As a Catholic, I really do think these might be my favorite -- if not most comforting -- lines in the whole Bible.
The Eucharist is, no disrespectful puns intended, probably the hardest piece of Catholic theology to swallow. It's weird. It defies empiricism. Sometimes it seems like it could be an embarrassing Dark Age superstition.
But then you have John 6:52-53. An NAB note on the passage even points out that the word John uses for "eat" was actually the word used for animals, and is closer to "gnaw" or "munch." The note suggests that this language might have been intended to reinforce the literalness of what Christ was saying (which is actually rather sophisticated because it suggests that figurative language in one place actually reinforces the literal language in another).
Also somewhat paradoxically comforting is that this is one of those passages that seems like it might embellish historical accuracy for theological explication. Whether or not these were Christ's exact words, it is clear that the author of John understood Christ to have offered his actual body for real digestion in the appearance of bread and wine. It testifies that the earliest Christian communities understood what we call transubstantiation even if they didn't have the word for it yet.
In a way, the modernist, literary approaches to this passage can actually reinforce orthodoxy.
To me, it seems that Catholics can occasionally have anxiety when we don't see things like the Eucharist or purgatory described in as explicit terms as we might like. We seem to expect everything in the Bible spelled out as clearly as in a Catechism. We forget that one of the roles of the Catechism, however, is to identify and spell out specifically the things that are in the Bible.
I'm sure that people pretty much understood the gist of gravity before they had a word for it. While having a word for a thing certainly proves a society has a concept of it, the lack of language does not prove a lack of awareness.
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