Deacon Cornell’s Homily

A week ago Sunday, I was at the wonderful 'A Night In Bethlehem' that Sheila and her team put together here at St. Isidore, with my eight and a half year old great grand-daughter Rose. We were downstairs at the Tastes of Bethlehem table and after tasting some olives which she loves and some pomogranate seeds which she now loves, when she looked up at me quizzically and said, "Wait. Is Bethlehem real?" Now this is a girl who along with many of her schoolmates is into Wings of Fire dragon stories and Kpop Demon Hunters so I was not surprised by her question. I told her, yes Bethlehem is real, really real.

One of the things that differentiates Christianity, along with Judaism, from almost all other world religions is that over and over again, it references actual history - names, dates, locations. A couple of weeks ago, Fr. Jeff pointed out that God often uses people that the world would consider insignificant to accomplish His plan, people such as Mary and Joseph, but the scriptures are also full of God using even pagan tyrants such as Caesar Augustus as minor characters in our salvation history. Mary and Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem from their hometown of Nazareth because Augustus had ordered a census that required Joseph to register in his ancestral home of Bethlehem since he was a descendant of King David.

Besides being rooted firmly in the history and reality of this world, there are so many aspects of our faith that all fit together. The more I learn about our faith, the harder it gets to think these things happened by chance. Tonight I would like to reflect with you on just a few of these aspects that pertain to the great feast that we celebrate tonight, starting with the name of the town that Jesus was born in: Bethlehem. Bethlehem, in Hebrew, means "house of bread". How marvelous is it that Jesus, who later will refer to himself as the "bread of life" would be born in the House of Bread. Bethlehem, of course is the city of David, and it had been prophesied that the Messiah would be born there. I suggest that this theme of bread is very intentional and very important to the Incarnation and God's plan to bring salvation to us. First, bread is the food of the poor in that part of the world, Rich people could have meat, or other foods, but poor people in that area ate lots of bread. In the Orient, rice would be the food of the poor. So by being born in the House of Bread and calling himself the bread of life, Jesus clearly communicates that, in God's plan for salvation, God is focused on the poor.

Bread is the result of cooperation between the earth and human effort. During the consecration, the priest refers to the host as 'fruit of the earth and the work of human hands'. From the very beginning of salvation history, God intends that human beings are to cooperate with God in the ongoing work of creation. Creation is not something that God does TO us, but something He does WITH us. God is true to that pattern even in the Incarnation itself. Jesus's mother Mary supplies her womb, her body, her human nature, and most importantly, her will, and God, through the power of the Holy Spirit supplies Jesus' divine nature. Jesus is fully human and fully divine, analogous to bread which can be said to be fully the fruit of the earth and fully the work of human hands.

Bread often takes on the meaning of food or sustenance in general. In the Lord's Prayer, when Jesus instructs us to pray to the Father to give us this day our daily bread, he is telling us to ask the Father for all that we need for life, physical and spiritual. And this little town of Bethlehem gives us all that we need. House of bread means House of Jesus who is all we need for life. How appropriate it was for Jesus to use bread in the Eucharist. He could have transformed anything into his own body but he chose bread. Peter Kreeft, a biblical scholar humerously said that God probably had the Eucharist in mind when he first created wheat and inspired the first farmers to farm it and the first baker to bake it.

So Bethlehem is a Eucharistic name, both because it is a 'house' and because it references "bread". A house is what we live in and Jesus is the spiritual house we seek to live in. As Catholics, we don't merely obey his commandments and imitate his virtues; we are to share his life, especially those of us who have been baptized into his Mystical Body, the Church. We become members of his body, analogously to the way organs and other parts are members of our human body. Secondly bread is what we eat, and Jesus is literally who we eat in Eucharist. And like bread, if we don't eat it, we die. If we don't participate in the celebration of the Eucharist we spiritually die. That is why the Church instructs us to celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday, again and again. And that is important because we have been baptized are called to be effective instruments in God's plan to bring salvation to this world. Is there anyone here who looks around and says, "The world is just fine, it doesn't need to be saved!" That salvation depends on us, the body of Christ, baptized into his body and formed more fully and deeply into his body by receiving his body and blood. Nothing you can ever do in this world is greater, or holier, or more more powerful, or more important than partaking of Jesus' life in Holy Communion, and then living that out in the world.

On behalf of Fr. Jeff and myself and our Apple Valley Catholic staff and volunteers, I wish you all a most Blessed Christmas. Thank you for gathering with us here today, and I mean it sincerely when I invite you all to keep coming, to keep doing that most important thing you can do for yourself and for the world: forming our community more fully into the body of Christ, so that we can help move our world closer to the salvation God has promised, here in this House of Bread.

homily index