How can you say 'this is my body' isn't literal when Jesus said it plainly?

You are honoring the words, and that is the right reflex. He did say it, the text does carry it, and a reader who refuses to explain away plain speech is a reader worth trusting. Do not lose that instinct.

And you are right that this is not a place for clever evasion. If the words mean something, they mean it, and 'he was just being symbolic' is too cheap a dodge for a table this weighty. The words deserve to be taken at full strength.

You may also sense that Christians have fought over this one verb for a thousand years, real presence against symbol, and that a war that long usually means both sides are missing the room the words were spoken in. That instinct is worth following.

Here is the frame to set down: reading 'this is my body' as a philosophical claim about how a substance changes. That is a question the Greek and Latin schoolmen brought to the table; it is not the question a Jew reclining at Passover brought. Sergio holds, as his own Hebraic-primacy conviction and not as settled consensus, that the utterance behind the Greek carried no 'is' at all, since Hebrew and Aramaic do not supply that little verb here; the sense is closer to 'this, my flesh.' He is honest that the Greek text does read estin, 'is,' and that a reader sure the words came first in Greek may keep it.

But the point does not ride on winning that argument. Even keeping the Greek 'is,' you still have to ask what the man at the table heard. He looked at the lamb already roasted in front of him and he heard korban (offering). The blood-word over the cup, 'the blood of the covenant,' is Moshe's (Moses') own line from Sinai (Exodus 24:8), where blood seals the covenant, binds its terms, and does not pay them off. Sacrifice, not substance.

Do not take it from me. Read Exodus 24:8, hear 'the blood of the covenant' in its first mouth, then read Luke 22 and ask whether Yeshua (Jesus) was teaching metaphysics or quoting Sinai.