Aside from the actual words of Jesus spoken at the Last Supper, the words of St. Paul are perhaps just as compelling.  For now we have actual proof that the earliest of Christians understood Jesus’ words on the real presence of His Body and Blood to not be merely symbolic but in every sense true and everlasting.  They continued what the Lord commanded them when He said, “Do this in remembrance of Me.” 

      Let’s consider St. Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 10:16: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?  The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”  Can it be anymore clearer that what St. Paul is saying is that in the Eucharist, or as the early Christians often referred to as “the breaking of bread” or “The Lord’s Supper”, we are participating in the actual body and blood of Our Lord!  One cannot participate in a symbol.  This is how I can best explain: When we participate in a game, a concert or a family event don’t we have to be present?  So the only way to be participants in the Body and Blood of Jesus is for the Body and Blood of Our Lord to be present! 

      More compelling is further on in Corinthians St. Paul exhorts Christians on the abuse of reception of the Eucharist and its consequences:  “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night He was handed over, took bread, and, after He had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my Body that is for you.  Do this in remembrance of me.”  In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.  Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”  For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.  Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.  A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup.  For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.” 1 Cor. 11:23-29

      Brothers and sister, how can one eat a symbol unworthily and answer to a symbol?  Yes, we can say that in the symbol or sign of bread and wine we affirm Jesus’ words “my flesh is true food and my blood true drink.”  Yet what St. Paul is saying is that in the bread and wine contain the Body and Blood of Our Lord.  Further, the language used by Paul as having been “guilty” is again marked not with symbolic language but brutal reality, that is body and blood.  Subsequently, we see again that the early Church seized on these words as further proof and understanding of the reality of the Eucharist.

      “Eucharistic teaching, it should be understood at the outset, was in general unquestioningly realist, i.e., the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Savior’s body and blood” (Protestant historian of the early Church J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 440).