+ In the Love of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
St. Luke certainly knows how to drive home a point in our Christmas Gospel:
First, he tells us that Mary and Joseph laid Jesus in a manger.
Then the angel tells the shepherds that they will find Jesus lying in a manger.
And then, when the shepherds get to Bethlehem they find Jesus lying in a manger.
A manger, from the French verb manger― to eat, is a feeding trough, a sign that Jesus, now surrounded by shepherds, will be the Good Shepherd who feeds his sheep; and as Jesus himself tells us in St. John’s Gospel:
“I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry”
and
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:35, 51).
A couple of years ago I read John Baxter’s Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). He writes this about bread:
“For centuries, bread in France signified the gulf between the classes: the higher up the social ladder, the more finely milled your flour, and the whiter your bread. Of someone who had all his success in early life, then fell on hard times, the French say, “He ate his white bread first.
“The bread of the French poor, when they had any, was dark and hard, made from wheat mixed with inferior grains like barley or rye. Unscrupulous bakers sometimes adulterated the flour with sand, even cement.”― and this practice continued as recently as the early twentieth century.
Then, later in his book, Baxter writes:
“The lavishness of our modern Christmas obscures how minor a role gifts traditionally played in the celebration. In [Charles] Dickens’ day, food and good works mattered far more. Scrooge, when he sees the error of his ways, doesn’t buy presents but gives money to a charity that helps the poor and sends a turkey to his clerk Bob Cratchit, whose wages he raises and family he helps” (pp. 235).
Here’s how Dickens himself describes Scrooge at that moment of transformation:
“‘I’ll send [this huge turkey] to Bob Cratchit’s,’ whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. ‘He shan’t know who sends it. It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim.’”
Then Scrooge tells the delivery boy, “You must have a cab,” and, Dickens continues,
“The chuckle with which [Scrooge] had said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried.”
St. Luke tells us that when Jesus began his public ministry in Nazareth, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day as was his custom. And when the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him, Jesus found this passage:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (4:18).
It’s a passage that echoes our Christmas reading from Isaiah:
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who brings good news.”
May Jesus, the Bread of Life, born in a manger, nourish our compassion for the breadless, the jobless, the friendless, and the hopeless, so that we, like Jesus, may have beautiful feet.
Amen.
Comments