COMMUNION IS NOT THE BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST

The Roman Catholic Church says that God can turn bread and wine into his son so that they are not bread and wine at all any more but Jesus. This doctrine is called transubstantiation.
 
The Roman Catholic Church has a different god from the Christian God. Its god is a piece of bread and a drop of wine into which their God Jesus has been allegedly turned. Their answer is that God is under the form of the bread and wine so that is not true. But it is true. Their answer is that they only seem to worship bread and wine for it is really Jesus, God the Son, they worship - he has made the bread and wine his body and blood and his very self. This answer implies that IF THE BREAD AND WINE ARE NOT CHANGED then they ARE worshipping bread and wine. They adore a false god.
 
The selfish person always takes for herself at the expense of another when she could share. Condemning selfishness is paradoxically selfish itself. The selfish person could justify his selfishness as follows: I am selfish. But I give others a reason to tolerate me or even accept me. They don't believe in selfishness. Because of people like me they have to learn to be unselfish. They have to try to be unselfish towards me.
 
The unselfish should at least assume that all the selfish intend to be unselfish in the sense that they want to assist them in being unselfish by being in need of unselfish treatment from them. The Eucharist is allegedly a picture of the unselfishness of Jesus and the unselfishness to which he calls us. Enough said!
 
Dogmas have varying levels of importance. You cannot believe bread and wine can become God unless you believe in God first so God is the most important belief and you should be surer he exists than that he can disguise himself as food and drink. You cannot say he takes the form of bread and wine for us unless you have as much evidence for that as you have evidence that he exists. But that cannot be done. Belief in God is necessarily more verifiable. Therefore it is blasphemy to say that God is the food and drink. It is blasphemy too to say that he is incarnate as Jesus Christ. The notion of the change in the bread and wine is based on the idea that God has become man Jesus who left us his body and blood as food and drink. The belief that Jesus is God and that the bread and wine is really God is not as certain or as important as the existence of God.  The Catholics put the belief in Jesus as God and the change of the bread and wine into God before God so it is perfectly right to say they adore a man and bread and wine not God.

Only the gospel of John chapter 6 seems to say the doctrine of the conversion of the bread and wine into God is true but given that John himself and the Law of Moses both state that two unrelated and reliable witnesses have to give a testimony before it can be accepted his gospel can be dismissed even if it does say it.

But it does not say it. At best for Catholics, it says Jesus will feed people with his body and blood but does not say how or if he will turn bread and wine into his body and blood to do it. When the conversion of the food theory is so strange some other strange mystery could be meant here – perhaps one that we cannot even go near grasping. God could be invisibly feeding Christians without communion all the time on the body of Jesus in an invisible and heavenly way. The last supper could picture this feeding. It could be that God wants to be so close to his saints in Heaven that he finds some way of making the transformed body and blood Jesus has had since his resurrection which has ghostly qualities live in them so that in a sense they eat and drink him spiritually.

John 6:29. "Jesus ... said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." The work - not a work. It is not the main work its the work. Bare belief in Jesus is claimed to be enough. This denies that sacraments are needed for salvation. This verse is the key to unlocking the symbolism in John 6 about the eating of Jesus' body and the drinking of his blood.
 
If you think Jesus meant his entire self by saying the bread was his body, then why does he use the word flesh or human meat in John 6?
 
Eat my flesh and drink my blood are synonyms for avail of the salvation I have won for you by sacrificing my flesh and blood on the cross and avail by faith and belief in them. Eat and drink mean have faith in. That is the Protestant interpretation. The Catholic Church says it is wrong. But it believes in it itself for it holds that unless you have faith, taking communion at a Catholic Mass does no good. It forbids partaking if you do not believe as the sin of mocking the body and blood.
 
We only need the grace of God as food and drink so the idea of eating Jesus and drinking his blood is superfluous and would mean God does stupid miracles. Believe that? Then why not believe that the statues of the Virgin Mary are changed into the body and blood of Mary?

John may be giving what Jesus said but without claiming to know what Jesus meant. John makes it clear that when the Jews did not start on Jesus for advocating the idolatry of worshipping food and drink as God that they knew he did not mean anything like that. Also, Jesus accepted the teaching of the Old Testament that any idol that could not protect itself was not a God at all. Therefore that the excuse that the God allowed the idol to be harmed for a mysterious purpose was unacceptable so Jesus could not have had the Catholic Eucharist which is bread and wine turned into God in mind for it cannot protect itself against desecration.
 
Jesus said that bread he will save the world with is his flesh. This bread is symbolic bread because it refers to himself as the bread of life and he was not bread yet and the Catholic doctrine says that God does not become bread but bread becomes God and the bread ceases to be bread. Then the Jews ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” At this point Catholics say he would have corrected the Jews had he not meant it literally but instead he went on to say that he who eats him and drinks his blood has life eternal. But why assume the Jews were talking literally? They knew fine well that Jesus did not mean eat literally before?

All believers in the bread and wine changing into the body and blood of Jesus believe that it is the resurrected glorious body of Jesus that is present. But at the last supper, Jesus said it was his body and blood being given up for them in sacrifice so it was the normal pre-resurrection body. They are pretending that the words are literal and it is clear that they know they are not. There is no reason to hold that when Jesus said the bread was his body and the wine his blood that he meant to turn them into himself even if John 6 is about a literal feeding with his body and blood for there is no need for a transformation for that to happen.

Suppose Jesus really was taken literally by the Jews and thought to be promising to turn into food and drink. Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well that he would give her water that would be everlasting and she asked if he meant he could take away the need to ever go to the well again. He just kept saying about this water as if he meant it literally. You see the same device in John 6. Jesus says something and ignores those who take him literally and talks as if he didn’t hear them in such a way that he might be taken literally. That is why Catholics saying that when Jesus didn’t correct the Jews for taking him literally the Jews were right to do so is incorrect. Nothing in the New Testament says the bread and wine of the communion become the body and blood of Jesus.
 
Long after this and John 6, if we turn to John 16, we read that the apostles praised Jesus for speaking plainly at last meaning he never did it before.
 
Jesus said that food going into the body cannot make one unclean for it goes into the stomach and then out of the body into the toilet. He thought food was not absorbed into the body. "You are what you eat", is heresy. He said all this in Mark 7. By eat my flesh and drink my blood in John 6, Jesus had the idea of absorption in mind. This shows that eat and drink meant absorb the body and blood of Jesus. Mark 7 eliminates the idea that this eating and drinking meant Jesus turning into real food and drink for these do not morph into the body and are not assimilated. If the stomach holds food but does not absorb it and the food changes in appearance and comes out in the toilet then the notion of Jesus becoming bread and wine to end up in the toilet is madness.
 
Some say that in Mark 7, Jesus only meant that the food cannot make you dirty for it can't get into your heart, your heart meaning your character. But that is still saying the food goes through the body and does not get assimilated. Food cannot contain power that affects the kind of person you are. You cannot become a bad person by eating the wrong food. So you can't become a good person either by eating or drinking. Yet Romanism claims that communion has the power to make your heart good if you receive it with the right dispositions. And the power to make your heart bad if you receive it with the wrong dispositions.
 
In actual fact, you can become a bad person by eating the wrong food! We make ourselves from the food we eat.
 
It is argued that Paul regarded the bread and cup as being the body and blood of Jesus which is why it is murder to eat and drink when you don't recognise the body or when you are unworthy.  But Paul merely says that it is being guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.  He does not say that it is about what you think of the bread and cup.  If the worship is to identify with Jesus in his suffering and death then whether the bread and cup change or not then to abuse it is to be a murderer in the sense you sympathise with the murderers.  And Paul writes all sin puts Jesus on the cross so all sin is murder.  The argument that Paul denied it was mere food and drink on the Lord's Table makes too many assumptions.

Paul said the individual Christian is the body of Christ and nobody takes that to mean anything more than that the Christian is close to Christ but is not literally Christ.  However, Corinthians 6:15-16 says that a Christian having sex with a prostitute is sacrilegiously trying to unite the body of Christ with a her. Jesus is really present in the Christian just like Catholics today think he is just really present in communion bread and wine. Paul does not necessarily mean prostitutes who are used purely as objects. Not all prostitutes work that way or their clients. But whether in some semblance of a relationship or more obvious exploitation the result is the same: Jesus is bodily given to a harlot. Sex and Jesus and the real presence of Jesus all go together.  The presence of Jesus in the believer is what matters not bread or the cup.