly and in advance provided the interpretive key to the climactic action of his life” (57). As the Suffering Servant, He would effect the New Covenant and fulfill Jeremiah’s prophecy where Yahweh would put His covenant within them and write it on their hearts (Jer 31:33). “Jesus wanted them to ingest His sacrifice so as to appropriate it in the most intimate, organic way, making it bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh” (58).

The Sacrifice of the Mass

• Re-presenting the sacrifice of the Cross: In the Mass, “we are not repeating Christ’s sacrifice on our own terms and through our own initiative; rather we are, as we’ve said, re-presenting it, tapping into its power” (60). “The Mass is indeed described as an anamnesis (a remembrance) of the Last Supper and Calvary, but this term is meant in much more than a merely psychological sense. Since Jesus is divine, all of his actions, including and especially the sacrificial act by which he saved the world, participate in the eternity of God and hence can be made present at any point in time. To “remember” him, therefore, is to participate even now in the saving events of the past, bringing them, in all of their dense reality, to the present day” (59).
• The value of offering our sacrifices: “Though the ordained priest alone can preside at the Mass and effect the Eucharistic change, all of the baptized participate in the Mass in a priestly way. They do this through their prayers and responses but also, the document specifies, by uniting their personal sacrifices and sufferings to the great sacrifice of Christ… Suffering, once joined to the cross of Jesus (most especially during the Mass), can become a vehicle for the reformation of the sinful self, the turning of the soul in the direction of love… pain, consciously aligned to the sacrifice of Jesus, can be spiritually transfiguring” (63).

3: The Eucharist as Real Presence

1st insight: Reality & appearance

“How is Christ really present, when all the sensible evidence is that bread and wine are still rather massively there?” (85)

• Bishop Barron’s first insight to this important question is a modern take on the classic “substance and accident” terminology. He proposes that reality (what is) and appearance (what appears) can help us look in a new way at the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
• Most of the time, appearance and reality coincide (if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…” But there are many exceptions to this rule. “Appearances are deceptive!” The movement of the moon and the sun, for example. Or “when we look into the distant heavens on a clear night, and we see the tiny lights of the stars, it certainly seems that we are seeing something that is substantially there, but we know that this is false. In point of fact, we are looking into the distant past, for the light from those stars has reached our eyes only after traveling across many years” (87). Or sometimes we make a judgment about someone’s character based upon one encounter with him, only to discover, after coming to know him much better, that our original impression was quite false. We might subsequently tell a friend, “I know he can seem that way, but he’s really not” (87).
• Conclusion: “[R]eality is never simply reducible to appearance and that, at times, the deepest truth of things is revealed, not through what we see, but by what we hear from authoritative voices: a scientist, an astronomer, an experienced friend” (87).
• With this in mind, “Aquinas is arguing that, at the Eucharist, the appearances of bread and wine do not tell the deepest truth about what is really present and that, in point of fact, the authoritative word of Christ does” (87-8).

2nd insight: The Performative Quality of Human Words

How do simple words, like “This is my body,” change something miraculously from bread into Jesus?

• The power of human words: Our words can function not only descriptively but performatively as well. Anyone can describe something at a baseball game: “He’s out,” but only a properly designated umpire can shout, “You’re out!” as an MLB player slid into 3rd base, and the unfortunate player would, whether he liked it or not, be out. The umpire’s words are not just descriptive but performative. He can objectively change the flow of the game. We can, in J.L. Austin’s famous phrase, “do things with words.”
• The power of the divine word: Jesus is the incarnation of the creative and effective word of Genesis (John 1:14). He proved to us that His word is effective and transformative time and time again in the Gospels. He said a storm at sea, “Peace! Be still!” (Mark 4:39) and immediately there was calm. He said to a dead man, “Lazarus, come out!” and he came out alive (John 11:43-44). He said “This is My Body… This is My Blood” over bread and wine, and they miraculously changed into His own Body & Blood (the incarnate and creative Word of God effected what He spoke). Jesus’ words are always efficacious and transformative – they produce what they pronounce (94). Jesus is the Isaian word that accomplishes its purpose every time (Isaiah 55:10-11). The same Word that spoke the elements of bread and wine into existence in the first place now speaks them into a new mode of being, changing them into the bearers of Christ’s sacramental presence. 94
• The efficacious word of Christ endures in the Church today, most especially in the “institution narrative” at the heart of the Eucharistic Prayer, when the priest slips into the words of Jesus & fully acts in persona Christi – permitting the same divine word that transformed bread & wine some 2,000 years ago to transform them now.

3rd insight: God is non-competitive with His creation

Robert Sokolowski says that there are 3 ways to think about the relationship between spirit and matter (and problems occur when we try to think about the Eucharist in terms of the first 2 models).

1. Darwinian: Matter is really all that there is, and what we call “spirit” is simply an epiphenomenon of matter. In this Darwinian reading, mind and will, for example, are only refined brain functions. In this Darwinian framework, the Real Presence is nonsense, for matter is all there is.
2. Aristotelian: Matter and spirit exist more or less side by side & interact with each other in complex ways. Think, for instance, of the standard view of how body & soul relate to each other. In this Aristotelian framework, the Real Presence comes to be thought of as a sort of inner-worldly change, some new & unprecedented way for finite natures – one spiritual & the other material – to relate to one another (but this is also problematic).
3. Biblical: The precedence of spirit over matter. The properly spiritual – mind and will – preceded matter & can determine matter according to its purposes. Think about the creation of the world. It is only intelligible in this third framework. In this biblical framework, God is NOT one being within the world or one nature among others, but rather the Creator of the world, the ground of all finite things. And thus, God can relate to matter in a non-competitive way, becoming present through it without undermining it. The Incarnation is the supreme example of God’s non-competitive involvement with creation and the Eucharist is the sacramental prolongation of the Incarnation. The Eucharist does not involve the supplanting of one finite nature by another – as though a tree becomes a leopard but continues to look and react like a tree – but the non-competitive presence of God within an aspect of the nature that He has made. The Church assumes this biblical context when speaking of the substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

4th Insight: Eschatological meaning of transubstantiation

“Then how do we explain the perdurance of the accidents, once their proper substances have been changed?” (86)

• Though God customarily sustains accidents through their proper substances, he can, for his own purposes, suspend the secondary causality and sustain them directly himself. Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) said that, at the Eucharistic change, the bread and wine lose their independence as creatures and become, through God’s power, pure signs of Christ’s presence. They no longer point to themselves in any relevant sense, for they have become utterly transparent to the Christ who makes himself manifest through them. 86
• In light of [Ratzinger’s] clarification, we can appreciate the eschatological significance of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The Eucharistic elements, fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, are not destroyed or annihilated through the power of Christ; rather, they are transfigured, elevated into vehicles for Christ’s self-communication. 88
• In the letters of Paul, we find the mysterious observations that, at the culmination of the present age, God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) and that all people will come together in forming “the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Could it be that the Eucharistic elements, transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Jesus, are proleptic signs even now of what Christ intends for the whole of the universe? 88
• Could it be that, in them, we can see, however indistinctly, God’s purpose in regard to even the humblest features of his creation? Perhaps, in light of this doctrine, we can begin to understand the mysterious words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist signals the eschatological transsubstantiation du monde (the transubstantiation of the world). 88

5th Insight: The Petrine Confession

“Do you also wish to go away?” (John 6:67).

• There is something terrible and telling in that question, as though Jesus were posing it not only to the little band gathered around him at Capernaum, but to all of his prospective disciples up and down the ages. One senses that we are poised here on a fulcrum, that a standing or falling point has been reached, that somehow being a disciple of Jesus is intimately tied up with how one stands in regard to the Eucharist… In response to Jesus’ question, Peter spoke for the group to stay with Jesus in this difficult time. Thus, a Petrine confession grounds & guarantees the survival of the Church” (70).
• Flannery O’Connor’s story, “If It’s a Symbol, to Hell with It” (click here)