The God Who Hides in Bread: Divine Hiddenness and the Eucharist

This week I watched a familiar argument flare up on X. Someone shared a clip of people kneeling to receive Communion, and the replies split down the middle. Some called it beautiful. Others called it showing off, or worse, superstition: “It’s a wafer. Why are you on your knees in front of a wafer?”

It’s a fair question, and I don’t want to brush past it. But it also put me in mind of today’s Sunday theme, the hiddenness of God. We usually frame that problem in big, cosmic terms: why doesn’t God write his name across the sky? Yet every Catholic parish in the world holds a much smaller, much stranger version of the same puzzle. If Christ is truly present on the altar, as the Church has always taught, why does he look exactly like bread?

A God who hides himself

The prophet Isaiah, of all people, said it plainly: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour” (Isaiah 45:15). Notice the pairing. Isaiah doesn’t say God hides instead of saving. He hides and saves. The hiding and the saving belong to the same story.

We see that pattern all through Scripture. God speaks to Elijah not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire, but in “a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). The eternal Word becomes an infant in a feeding trough. For about thirty years he lives in an unremarkable town, working with his hands, so ordinary that his neighbours later ask, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” (Matthew 13:55). St Paul describes the whole movement of the Incarnation as a self-emptying: Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7).

The Eucharist isn’t an exception to this pattern. It’s the pattern carried to its furthest point.

The Godhead here in hiding

St Thomas Aquinas wrote a hymn that Catholics still pray before the Blessed Sacrament. It opens with the words Adoro te devote, latens Deitas: “I devoutly adore you, hidden Godhead.” Gerard Manley Hopkins rendered it memorably as “Godhead here in hiding.” Aquinas, one of the sharpest minds in history, didn’t pretend the senses could detect Christ in the host. In the hymn he admits that sight, touch and taste are all deceived; only hearing, trusting the word of Christ, gets it right.

The Catechism quotes him on exactly this point: “That in this sacrament are the true Body of Christ and his true Blood is something that cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by faith, which relies on divine authority” (CCC 1381). The Church isn’t claiming a magic trick you could catch under a microscope. She is claiming something more modest and more daring at once: that Christ keeps his promise, “This is my body,” while choosing to remain veiled.

St Francis of Assisi saw the connection with the Incarnation clearly. In his first Admonition he wrote that each day Christ humbles himself as he did when he came from heaven into the Virgin’s womb, and each day comes to us in humble form, descending upon the altar in the hands of the priest. For Francis, the lowliness of the host wasn’t an embarrassment to explain away. It was the signature of the same God who chose Bethlehem.

Why would love hide?

Here is where the Eucharist sheds light on the wider problem of divine hiddenness. If God simply wanted to overwhelm us, he could. But overwhelming isn’t the same as loving. A presence that forces itself on you leaves no room for a free answer.

Think about the road to Emmaus. Two disciples walk for hours beside the risen Jesus without recognising him. Then, at table, “he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24:30–31). The moment of recognition is the breaking of bread, and the moment after recognition, he hides again. Not because he has left, but because from now on they will meet him in that bread and in the community that gathers around it.

The Catechism says it was “highly fitting” for Christ to remain present to his Church in this unique way, so that, returning to the Father, he would not leave us orphans (CCC 1380). That is the logic of a friend who stays close without crowding you. Bread is the most approachable thing in the world. Nobody is afraid of bread. A God who comes to us like this is a God who wants to be received, not merely acknowledged.

The strongest objection

The serious skeptic will say: “This is too convenient. You believe God is present in something that looks, tastes and tests exactly like bread. That’s unfalsifiable. And it’s the hiddenness problem doubled: not only does God hide in the universe, you say he hides in the one place you claim he’s most present.” The philosopher J.L. Schellenberg has pressed a related argument for years: a perfectly loving God would make sure that anyone open to him could find him, so sincere unbelief counts against God’s existence.

I think that objection deserves respect, and I won’t pretend it evaporates. But two things are worth saying.

First, the Church has never offered the Eucharist as evidence for people who don’t yet believe in Christ. It’s the fruit of faith, not its proof. The case for Christianity rests on other things: the historical evidence for the Resurrection, the witness of the apostles, the coherence of the faith. Belief in the Real Presence follows from trusting the one who said, “My flesh is food indeed” (John 6:55). That’s why the doctrine hasn’t shifted with fashion. When Jesus first taught it, many disciples said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” and walked away (John 6:60, 66). He didn’t soften it to keep them. Around AD 110, St Ignatius of Antioch criticised those who stayed away from the Eucharist because they would not confess it to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 7). The earliest Christians weren’t inventing a convenient story; they were holding on to an inconvenient one.

Second, hiddenness is not absence. A God who only revealed himself in ways no one could resist would give us certainty, but he might not give us relationship. The Eucharist suggests God prefers the second. He comes close enough to be touched and received, yet veiled enough that coming to him remains a free act of trust. I’d gently suggest that a faith built on that kind of approach is not a dodge. It’s how persons, rather than forces, make themselves known.

Why the knees bend

Which brings me back to that clip of people kneeling. The Catechism notes that Catholics express faith in the Real Presence by, among other ways, genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration (CCC 1378). Kneeling isn’t about performing for the person behind you. It’s the body’s way of saying what the senses cannot: I know you are here, even though I cannot see you. Other Christians receive standing with just as much love, and the Church allows for both. What matters is the recognition underneath.

Maybe that’s the quiet answer the Eucharist gives to the question of divine hiddenness. God hides not to keep us out, but to invite us in, one humble step at a time, the way the disciples at Emmaus found their hearts burning long before their eyes were opened.

So I’d love to hear from you: have you ever sensed God most clearly in the very place where he seemed most hidden? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

— Noah Marshall