December 2019

In their wedding vows, a man and woman make a gift of themselves to each other. They promise fidelity and the whole of who they are as persons. This mutual gift then becomes the basis of the whole of their life together—their communion of love. This gift is remembered and expressed in a unique way in the bodily language spoken in sexual intercourse.

Matthew tells of Herod’s decree to kill the young male children around Bethlehem. Jesus escapes with his parents to Egypt only to come back to Israel later, after an angel appears to Joseph, telling him, “. . . those who sought the child’s life are dead” (Matt 2:20).  

When Kimberly and I first entered the Church, we noticed one thing—that Catholics didn’t read the Bible.
But our faith is biblical. In fact, our liturgy is steeped in Scripture. To be fully Catholic, we must know the Bible.

Can there be a greater gift than God becoming man so that humanity could be reunited with God? Gratitude for that greatest Gift has been the inspiration for other gift-giving at Christmas.  

For most readers of the Bible, reading a genealogy is about as exciting as reading a telephone book. Yet this is exactly how the entire New Testament begins in chapter one of Saint Matthew’s Gospel:

“Who is Jesus Christ?”  

The answer to this question is the heart of all Christian doctrine. In a very real way, all of Christian theology is an attempt to answer this question, and it’s not a simple question to answer, for Jesus Christ is the very center of history and the very center of all creation; he is the one through whom everything was made and to whom everything points.

The promise of the Messiah was first revealed after Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. God said to the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen 3:15).  

Jesus Christ knew the power of words. He was the Word. When Christ became man and began his public ministry, he most often conveyed truths about Heaven, His Heavenly Father, and living a moral life through stories.

Do you remember Christmas when you were a child? I recall the excitement that the approach of the holiday created in me. During the month of December, Christmas was never far from my thoughts. What gifts would I receive? With little resources, what present could I give to my mom and dad? Of course, the closer to December 25, the more my excitement intensified.

As a westerner, I struggle with something that I think most of us do. We are highly materialistic. I don’t mean that we don’t necessarily believe in God. I mean that even as Christians, we have an unhealthy attachment to wanting things to make sense to us according to the senses and the scientific method. A prime example of this materialism is the major flaw of reading Scripture from a fundamentalist perspective: Genesis is seen as a literal account of what, where, why, how, and in what way God made the universe. As Catholics, we read the Bible literarily, considering the various genres of each book of the Bible.