This year, in the midst of the Christmas Octave, on December 28th, we will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the death and birth into eternal life of the great French Doctor of the Church, Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622).
Patron saint of journalists and a fervent apostle of lay holiness, he is one of the most venerated bishops, apologists, re-evangelizers, spiritual writers, and directors of souls in the history of the Catholic Church.
In two Christmas homilies, Saint Francis de Sales explores the initially surprising link between Christmas and the manna that God rained down upon the Israelites in the desert. Before God gave this heavenly bread for the first time, Moses had said to the grumbling children of Israel: "In the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord" (Exodus 16:7), and Saint Francis used this as an analogy for what the Angels said to the shepherds of Bethlehem in the cave at night and what the Church tells us at the Christmas vigil.
"God willed," he preached, "an even greater and more loving gift for us who live on earth as in a desert. He came Himself to bring us this gift. … Thus, in the darkness of the night, Our Lord was born and appeared to us in the form of an infant lying in the manger."
Christ Himself was the incarnation of God's glory at the highest level. This incarnate glory was adored by the heavenly host, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men, and the animals of Bethlehem. This radiant effulgence (Hebrews 1:3) remains for us to adore on the altar and in the tabernacle.
As Saint Francis explains, "the manna is a figure of the incarnation of the Word. It also prefigures the Eucharist. Between the mystery of the Eucharist and that of the Incarnation, there is only one difference:
In the Incarnation, we see God incarnate in His own Person, and in the Eucharist, we see Him under a more hidden and obscure form. In both cases, it is the same God-Man who was born of the Virgin. Thus, the manna which prefigured the Eucharist can also symbolize the Incarnation."
Highlighting both his encyclopedic knowledge of Sacred Scripture and his famous habit of imitating Jesus by describing spiritual truths through earthly analogies, he said that, just as the manna had three distinct tastes—honey, oil, and bread (see Exodus 16:31, Numbers 11:8, and Wisdom 16:20)—so too the incarnate Christ united, respectively, divinity, a human soul, and a human body.
He compared the divinity to honey, which is produced through the work of bees coming from above; the soul to olive oil, which floats above other liquids; and the body to bread, whose grain clearly grows from the earth. But just as "the manna had three tastes, but there was only one manna, so too, although in Our incarnate Lord there are three 'substances,' there is nevertheless only one person."
This connection that Saint Francis makes between the manna and the Incarnation—although perhaps rare for Christmas homilies—was not new.
Jesus Himself, indeed, made the connection between the two when, after the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes, He identified Himself as the "true manna from heaven" that God the Father gave for the salvation of the world. Then He linked the Incarnation and the Eucharist by adding: "I am the bread of life … which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. … And the bread that I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh" (John 6:32-58).
Thus, He who was born in the place called in Hebrew "House of Bread" (Bethlehem), and who was literally placed in an ancient animal feeding trough (the manger), was born as the heavenly manna, as "the living bread which came down from heaven."
It would take three decades for this truth to be proclaimed and additional centuries for it to be better understood. However, as Saint Francis notes, it is an essential truth for understanding what we celebrate at Christmas. Saint Francis de Sales developed the Eucharistic dimension of Christ's nativity and His entire life in his other, more famous works.
In his *Catholic Controversy*, which includes the pamphlets he sent throughout the Chablais region to bring back (successfully) to the Catholic faith those who had become Calvinists, he writes that the Holy Sacrament is "the abridgment of our faith," a "holy and perfect memorial of the Gospel" and an "admirable summary of our faith."
In his *Introduction to the Devout Life*, he expands on the idea that the Eucharist is the synthesis of faith and Christian life by declaring that the Eucharist is "the sum of all spiritual exercises… the very center of our Christian religion, the heart of all devotion, the soul of piety, the ineffable mystery which embraces the entire depth of divine love, by which God, really giving Himself to us, communicates to men, with royal magnificence, all His graces and favors."
The Eucharist, in other words, summarizes the incarnation, birth, hidden life, public ministry, passion, death, resurrection, ascension, and glorification of Christ, as well as the identity, center, life, and mission of the Church as the Body and Bride of Christ.
In his *Treatise on the Love of God*, his most profound work, he unsurprisingly calls the Eucharist "the perpetual feast of divine grace" in which we receive "the blood of our Savior in His flesh and His flesh in His blood… given into our bodily mouth." This harkens back to what the Church implores in the opening prayer of the Mass on Christmas Day and every day at the altar, when the priest mixes a drop of water with the wine in the chalice:
"O God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant us… to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled Himself to share in our humanity."
This "wonderful exchange," this transformative union with God our Savior, is the meaning of Christmas and of the celebration of the Mass. Because of the reality of Christ in the Eucharist and the work Christ seeks to accomplish in us through His incarnate and ongoing self-gift at the altar, Saint Francis exhorts us, in his *Introduction to the Devout Life*, to "make every possible effort to be present each day at this holy celebration."
Just as the Israelites ate each day the manna that God rained from heaven, Saint Francis exhorts us to do the same with the true manna, which is the means by which we will enter much more deeply into the permanent reality of Christmas, God-with-us, who is always with us.
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As we prepare to commemorate the great Saint Francis de Sales on the 400th anniversary of the fulfillment of his life's advent, Saint Francis invites us to go to Christ in the Eucharist and exhorts us, as we sing at Christmas, to "come, let us adore Him"—and to receive Him with adoration.
This article was originally published by the National Catholic Register (Article Link). It is republished and translated with the author's permission.