Housed in Flesh

We come soon to the celebration of our Lord come into the world as a babe in Bethlehem. After a period of preparation in Advent our preparation comes to an end as we will celebrate His birth and feast in the upcoming days. And it is right that we should do so, this is a wonderful thing that our Lord has done for us. But, there are some things that many of us miss in this celebration of the birth of Christ, in celebration of the Christ Mass, that would be good for us to be more aware of.

For one, and this is repeated by many priests so it is not unfamiliar to all, it is in the name of Bethlehem meaning "house of bread" in Hebrew. This prefigures Christ in the future when He claims the title of the Bread of Life in John 6:35, as well as it prefigures Him in the Eucharist as it is the bread offered up for us for the forgiveness of our sins. The Mana was the food come down from Heaven which once sustained God's people in the past, the Eucharist is the bread which is Him who came down from Heaven and sustains us now.

But, the "house of bread" is only part of the story. That is the meaning of the name in Hebrew, but in the commonly spoken language of the Jews at that time of Aramaic Bethlehem means "house of meat", which you can read as "house of flesh". How fitting. It is in the town of Bethlehem that the God of the universe came to be known by the world in the temple of a human body, encased in flesh. The divine, become man. Christ was born into a house of flesh, which is the body, in order to help us grow deeper in relationship with Him.

Now step in further with me. Take both the Hebrew and Aramaic meanings of Bethlehem and hold them equally as proper understandings of the name, and there you have the Eucharist, there you have Christ. In John 6 when Christ reveals to His followers that we must eat of His flesh and drink of His blood and also calls Himself the Bread of Life, we see that it even more makes sense that the Eucharist is bread in form but His body in substance. The body which He took on is Him, and it is the housing for the incomprehensible divinity that is God. The Eucharist is this bread which houses our Lord, and it is His flesh which was sacrificed for us on that day on Calvary.

I do not mean to make this into a theology of duality. It is not that the Eucharist is both bread and the body of God, rather that it is bread/flesh, as Christ is the Bread of Life and also an embodied man. He is the Manna come down from Heaven, and the lamb on the sacrificial altar. There is no division, He is all at once. Just as you could not run a test on the Eucharist to see if its parts appeared as flesh under the microscope, neither could you have taken a piece of flesh cut from Christ and determined under a microscope His divinity - these are supernatural realities, which is to say they supersede the natural and so the natural cannot explain or quantify them.

And so, on Christmas we will come together as Christians in another celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice, uniting together across the world. We will commemorate and celebrate the moment when the Bread of Life chose to present Himself in flesh as a baby, and we shall partake in the flesh of our Lord sacrificed for us which is presented as the Bread of Life.

Merry Christmas to all. Christ is born, glorify Him.

Written for VME Catholic, by Ethan Hall