Since divine-human love is true love and the most perfect kind of love that can exist after Supreme Love, it must include the condition of total and reciprocal self-surrender that is proper to the act of loving. And so, the divine Lover gives himself into the possession of man, creating a situation of belonging that is as genuine as the love that God professes to the enamored creature who responds to him. It is clear that the New Testament – which contains the good news of the gift of his Love that God has given man – speaks of nothing else, and we can find it even earlier in the revelation of the Old Testament: in the Song of Songs particularly.

The Eucharistic discourse at Capharnaum (Jn 6: 26-59) is a proclamation of the loving surrender of God to man. This sounded so incredible, due to its excessive generosity, the fruit of a love no less excessive, that it scandalized most of those present (Jn 6: 60.66). From the discourse we can see that, just as food is assimilated and turned into part of his own body by the person who eats it,[1] Jesus offers himself to the man who loves him: My flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.[2] But the scandal caused by the Eucharistic mystery, which has never been absent down through the centuries, has acquired greater virulence in our own days, due, surely, to a cooling of charity (Mt 24:12) caused, in turn, by a lack of faith: it is impossible to believe in the kind of madness love is capable of if one no longer believes in love. As we have pointed out so often, only lovers are capable of truly believing in love, and only those who generously open their hearts can accept that anyone could give himself in the way Christ does in the Eucharist. So, to the extent that Christians have been abandoning faith in the Real Presence, they have been also abandoning belief in the possibility that God could love a human being to the extent of giving himself over to man as true possession.

(From the book Commentaries on the Song of Songs, Volume I, pages 122-123).

[1] Assimilated food becomes not just the property of the eater but actually part of him.

[2] Jn 6:55.