Lest the Christian life be reduced to mere words – spoken or written – Christ equates His spiritual teaching with a physical act of eating. Jesus would have us be refreshed by Him in the same delightful and satisfying way as eating food. When life becomes difficult and presents sad and complex situations, many people turn to food in both normal and excessive ways to experience relief and joy. Jesus created us to experience hunger, to long for being filled, to be unsatisfied and empty on our own. Eating is the experience of becoming one with something that I desperately need in order to live. Jesus’ major teaching is not about something difficult we need to try to understand. He teaches us that believing is like eating – it makes us one with Him and feeds our deepest need and makes us live. This experience of loving and being loved is central to Christianity. Christ’s Words, His presence, His flesh and blood, are meant to be consumed by us. We can then become divine food with Christ for the salvation of the world. The ultimate joy of being consumed out of love is the new commandment.
Nativity of the Lord, Vigil
A creative exegetical commentary by an anonymous early Church father can help us this Christmas with a true spirit of admiration. When we read that Joseph did not “know” Mary until she gave birth, it is commonly taken as a statement about Mary’s virginity. It is true that the word used for physical intimacy in the Old Testament is frequently the verb “to know.” Intimacy is most often met with the loss of innocence – just as eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge was disobedience and cause of shame, self-consciousness, awareness of nakedness, disordered flames of passion and death. The mystery of Christmas restores the fruit and the joy of intimacy while preserving the veil of innocence. At the birth of Jesus, Joseph truly comes to know his wife Mary – who she is for God, who she is for him, who she is for the human race. Jesus, the fruit of Mary’s intimacy with the Holy Spirit, is also an intimate fruit reserved for Joseph’s fatherhood – from the angel’s message we know that no other man can claim fatherhood of Mary’s son, no other man knew or will know intimacy with Mary his wife.
December 22nd
Mary’s Magnificat remains the most complete encouragement to the essential virtues of Christian life. Poverty, humility, lowliness, fear of the Lord, servitude, etc. are so difficult for our pride to accept as the way to salvation. Mary not only exemplifies these qualities, she also bears witness to the satisfaction, peace, and joy that we may experience already in this life by living as true Christians. Mary doesn’t take on any of these attitudes because of a lack of self-confidence or out of self-hatred. She doesn’t take them on ostensibly as a form of penance for her own failures – she has none – or the failures of others. Mary’s magnificat is a hymn of wisdom that praises the proximity of God, and the conditions and attitudes that benefit fully from His nearness. Spiritually, Mary speaks as the daughter of an All-Powerful Divine Father. Her greatness is simply God reflected in the purity of her heart – she does not need any greatness of her own making.