My friends in Christ, at the very beginning of Advent, I preached on the Greatest Story ever told, the centerpiece of which is the Sacred Story of Jesus Christ. You may recall that my homily, in essence, was a brief synopsis of the five chapters of the kerygma. Chapter One, God loves us and so God creates us. Chapter Two, we respond to God’s love for us by rejecting that love, and thus, we sin. Chapter Three, God responds to our response of choosing to reject Divine Love, and thus are we given the God-made-man, the Word-made-flesh, Jesus Christ. Chapter Four, with Jesus Christ, God makes a “friend-request” of us, as it were; we are being asked now for a new response to what the Father does for us now in giving us His Son. And Chapter Five (as yet incomplete): what will our new response be? And here we are now in the midst of the Christmas season, and we celebrate today the Feast of the Holy Family. And at the very heart and center of this little family (whose mother is Mary and whose father is Joseph) is, of course, the Newborn King: Jesus Christ. And so, the kerygma Chapter Three begins on Christmas morn. Then let us unpack Chapter Three just a little bit more. Because we hardly covered that part of the Greatest Story ever told back at the start of Advent, and Christmas starts the Sacred Story of Jesus Christ, and His birth is what we are celebrating at present. Therefore, let us dig a little deeper, and in doing so, let us consider these three things: the three-fold birth of the Lord; the relationship between the manger of the Child and the cross of Christ; and the City of David (Bethlehem) which is a Hebrew word meaning “House of Bread.” The three-fold birth of Christ. Saint John has already told us that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The first birth of God the Son, then, is an eternal birth from the heavenly heart of God the Father, “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.” And Saint John, as well as Saint Matthew and Saint Luke, tells us of the second birth of God the Son: the temporal birth (in the context both of space and time) from the immaculate womb of Mary, His Mother. Of course, this is the primary focus of our celebration right now. The first birth is eternal, from the heart of the Father. The second birth is temporal, from the womb of the Mother. And the third birth…is spiritual. And it occurs in the souls of believers; in us, in other words, when we accept Him and receive Him and embrace Him as Lord and God – Savior and Redeemer…. Thus, we are given to encounter the three-fold birth of God the Son. Next, the relationship between the manger of the Child and the cross of Christ. Now, as we often seem to find in the Sacred Story of Jesus Christ, there frequently is a poetic interplay of mystic symmetry of what has happened before and what will happen later. And what I mean by this is I think what we see in the mysterious connection between manger and cross. In Bethlehem, in the manger, the Lord is laid down amid brute cattle. On Calvary, on the cross, the Lord is nailed up amid brutal criminals. In the manger, He is helpless and poor in the midst of poor shepherds; on the cross, He is helpless and poor in the midst of poor souls in need of a Shepherd. In the manger, He is bound by swaddling clothes; on the cross, He is stripped of all clothes and bound by nails. In the manger, He lies low and is gazed upon by the Gentile Magi, but on the cross, He is lifted up and gawked at by the Jewish and Roman powers-that-be. In Bethlehem He was born and so entered into earthly life from the immaculate womb of Mary of Nazareth; on Golgotha He was killed and so departed from earthly life into the unused tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Thus, since the end lies hidden in the beginning and the beginning becomes clear at the end, it is not actually out of place for us, the Church, to speak of the Cross and the Resurrection on Christmas, nor for that matter to speak of the Incarnation and the Nativity during Holy Week and Passiontide. And thirdly, the “House of Bread,” for that is what “Bethlehem” means. The Lord Himself says, “I am the living Bread that came down from Heaven.” The Son came down from Heaven and was born in Bethlehem; thus, the City of David can be said to be the birthplace of the Eucharist; the Venerable Saint Bede (priest of medieval England and Doctor of the Church) tells us that “the place He was born is rightly called the ‘House of Bread’ because He came down from Heaven to Earth to give us the food of heavenly life and to satisfy us with the flavor of eternal sweetness.” And so, just as the Church contains within her the Bread of Life (the Eucharist), she can be regarded a Perpetual Bethlehem; through the Eucharist, every Catholic cathedral, church, and chapel becomes, as it were, a little City of David. In the manger, the Son hid His Divinity beneath the humble form of infancy; on the altar, it is hidden (waiting to be discovered and embraced) beneath the lowly form of bread. The Eucharist – the Bread of Life – offers us a clue then with regard to what we are told in the kerygma Chapters Four and Five: Jesus gives us Himself and in doing so solicits our response to this most sublime gift of Self (and that, again, is Chapter Four of the kerygma); and our response to His gift of Self will be…dot-dot-dot…to be continued; and as yet to be determined – which is the kerygma Chapter Five. Jesus would have it be our response to His call as He wanted and willed to have it with His Apostles. For He calls us, too, to be “fishers of men,” the “salt of the earth,” and the “light of the world.” And answering His call often begins (and always is renewed) when, in our humility of heart and with joy in our soul, we come forward at Holy Communion to receive His very Self, worthily and well, in the Eucharist – He, Who is the Bread of Life…born in the House of Bread and laid down in a manger as on an altar. May it be, then, that our glad rejoicing of Christmas bliss would be centered on Jesus Christ, on Him alone, Who gave Himself to us a Child in the manger…Christ on the cross…and the Bread of Life in the Eucharist…so that, at the end of days, just as we received Him here on Earth, He will receive us in halls of heavenly realms.