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Real Presence: A Meeting With The Christ in Flesh and Blood
by Hubert Hirwa | Phoenix, Arizona
Imagine you are having a difficult week. Work is tough. Home is tough. It is just one of those weeks. Then suddenly you remember, on Sunday you have an appointment with Jesus. An appointment where you will get to see him and be with him in flesh and blood.
Not metaphorically either, but a guaranteed personal time with the Christ. That is what believing in the real presence is.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14)
Real presence is the belief that when the bread and the wine are consecrated they become the actual body and the blood, no longer just representations of the body and the blood. So as Jesus told the people that to have life in them they needed to eat the flesh and the blood of the son of man (John 6:53). When a believer takes that action, the moment they have communion, it is a fulfillment of the Lord’s words.
Just as God became man in Jesus for our salvation, Jesus becomes food and drink for our life.
The Christ goes from being a concept, a belief, an all-ruling God somewhere far off in heaven, or a spirit ethereally present among us, to being a man of flesh and blood. A man who understands our problems, our issues, and our predicaments not just because he is our creator, but because he as man has experienced them. Just as God became man in Jesus for our salvation, Jesus becomes food and drink for our life. In front of the believer, the divine presence is embodied in the humble form of bread and wine.
The Christ returns to being the man that ate with tax collectors and sinners. The man who preached to the poor in Temple Courts and healed the sick. The Jesus who walked this earth is with us in that moment. God made flesh in that moment and physically present to us.
It makes communion that moment where the believer meets Christ; no matter what has happened in the previous week, no matter the hardships, the pains and the suffering of this world.
Belief in the real presence makes communion an affirmation of our intimate and personal relation to Jesus Christ. It makes communion that moment where the believer meets Christ; no matter what has happened in the previous week, no matter the hardships, the pains and the suffering of this world. Every Sunday becomes the day one has an intimate meeting with Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. “I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:23).
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