716. The Lord Himself and His Redemption Are Fully Present in the Holy Supper

The Lord's own words show that he is fully present in the Holy Supper - that both his glorified humanity and his divinity, which was the source of his humanity, are present in it.

The following passages show that his humanity is present in the Holy Supper: "Jesus took the bread, broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, 'This is my body. ' And he took the cup, gave it to them, and said, 'This is my blood'" (Matthew 26:[26-28]; Mark 14:[22-24]; Luke 22:[17-20]). Similarly in John, "I am the bread of life. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever. The bread that I will give is my flesh. Truly, truly I say to you, those who eat my flesh and drink my blood live in me and I in them, and they will live forever" (John 6:[48, 51, 56, 58]). These passages clearly show that the Lord is present in the Holy Supper in his glorified humanity.

[2] The following passages make it clear that the Lord is also wholly present in the Holy Supper in his divinity, which was the source of his humanity: He is the bread that came down from heaven (John 6:[51]). He in fact came down from heaven with all that divinity; we read that "The Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by it. And the Word became flesh" (John 1:1, 3, 14). This point is also supported by the statements to the effect that the Father and he are one (John 10:30); that all things that belong to the Father are his (John 3:35; 16:15); and that he is in the Father and the Father is in him (John 14:10-11, and so on).

For another thing, his divinity could not have been separated from his humanity any more than a soul can be separated from its body. Therefore the statement just above that the Lord is fully present in the Holy Supper in his glorified humanity leads to the fact that his divinity, which was the source of his humanity, is also present in the Holy Supper.

Given that his flesh means the divine goodness of his love, and his blood means the divine truth of his wisdom, it is clear that both the Lord's divinity and his glorified humanity are fully and infinitely present in the Holy Supper. As a result, it is a meal that is spiritual in nature.

493. Every Spiritual Gift the Church Has to Offer That Comes to Us in Freedom and That We Freely Accept Stays with Us; What Comes to Us in Other Ways Does Not

What we accept in freedom stays with us, because freedom relates to our will; and since freedom relates to our will it also relates to our love. The will is a vessel for love, as I have shown elsewhere [39, 263, ].

Freedom is a characteristic of everything that belongs to love and everything that belongs to our will. Anyone can see this from the statement "I want to do this because I love it," and the other way around, "because I love this I also want to do it. " Nevertheless, the will we have is dual. We have an inner will and an outer will; our inner self has a will and so does our outer self. This is what makes it possible for con artists to act and speak one way before the world and another way with their close friends. Before the world they act and speak from the will of their outer self, but with friends, from the will within, and here I mean the will of the inner self where their dominant love resides.

Just from these few points we can see that our inner will is our true self. It is the location of the underlying reality and essence of our life. Our intellect is the form of that inner self. Through our intellect our will makes its love visible. Our freedom is a matter of everything we love and everything love leads us to want. Whatever comes forth from the love in our inner will is the delight of our life. And because the love in our inner will is the underlying reality of our life, it also truly belongs to us.

This is why something that the freedom of this will leads us to accept stays with us; it adds itself to what is our own. The opposite occurs if something is brought in apart from our freedom; that something is not accepted in the same way. But this is to be taken up in the ensuing discussion [496, 500].