709. From all that has just been said, you can see what the Lord's flesh and blood and the bread and the wine symbolize in their threefold meaning - their earthly, spiritual, and heavenly meaning.

All people within Christianity who are at all involved in their religion should know, and if they do not know, should find out, that in addition to physical nourishment, there is such a thing as spiritual nourishment. Physical nourishment affects the body; spiritual nourishment affects the soul. For instance, Jehovah the Lord says in Moses, "Humankind does not live by bread alone, but by everything that comes from the mouth of Jehovah" (Deuteronomy 8:3).

Now, since the body dies and the soul lives on after death, it follows that spiritual nourishment exists to serve our eternal well-being. Surely everyone can see, then, that these two types of nourishment should not in any way be confused with each other.

[2] If we do confuse the two, the ideas we form about the Lord's flesh and blood and the [sacramental] bread and wine will inevitably be earthly, sensory, and even materialistic, bodily, and carnal; and these types of ideas suffocate any appropriately spiritual idea we might have of this most holy sacrament.

If some people are so extremely simple that they are incapable of developing any mental concept beyond what they can see with their own eyes, I urge them, when they take the bread and the wine and hear the Lord's flesh and blood mentioned, to think of the Holy Supper as the most holy act of worship and remember Christ's suffering and the love that drove him to save humankind. As he says, "Do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19). "The Son of Humankind came to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45). "I lay down my life for the sheep" (John 10:15, 17; 15:13).