In his talk on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, which has now amassed almost three million views on YouTube, Bishop Robert Barron calls Christ’s “bread of life” teaching in John 6 a “standing and falling point,” a stumbling block—an “either you’re with me or against me moment.”
That perilous edge can be found in the recent comments by YouTuber and Christian convert George Janko about the Eucharist. On his podcast (clip here, and full episode here), which has almost three million subscribers, Janko says,
I don’t look at things that are dirt and put it to the holiness of God. I could never do that. Differently with the Bible: I get uncomfortable when the Bible’s on the ground just because it’s the Word of God, and God was the Word and became flesh. . . . But like when they take the Eucharist, when they take this, and they truly believe that it is actually his Body and his Blood, to me, that’s a big no-no. . . . I need somebody to come with biblical terms and show me in the Gospel, because as of right now, we’re just taking dirt and worshiping it as if it’s our presence of God, and I just—I can’t wrap my head around that. . . . They treat it like it is actually my God that’s in that bread. I can’t get behind that. Now, if any man has a Scripture and says ‘No, this is exactly why,’ I will bow my head and I will bite my tongue. I’m never trying to go against God. But I think little movements like this could . . . move a man away from God.
In reacting to this dismissal of the Eucharist—which, though certainly not new, was amplified far and wide to hundreds of thousands of listeners—it would be easy enough for Catholic and Orthodox believers to fall into a fit of blind rage: “How dare he call the Eucharist dirt?”
But Janko seemed to make these comments in a spirit of good faith and honest questioning. Why not respond in kind?
One could point to the biblical basis he says he’s looking for, however well trod it might be in these discussions: not only in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel but also the Last Supper narratives in the Synoptic Gospels; in 1 Corinthians 11:23–34 and the “breaking of bread” in Acts (2:42–46, 20:7); in the liturgical resonances in the book of Revelation (beautifully explored by Scott Hahn, a former Protestant, in The Lamb’s Supper); and in the many Eucharistic types in the Old Testament, from Melchizedek to the Passover to the manna in the desert.
One could also point to the historical record, which sooner or later all Christians have to confront. We can continue to argue ad nauseum over the precise meaning of these passages—but what did Christians believe and do over the past two thousand years, especially in the early Church? Bishop Barron’s talk, again, offers a phenomenal overview of the doctrine of the Real Presence, from John 6 to the present. He also offers a sample of the teachings of the Church Fathers on the Eucharist, which are profoundly Catholic in character.
St. Ignatius of Antioch (AD 35–108), to mention just one striking example from the first century, calls the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality” and even warns about those who “abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.” Even Protestants like the rapper Flame and the preacher Francis Chan have recently witnessed in powerful ways to the unanimity on this doctrine for 1500 years, up until the Reformation era.
Personally, I also want to untangle the theological dilemma in Janko’s own comments, which is where we find the crux of the issue. He twice refers to the Eucharist as “dirt” in sharp contrast to God—to God’s holiness, his presence. In other words, how could something as lowly and fragile and finite as bread—which grows up from the ground and passes through our hands, mouths, and stomachs—possibly be the bearer of the eternal and all-powerful God? How could we worship him then?
This is what I’ve termed a heaven-earth dilemma: God and his perfection are on the one side, this world and its dirt on the other; and either we take God and move away from the bread, or take the bread and move away from God. We can’t have it both ways.
But Janko’s own response references a line from Scripture that’s critical to this conversation: “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14). That is to say, God became fully human. The shocking logic of the Incarnation—in tandem, of course, with Scripture and Tradition—is precisely what has compelled apostolic Christians to affirm the Real Presence for two thousand years.
On the face of it, God’s becoming human and God’s becoming bread are two wildly different things. We have rational souls; bread doesn’t. We are alive; bread isn’t. But in the poetry of Scripture, we find deep linguistic and conceptual ties between the dirt of the ground and human life: “The Lord God formed man [adam] from the dust of the ground [adamah]” (Gen. 2:7). Man, as countless Christians will hear on Ash Wednesday, is “dust”—and to dust he shall return (Gen. 3:19).
And though the idea of God becoming man is taken for granted today by most Christians, it was met with the same astonishment, disgust, and even horror that many believers feel today at the idea of God becoming bread. In both cases, it’s God’s intimate connection with the earthly that scandalizes. Augustine, reflecting on his pre-Christian Manichean days, captures a common view of the time: “I feared to believe the Word made flesh lest I be forced to believe the Word defiled by flesh.” Many brilliant and devout Christians feared to draw God too close to the “dirt” of this world by saying that Christ had a human body, a human will, a full human nature.
How could we worship him then? Wasn’t this, too, blasphemous? Idolatrous?
But God did become man, fully taking on all our “dirt.” And what we see in the Incarnation—the communion of God and man in Christ—is the beginning of a broader story: the communion of heaven and earth in the Church. God gathers and reconciles to himself things above and things below (Eph. 1:20; Col. 1:20).
This same logic undergirds not only Eucharistic worship (which predates the New Testament) but also the veneration of icons, which also came up in the same podcast discussion. Indeed, Janko’s own admission that he shows reverence and respect to the physical book of the Bible—which, after all, is composed of ink and paper, and no less “dirt” than bread—bears witness to the same incarnational logic. Rather than follow Janko in holding to the Incarnation and sacredness of Scripture but, in a strange inconsistency, stopping short of the Eucharist, we should follow John of Damascus, that great defender of icons, who deftly ties all three communions together:
“I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake, and in matter made his abode, and through matter worked my salvation. . . . I reverence it not as God, but as filled with divine energy and grace. . . . Is not the ink and the parchment of the Gospel matter? Is not the life-bearing table, which offers to us the bread of life, matter? . . . Before all these things, is not the body and blood of my Lord matter?”
And, as G. K. Chesterton put it in his 1904 essay “The Protestant Superstitions”:
Heaven has descended into the world of matter; the supreme spiritual power is now operating by the machinery of matter, dealing miraculously with the bodies and souls of men. It blesses all the five senses. . . . It works through water or oil or bread or wine. . . . I cannot for the life of me understand why [a Protestant] does not see that the Incarnation is as much a part of that idea as the Mass. A Puritan may think it blasphemous that God should become a wafer. A Moslem thinks it blasphemous that God should become a workman of Galilee. . . . If it be profane that the miraculous should descend to the plan of matter, then certainly Catholicism is profane; and Protestantism is profane; and Christianity is profane. Of all human creeds and concepts, in that sense, Christianity is the most utterly profane. But why a man should accept a Creator who was a carpenter and then worry about holy water, . . . why he should accept the first and most stupendous part of the story of Heaven on Earth and then furiously deny a few small but obvious deductions from it—that is a thing I do not understand; I never could understand; I have come to the conclusion that I shall never understand.
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Becklo’s Incarnation logic is correct, that if God can become flesh he can become bread. If we have faith, rather than mere belief we believe Christ meant what he said when he held the bread before the Apostles, that this is my body. Belief subjects the Gospels to one’s liking while faith subjects oneself to humble acceptance.
Thank you for your validation of the author’s logic. I need to make these words my words to share within a parish that has taught the Eucharist is a “symbol” as well as the distinction between belief and faith.
Good AFCz. It’s well needed. My prayers are with you.
The idea that “God did become man, fully taking on all our ‘dirt'” (“God-become-dirt”) is part of the reasoning and justification that Francis/Bergoglio and his movement uses for the recent papally-approved document that authorizes and encourages (requires?) all Catholic priests to give in-church blessings of self-declared, unrepentant, sexually active gay married couples.
The whole concept of the Incarnation has undergone a transformation ever since the Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes # 22, which says, “For by His incarnation the Son of GOD UNITED HIMSELF WITH in some way with EVERY HUMAN BEING.”
This, from the George Janko quote; “They treat it like it is actually my God that’s in that bread,” shows a misunderstanding. God isn’t IN the bread, God IS what was bread, fully.
This is well worth forwarding to those who harbor doubts. My take is John 6:55-58. How does a Protestant get around that? Actually, the whole of John 6 is the foundation of Christian faith. Scott Hahn said it was this chapter – a chapter that his seminary professors did not want to address – that turned him around to become a Catholic.
Accompanying the replacement of Tridentine Holy SACRIFICE of the MASS with the Novus Ordo COMMUNAL MEAL LITURGY—not surprisingly—has been the cessation of belief in the Real Physical Presence of Our Lord Jesus (body, blood, soul, and divinity) in the consecrated host, among a clear majority of the Catholic laity—a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center concluded that two-thirds of Catholics no longer accept the doctrine of the Real Presence. Thank you for defending the doctrine of the Real Presence. I’m not sure, however, that the damage caused by the widespread acceptance of the Novus Ordo Liturgy’s communal-meal emphasis can be undone without a return to the Tridentine understanding of the Catholic Mass as a non bloody re-presentation (i.e., a presentation again) of Jesus’ sacrifice on Calvary.
To me, when you realize what the consecrated host really is, suddenly you see the necessity of the profound inner and outer reverence inherent in and promoted by the traditional Mass.
By traditional Mass, I am referring to the longstanding universal Catholic liturgy that was quashed with the introduction of the generally not very reverent new Mass that was mandated by Paul VI in 1969 and which was partly based on the texts of the Vatican II Council, particularly Council’s document on the liturgy and the Council’s document on ecumenism.
It is well documented that the men who designed the new mass specifically stated their intention to make the new mass as much like Protestant worship services as possible, for the sake of progress in the ecumenical movement that the Church had just joined during the Council.
Another resource for Janko would be Brant Pitre’s book, “Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.” Densely rich in many notes and explanations of OT foreshadowing and types, Pitre explains, for instance, the Eucharist as the Lamb of the Pasch (Passover), wine as the blood of the lamb (in which was life, which is why Jews forbade imbibing it), and the manna of the exodus as miraculous food, not arising from “dirt” of nature but from the supernatural source in heaven.
There is much more in the book. Here’s one more example: The death of the firstborn son in Egypt led to the Jews’ liberation/salvation. Similarly, the death of God’s firstborn son in His Pasch (sacrificial death) leads to the Christian’s salvation. We believe and do what He said: Eat and drink His flesh and blood–in memory of Him–since He IS the bread which miraculously came down from heaven; the water which He caused to become wine (at Cana), so the wine He caused to become His life-blood at the Last Supper. The OT Passover meal and therefore the effect of the sacrifice) was complete only when the Jews ATE the lamb. Pitre says (p. 56) that the Bible states five times that the Jews must eat the lamb for the sacrifice to be effective and complete, according to God’s command.
Christians today eat the supernatural bread of salvation, just as ‘men of natural dirt’ eat the natural bread, fruits, and beasts to maintain our natural lives.
Janko may appreciate Pitre’s book if he gave it a look.