It is curious indeed. . .

Have you ever thought about how sin entered the world?  It is a remarkable story.  The first sin did not involve mass murder or some sort of egregious abuse.  It did not involve the theft of something another deemed precious nor did it involve the defamation of character or the ruin of reputation.  It did not involve sexual immorality in any of it its many and various kinds we know so well today.  It involved a nice piece of fruit and a bite into it.  Adam and Eve did not eat a poisonous fruit that they were warned against but a good fruit, pleasing to the eye and to the palate but one which transgressed against God's Word.  They did not overindulge themselves on something that should have been tasted but ate a bite and that was enough.  How could this be a sin?  How can something that tastes so good and feels so right be wrong?  But it was.  Man ate himself and all who followed into the fires of hell.

Even more curious, indeed, is that the answer to this sin is not fasting.  You cannot stop your eating into forgiveness, life, and salvation.  The answer to the eating that led to sin and its death was not and is not to stop eating at all.  It is to eat something different.  Jesus insists His flesh is real food and His blood is real drink and calls us to eat of His flesh and to drink of His blood with the promise that what was done by eating would be undone by eating.  He goes so far as to say that unless you eat of His flesh and drink of His blood there is no health in us, no life, and no salvation.  You cannot cease to eat and answer what was done by eating but only by eating what you must eat in order to be saved.  The work that brought us under the curse of sin will not be undone by another work but only by Christ's work of giving His flesh and blood to us as the fruit of the new tree in which salvation alone is to be found.

I grew up with the idea that you should commune when you are ready, when you have the right heart, and what it feels right to commune.  How wrong that was and is!  We do not eat because we are hungry and feel like eating but because unless we eat, we shall die.  This is the element in the Eucharistic life of God's people which seems to have been lost.  Some find the time at the rail to be a private moment with God.  Others focus on forgiveness (which is also available elsewhere).  Still others presume that it is a magic moment in which some sort of dramatic revelation happens.  Jesus is more blunt.  If you eat of His flesh and blood you are one with Him, His life dwells in you, and death's claim cannot be enforced over you anymore.  We eat because the way sin entered us with its curse of death is become in Christ the way to overcome sin and its claim to our lives.  We think that fasting ends the curse of what that first eating of the forbidden cost us but it is not.  Fasting is good and salutary but the answer to what that first bite cast over us is to eat again and anew, the foretaste of the eternal in the Holy Eucharist.

Jesus is the Bread of Life, of which we eat and hunger no more and no more live under the curse of sin that came by eating what was forbidden.  This is why this Holy Sacrament is our oft repeated meal, not some special meal for a special time but the ordinary food of those who ate wrongly and suffered and who now eat rightly and are healed.  Taste and eat and live... the command that will undo what breaking the command not to eat has done.