The Mass is a gift. Our offering of bread and wine is transformed into the risen body of Christ and given to us in the Eucharist.
What we receive is not a dead body, a thing, however holy, but the living and risen Christ who has gone beyond death to life.
By our Communion we take this risen body and resurrected life into ourselves so that our body ‘of this lowliness’ is gradually transformed into the ‘body of his brightness’. Risen life grows in us as we receive Risen Life itself. When we receive Communion we receive what is beyond death.
The body of Christ is the food for our journey to God, it is the ‘manna from heaven’ which saves us from starvation and gives us strength to go forward into the unknown. But it is also the end of the journey; as by God’s indwelling grace we are already in eternity, so we now feed on eternal food, the fruit of the Tree of Life in Paradise. Immortality is ours, for ‘he who eats this bread will live for ever’.
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