This Sunday, Four Ways Jesus Replicates Himself in Every Parish in the World

Sunday is Corpus Christi in the United States, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Year C. It is a day to celebrate the Eucharist, which is uniquely the real presence of Jesus Christ. It only looks like bread: The host becomes the whole Christ — body, blood, soul and divinity.

But the readings this Sunday show that the host itself is just one of the ways Jesus replicates himself before (and after) Mass. Here are five takeaways from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: In the Eucharist, Jesus replicates himself to be at our side in our church.

The reading from Luke is often called the multiplication of the loaves, and Church Fathers, the Catechism and eminent theologians throughout the years call what happens in the story “multiplication,” so that’s not wrong.

But as Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis points out, writing about Matthew’s version of the story, “the text carefully stresses the passing of the loaves from hand to hand,” and he asks, “In whose hands were the loaves in fact ‘multiplied?’ … Apparently the bread grew in the distribution of it, as a result of both Jesus’s blessing and of the disciples’ collaboration with him.”

St. Thomas Aquinas quotes St. Hilary saying essentially the same thing. “The five loaves are not multiplied into more, but fragments take the place of fragments, the substance growing whether upon the tables or in the hands that took them up, I know not.”

Aquinas also quotes St. Rabanus Maurus saying Jesus “creates no new food items, but having taken what the disciples had, he gave thanks.”

Continued below.