From a commenter on YouTube:
“So the Catholic Church thinks that during each Mass, Christ descends down from heaven onto the altar? There’s only one true Jesus Christ, and there are hundreds of Masses being said worldwide at the same time. So which of the hundreds of altars does Christ descend on? It doesn’t make sense that he would descend on all the altars at the same time.”
My response:
That’s a great question, and one that many of us who come from Evangelical backgrounds wrestled with before becoming Catholic. There is indeed only one Christ, who died once for all, in atonement for our sins.
And yet, even as Evangelicals, we had a mysterious sense that it was possible for that same Jesus to be everywhere but also personally close to us as individuals. He is resurrected, glorified, ascended to the right hand of the Father, and yet closer to us than we are to ourselves. How is that possible, with 2.4 billion Christians worldwide? At some of the revival services I used to attend, there were hundreds of people being led together in the “Sinner’s Prayer,” asking Jesus to come into their hearts. So to turn that question around, if there’s only one true Jesus Christ, and there are hundreds of people asking Him into their hearts at the same time, into which of the hundreds of hearts does Christ enter?
To those of us who come from Evangelicalism, we’d think the idea preposterous that in a situation like that, the real Christ only descended into one heart, and and that the other hearts were left empty, or received a counterfeit experience of Christ.
For many of us, the first question about the Mass was, “how is it possible for Jesus to be truly present in the Eucharist—body, blood, soul and divinity?” But as Christians, we know that the question we’re asking is a loaded one: how is it possible that the Word who became Flesh, who walked on water, who calmed storms, who healed the sick, raised the dead and even rose from the dead Himself, could be uniquely present to us in the Eucharist? The answer is, it’s possible, because Jesus is God.
The question that is more appropriate for those who know Jesus to be God is this: “if it’s possible for Jesus to be truly present in the Eucharist, then is He truly present in the Eucharist?” And that leads us to the Last Supper accounts—John 6, 1 Corinthians 11, and other passages from the New Testament—which are interpreted in various ways by various Christians.
But the first Christians, the ones taught by the apostles themselves, believed and attested to what we still believe today as Catholics: that the possible is true, and that Jesus really is with us always and everywhere, but uniquely so in Holy Communion. And His presence is not diluted or dissipated in Holy Communion, any more than it has been diluted or dissipated by His dwelling in the hearts of believers around the world and across time.
