PhDr. Mgr. Jeroným Klimeš, Ph.D.
Czech version 2015-08-03
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English version 2026-09-11
The Eucharist is a difficult-to-understand Christian custom, usually understood merely as a symbolic gesture — believers simply stand up in the middle of Mass and go to receive a wafer — and it is not given much further thought. In the past, for example among the ancient Romans and Jews, the Eucharist even evoked images of cannibalism. This stemmed from how Christians themselves interpreted the Eucharist, namely that the consecrated bread and wine are the living body and blood of Jesus. If the Eucharist was incomprehensible to the Romans, it is all the more incomprehensible to modern people — whether they are believers or not. That is why I want to focus in this article on how Jesus thought before he instituted the Eucharist as the central sacrament of Christianity.
We will go through the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, sometimes called Jesus’ Eucharistic discourse, which is the only text that gives us a glimpse into the thought processes that led Jesus to institute the Eucharist. This chapter is being read in installments in church during this year’s summer season (17th to 21st Sundays in Ordinary Time, Cycle B). You can find an illustrative overview of various conflicting views on the Eucharist in this article.
The Context Leading Up to the Eucharistic Discourse
Unfortunately, John’s sixth chapter alone is not sufficient to understand what preceded the dialogue between Jesus and the people standing around him. We must also look to the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 14:12–16):
[Herod the Tetrarch, at the request of Salome, a daughter of his wife Herodias, had beheaded John the Baptist in a prison.] John’s disciples then came, took his body, and buried it; then they went and told Jesus. When Jesus heard this, he withdrew by boat to a deserted place to be alone; but the crowds heard about it and followed him on foot from the towns. When he got out of the boat, he saw a large crowd and had compassion on them. And he healed their sick. When evening came, the disciples approached him and said, “This place is desolate, and it is already late. Send the crowds away so they can go to the villages and buy food.” But Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat!”
The discussion about the Eucharist is preceded by this series of interconnected events, which apparently unfolded as follows: Jesus learns of John the Baptist’s death. This triggers a reaction of grief. Jesus has introverted tendencies, meaning he has a need to withdraw, so he sets out by boat and wants to be alone. The crowds thwart his plan. Thus, clearly still under the influence of thoughts about John the Baptist’s murder, he embarks on spectacular acts that he had previously avoided in public.
Up until this point, he had mostly wanted his extraordinary acts (turning water into wine, healing) to remain private, so that those involved would not tell anyone about the healing. Such was apparently the agreement within his own family, at least with his mother Mary — something along the lines of: “We will not speak of these things in public until my hour comes, that is, until I receive a sign from above.” This was also the main point of the sharp exchange between him and his mother at Cana in Galilee (John 2:1ff), where she wanted him to perform a miracle to address the plight of the wedding guests, who had run out of wine during the feast, but he did not want to do so at that time.
He had to abandon this stance at some point during his ministry, and this apparently did not happen all at once, but gradually, in several steps. The first step was certainly the debate at Cana in Galilee, but the death of John the Baptist was certainly another powerful impulse that broke through this primary mindset of Jesus, for several logical reasons:
a) The consultation at Mount Tabor helped Jesus to unify John the Baptist with the prophet Elijah who was to come before the Messiah’s arrival and whom the prophet Malachi had foretold (Mal 2:13):
“Behold, I am sending the prophet Elijah to you before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a curse.”
St. John the Baptist was Jesus’ cousin (a relative) six months his senior and, at the same time, a man greatly admired not only by Jesus but also by a large part of the Jewish people.
This helps us understand the disciples’ question in Matthew (Mt 17:10–13):
The disciples asked him, “Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” He replied, “Yes, Elijah will come and restore all things. But I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but did to him whatever they pleased; so also the Son of Man will suffer at their hands.” Then the disciples understood that he was speaking of John the Baptist.
b) Jesus considered himself a biological son of the living God and the anointed Messiah (Mt 16:16–17):
... Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, a son of the living God.” Jesus replied to him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.
Jesus regarded St. Joseph as his adoptive father. Traditionally, St. Joseph is referred to as a foster father, although in the modern conception, the relationship between St. Joseph and Jesus more closely resembled adoption than modern, state-funded foster care.
c) When John’s logical arguments and calls to repentance failed to help, Jesus wanted to test whether people would listen under the impression of spectacular miracles.
For these reasons, it must have logically followed for Jesus that, with John the Baptist (the returned Elijah) out of the picture, it was now his turn, as the Messiah, according to Scripture, and that he must now make use of all the abilities God had placed at his disposal. He had no idea yet how quickly disillusionment would come.
So, after learning of St. John the Baptist’s death, Jesus overcomes his desire to be alone and instead teaches the crowds. Subsequently, his disciples remind him that the people are already hungry and that he should send them away so they can go buy something to eat in the surrounding villages. In response, Jesus decides to perform a truly spectacular miracle that would leave any reasonable person speechless. He feeds the entire crowd, about 4,000 people. He certainly made an impression on the people, but they interpreted it in their own way, differently than Jesus intended (John 6:14–15):
When the people saw the sign that Jesus had performed, they said, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world!” When Jesus realized that they intended to come and seize him to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain, all by himself.
So another debacle on the path of miracles — the miracles simply didn’t work the way Jesus had expected. He certainly made an impression on the people by feeding them, but he did not teach them to think. Subsequently, in a similar gesture, unprecedented in his ministry, he performs a miracle for the disciples — walking on water, which Matthew describes in greater detail than John (John 6:16ff vs. Matthew 14:23–36):
After dismissing the crowd, he went up the mountain to pray alone. When evening came, he was there by himself. The boat was far from land, and the waves were battering it, for the wind was against it. Toward morning, he went out to them, walking on the sea.
When the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, thinking it was a ghost, and they cried out in fear. Jesus immediately spoke to them and said, “Take courage; it is me; do not be afraid.”
Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water!”
And he said, “Come!” Peter got out of the boat, stepped onto the water, and walked toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, began to sink, and cried out, “Lord, save me!”
Jesus immediately reached out his hand, caught him, and said to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
Just as a side note, let us observe that when he was fasting in the desert, he rejected this kind of act (jumping off a cliff) as a presumptuous temptation of the Lord (Mt 4:7), as a gesture without purpose, but now, after the death of John the Baptist, he uses it as a means to convince his disciples.
The Eucharist — a parallel with the feeding of the crowd
Once we have taken all of this into account, we can finally turn to the main passage of the Eucharistic discourse (Jn 6:24ff):
When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were on the shore, they got into boats, went to Capernaum, and looked for Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”
Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, I say to you: You are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of those loaves. Do not strive for food that perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. God the Father has sealed him with his seal.”
Here it is worth noting how Jesus regards his extraordinary deeds as a completely unimportant matter of course. Here he tries in vain to explain to people that they should not superficially cling to a miracle that is not important. What is important, according to him, is the food that endures to eternal life. This is not the mindset of an illusionist, for whom the magic trick is the center and goal of his performance — the goal is to deceive people and evoke amazement. Jesus succeeded in this, but unfortunately, it was not his goal. Jesus’ intention was to use the miracle merely as a means to convince people of something that far surpassed the miracle itself. Unfortunately, he had to admit that, for the most part, he had failed to do so with his contemporaries.
They asked him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one whom he has sent.” They said to him, “What sign, then, do you perform so that we may see and believe you? What do you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, I say to you: It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven; for the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
So they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
These two sentences, in their overall context, explain to us how Jesus came to establish the Eucharist. When he realized that miracles were useless, that people did not understand him anyway, he tried to explain it to them in simple terms — “what I did was meant to be only a means and an instrument for you to understand the parallel”:
“Just as earthly bread is a necessary condition for physical survival, so I, Jesus — the Son of Man and the Son of the living God — am a necessary condition for spiritual survival. Thus, I am something like food, something like bread — the source of life.”
Then Jesus witnesses that even this parallel was not understood by those standing around him, and after feeding the thousands, the Pharisees, referring to Moses, demand some further sign. What more could they possibly want? He continues to tell them, in the same vein of reasoning, that he, HE is the bread from heaven that will give them life. But as we see, it was as if he were speaking to a wall. Moreover, the fact that the Pharisees did not understand him was not the worst part. Even the disciples did not understand him. For Matthew adds further details to John’s account of the debate between the Pharisees and Jesus (Mt 16:1–12):
The Pharisees and Sadducees came and tested him; they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. But he replied to them, “In the evening you say, ‘It will be fair weather; the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘Today will be stormy; the sun is rising through the clouds.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times? An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” He left them and went away.
When the disciples were on the other side, they realized they had forgotten to bring bread.
Jesus said to them [still under the influence of the previous debate with the Pharisees], “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees!”
But they were thinking to themselves, “We didn’t bring any bread.”
When Jesus noticed this, he said, “Why are you talking about not having bread, you of little faith? Do you still not understand or remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Don’t you understand that I wasn’t speaking to you about bread? Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees!”
Then they realized that he had not told them to beware of leaven, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
In other words — the Pharisees don’t understand him at all, and the disciples only barely.
The Relationship Between the Eucharist and Jesus’ Spiritual Identity
But let us return once more to the heated debate between Jesus and the Pharisees and read to the end of John chapter 6 (Jn 6:35–71) with occasional commentary:
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I have told you: You have seen me, and yet you do not believe. All whom the Father gives me will come to me; and whoever comes to me I will never cast out, for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of him who sent me; and his will is that I should lose none of those he has given me, but raise them up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life; and I will raise him up on the last day.”
Here Jesus explains to us why he did not want to be proclaimed king. He has other plans. Here we see his inner identity, the task with which he identified himself: “My task is to conquer death by raising people on the last day, that is, at the end of the world.” This identity is closely linked to apocalyptic thinking, much like the term “Son of Man” itself, which we otherwise find only in apocalyptic texts (the prophet Daniel, Enoch). Therefore, we cannot understand this term merely in a literal sense. For his contemporaries, it was a somewhat cryptic reference to the term “Messiah,” which he could not use publicly about himself, as doing so would have risked stoning.
Jesus’ identity and life’s purpose — to rise from the grave so that
everybody might have life through him
To tell the truth, I do not know from which passages of the Old Testament Jesus derived this identity of his, but we can clearly see that he possesses it. This needs to be thought through even more thoroughly. Here we will content ourselves merely with realizing this and committing it to memory as a question. The answer to it will come in time.
The Jews grumbled against him because he had said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” And they said, “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph? We know his father and mother! How then can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves!
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.
It is written in the prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and been taught by him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father; only the one who is from God has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. “I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven: whoever eats of it will never die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats of this bread will live forever. And the bread that I will give is my flesh, given for the life of the world.”
The Jews argued among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
This is the main reference to cannibalism. It is remarkable that Jesus does not refute this at all. He does not say, “That is a mistake; I meant something else.” On the contrary, he confirms their fears:
Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so whoever eats me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven — not like the manna your ancestors ate and died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
The Eucharist rightly has the character of cannibalism — it is a real meal — in the sense that Jesus intended. Whoever wants to be resurrected on the last day must physically connect to him and draw life directly from him. This is no symbolism, no gesture. Just as a computer does not work unless it is physically connected to the electrical grid, so on the last day people will not live unless they physically connect to Christ. Or, if you prefer the maternal image, just as a child in the womb is nourished from the mother’s body through the placenta and the umbilical cord, so Jesus on the last day will be the source of life for our resurrected bodies as well. After all, Jesus did this as a kind of trial run with Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor (Mt 17:1ff).
We can therefore understand today’s Eucharist as a sacrament — a kind of mental vaccination for this future. Already today, in the Eucharist, we unite with the living Jesus so that we may be prepared for the fact that at the resurrection from the dead, on the last day, this union will be even more intense.
Personally, I don’t care whether anyone believes this or not, whether they are a believer or a non-believer. Here I am merely defending the claim that the historical Jesus understood it in this sense, at least as far as we can judge from the text of the Gospels. The actual institution of the Eucharistic sacrament later, before his own crucifixion, is then merely a logical consequence of this earlier, triggering reflection on the feeding of the multitudes with loaves of bread. In any case, we cannot be surprised that this seems crazy to some, because it was already an absurd idea to Jesus’ contemporaries:
When his disciples heard this, many of them said, “This is a hard saying! Who can listen to this?”
From that moment on, many of his disciples left him and no longer followed him.
Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. And we have believed and come to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Jesus replied to them, “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.”
He was referring to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. For he was the one who was to betray him, one of the Twelve.
Notice the difference in Jesus’ reaction. When St. Peter once testified to him (see the quote above from Mt 16:16): “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus was overjoyed at the time. Today he is dejected. It is truly no wonder. After such events, he could feel nothing but utter despair — John the Baptist is dead, people do not understand him, his disciples are abandoning him. Peter’s words brought him no joy. Today, it is impossible to cheer him up. In response to these words, only one thought occurred to him: “Yeah, those are nice words, but one of you will betray me anyway. Oh well..."
The Final Institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper
In the following months, Jesus reflected deeply on this idea — I am the bread that comes down from heaven (Luke 22:13–20) — and we see it for the last time at the Last Supper, where he institutes the Eucharist as the central sacrament of Christianity:
They went [...] and prepared the Passover lamb. When the hour came, he sat down at the table, and the apostles with him. He said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”
He took the cup, gave thanks, and said, “Take this and share it among yourselves. For I tell you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes.”
Then he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
And in the same way, after supper, he took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant sealed with my blood, which is poured out for you.”
Here, as we see, we have only a technical description of the institution of the Eucharist, without further details that would reveal Jesus’ thoughts that led him to take this step. As we have seen, we must infer these from other passages in the Gospels.
Problems with Atypical Motivations and Faith
If we carefully examine the Gospels, we can gain a fairly vivid psychological picture of the historical Jesus’s reasoning and motivations. The problem is that his reasoning was highly atypical and anomalous for his time, making it all the more difficult for modern people to empathize with him. But even today, psychologists encounter cases of curious motivations that defy reason. Yet they are often logical from the person’s own perspective and possess their own internal — psychological — logic. For example, ordinary people do not understand the foster parents’ intense need to have a crowd of children and a large family around them, so they explain this motivation — which is incomprehensible to them — in a simplistic and personal way — they simply state that “foster parents are only in it for the money,” which usually represents a misunderstanding of the entire issue of foster care.
Similarly, Jesus takes his extraordinary abilities for granted and, quite logically, derives his identity from them. We can roughly outline the gradual revelation of his abilities as follows: After John’s baptism in the Jordan, “the heavens were opened to him” (Mt 3:16), and thanks to this, he has been able to turn water into wine ever since (Jn 2:1ff). Later, he discovered that he was able to heal people by anointing them with mud and saliva (Jn 9:6). Then he discovered that it could be done without saliva, then that he could even heal someone who was physically distant (Mt 8:1–13), then he discovered that he could revive someone who had just died (Mk 5:41), and then even someone who had died several days earlier (Jn 11:1ff). So the question arises: why not try to raise Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor (Matt 17:1ff)? “If I have this ability, then it logically follows that my Father in heaven wants me to raise people from the dead on the last day.” Identity is generally derived primarily from abilities and significant emotional relationships. Jesus was no exception in this regard. Only his abilities were exceptional.
Even in Jesus, therefore, we find a motivation that is completely incomprehensible to a normal person — I want to raise people from the dead on the last day because I am the son of the living God, and this is the task entrusted to me by my real, “biological” father, who is in heaven (i.e., not my adoptive father, St. Joseph). Whether one is a believer or a non-believer — one must admit that this was the thinking of a single historical person. When we acknowledge that Jesus thought this way, then even the seemingly incompatible parts of the Gospel begin to fall into place, including the otherwise very incomprehensible Eucharist.
Believers view the abilities attributed to Jesus as entirely unique in the entire history not only of the earth but of the universe. Thus, this is not a repeatable experiment, but purely a one-time historical event. From a scientific perspective, what is relevant is merely the description of extraordinary events or the classification of eyewitness accounts and the search for connections with what is in some way universal. The only universal fact here is that, according to theology, Jesus was a real person (truly not only the Son of God, but also the “Son of Man” — P. Marie). So we can expect general human reactions — grief, responses to stress, the formation of identity, and even human fallibility and gradual understanding.
In any case, science can never state (even though individual scientists have stated this many times) that something extraordinary, unique, and unrepeatable — something that completely transcends our experience — cannot appear in history. However, if something like this does appear, then due to its uniqueness and unrepeatability, it remains outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Science is not about particulars, but about general laws. Therefore, it is up to each individual person whether they accept as their own the testimony of those unrepeatable events that are conveyed to them in some way through witnesses, that is, whether they believe them or not. That is why faith has always been regarded as a gift from heaven, which an individual cannot prescribe for himself or for others.
Conclusion
This article has examined whether the description in the Gospels allows us to form a coherent picture of the thought processes that led Jesus to establish the Eucharist as the central sacrament of Christianity. I believe we can answer this question in the affirmative: The Eucharist is the central sacrament of Christianity because, of all the sacraments, it is most closely tied to the identity of Jesus himself, who considered himself the Son of God and was convinced that his primary mission was to save people by raising them from the dead on the last day, at the end of the world. When we realize this unique motivation of his, the meaning of the Eucharist in the context of the events of that time becomes clear.