Essentially your argument is: It's not physically possible for mere bread and wine to actually be Jesus' flesh and blood, so therefore it can't be literal, and thus conclude it must be symbolic.
You predicate your argument here on the basis of incredulity.
And yet, that same incredulity when applied to the physical impossibility of the ark and great deluge is scorned as simply "not believing the Bible".
Of course there's plenty in Genesis to indicate non-literal readings. The creation stories, if read strictly literally, flat out contradict each other, for example.
In the first creation story God causes plants to sprout up on dry land on the third day, animals are created on days five and six, with man being created last on the sixth day. In the second creation story, God forms man from the dust of the earth, and then creates plants, places man in a garden, and then creates animals.
The first story's chronology: Man > Plants > Animals
The second story's chronology: Plants > Animals > Man
In order to force the two stories to not conflict requires drastically changing the plain reading of the text.
Now, if I were a biblicist who believed in taking those stories in Genesis literally, that would be a problem for me. But I'm not, and so those details aren't problematic. Because the point of the creation stories aren't to give us a literal "play-by-play", but rather to provide meaningful context for the story of God's redemption of the world. The first creation story presents us with God as the Creator who has ordained everything to be and to dwell in its ordered spaces. Creation isn't, as it is in many of the mythologies of the surrounding nations to Israel, the result of cosmic chaos; but is the product of Divine Order. A division between light and dark, between sky and sea, between water and dry land, giving room for sun, moon, and stars to rule day and night, birds and fish to rule sky and sea, and beasts to rule dry land--with man as the priestly steward over the earth bearing the Divine Image. The second creation story presenting us with the story of man's relationships with God and the rest of creation, relationships which become fundamentally and forever broken by the introduction of death, sin, and suffering, the realities of this present world which we find ourselves--in which rather than simply enjoying God's good world we must toil at the soil, hunt to kill for food and clothing, in which violence, war, and every other evil is present in our midst.
And so when I get to the story of Noah and the ark, it's really not that difficult to understand that the point of the story isn't "God got really mad and decided to kill everyone and everything on the planet." But rather the point of the story presents to us an important lesson to learn: Salvation does not come through destruction. The flood did not save the world. The world cannot be healed by erasing everything and just starting over. The flood came, the waters receded, and sin, death, and suffering didn't go away. As quickly as Noah gets off the boat, builds an altar to thank God, he gets drunk off his rear end, strips naked, gets caught naked by one of his sons, and then places a curse on his own grandson. And almost as soon as the whole story of Noah ends, we're already reading about men gathering together to build a tower to ascend to heaven--our hubris has not subsided. We were just as bad after the flood as we were before. Nothing got fixed.
That sets us up with something really important, the way God actually will redeem and heal the world.
"Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. 32 The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran. Now the Lord said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.'" - Genesis 11:31-2 - 12:1-3
"Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, 'And to offsprings,' referring to many, but referring to one, 'And to your offspring,' who is Christ." - Galatians 3:16
In Christianity the point of the Bible is Jesus.
-CryptoLutheran
