Bread from the earth
Hosannah
Toward the end of the book of Psalms, toward the middle of Psalm 104, is a verse which underlies the Jewish blessing before a meal—Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has brought forth bread from the earth.
The psalm also praises God for giving us wine and oil.
Isn’t this odd? Bread, wine, and oil are not merely products of nature, but as we say in the Mass—fruit of the earth, and work of human hands.
A conundrum! One way to think about this is that God, through creation, provides the raw materials, and we, through technology, process them. But the coming of Jesus, who is both divine and human, provides another lens through which to ponder this mystery.
People used to believe with Aristotle that the man’s contribution to procreation was a homunculus, a germ of a complete human being, and the woman’s contribution was to house it while it grew. This is like the modern phrase—having a bun in the oven.
Mary provided much more than that for Jesus! The material of his flesh was drawn from her flesh. His bones were made from her bones. Every cell in his body could only contain what the cells of her body had to offer, because that is how we are made. It is an intimate cooperation with the Holy that blurs the boundary between Mary and the Lord who created us to be made this way.
It is no longer so easy to separate the roles of the human and the divine in the creation of bread, or of the Son of Man. We struggle to express this, saying that Jesus had two natures, being both fully divine and fully human.
The Lord brings forth bread from the earth. If the bread itself is the Lord’s creation, a gift to us, then the work of the miller who grinds the grain, and the work of the baker who prepares the loaves is the work of God, as inevitable as the growth of an unborn child. We ourselves do not get any separate credit or control.
The glory of Mary was to go with the flow of God’s will, not claiming any credit, or insisting on an explanation.
Jesus, the mysterious synthesis of the Holy and the human is the embodiment of the explanation of how we are to be as part of God’s creation. No one knows the Father except the Son.
Christ is born, alleluia! The Word of the Lord through whom all things were made, expressed in a human life. Let us imitate that expression with all our heart.
