Christmas is the reason for our Eucharist

At the celebration of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, million upon million of Christians around the world will attend the Eucharistic services. I think we must pause and ask ourselves why celebrating the Eucharist (the 'Mass' in Christ-Mas) at Christmas? Can we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ without the Eucharist?

To answer this question, we must first understand what we call “Eucharist”.

According to Dom Gregory Dix, Eucharist is an action –‘do this’ –with a particular meaning given to it by our Lord Himself—‘for the anamnesis of Me’ (Dom G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p.238). This means that the Eucharist is an act of remembrance. We do what Jesus did and asked us to do. It is a command that originates in the love the Father has for us. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…”(John 3:16).

Christmas and Eucharist are facts

Christmas, first of all, is a fact of history. In a point of time and at a definable place the God of heaven and earth was born of a woman, and came to live among us as man. It is a fact that the infinite God became, unexplainably, a finite creature. It is a fact to which historians attest but which we know is no mere statistic of history; it is, rather, a fact planned by God from all eternity. This is the fact of Christmas: the Word actually became Flesh.

The Eucharist is Christmas prolonged, because faith tells us that once God became man, He decided to remain man.

The Eucharist is a two-ways love: God loves us by ‘giving’ us Jesus. We respond to that love by an act of thanksgiving. At Christmas, we receive the love of God in celebrating the word that became flesh and dwelt among us; and we “give thanks” to God for His great love for us.

That’s the meaning of these word that we say in the Eucharistic prayer:

“And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee, that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.”

Christmas and Eucharist are mysteries

But Christmas and the Eucharist are not only facts, they are also mysteries. What is the mystery of Christmas? The mystery is the humanly incredible reality of why God became man. He did not have to. God did not even have to make the world, and within the world, He did not have to make us. Except for the love of God, we are all empty unoccupied spaces on earth. But, having decided to make the world and to make us, God also decided that once man had sinned, He would redeem man. God might have redeemed man by an act of His divine Will; He chose not to do so. He chose, rather, to become man, so that as man He might not only, by some fiat of His human freedom redeem us, but might have a mortal flesh and a soul capable of suffering. In a word, the mystery of Christmas is the mystery of God's love that chose to take on our human form in order to show His love for us by suffering.

I will be with you alway.

Darwell Stone rightly views the Eucharist as a mystery in which the Church remembers Christ, His Incarnation, His Passion, and His Resurrection, and, in remembering Him, makes the memorial of Him to the Father (Darwell Stone, Holy Communion, p.42). The first mystery of the love of God here is undeniably the Incarnation in which the word of God became flesh. That’s the reason of our Eucharist.

In the Eucharist, we confess the Real Presence. Jesus is the Real Presence to the whole world. Eucharist is therefore Christmas. Believing in His Real Presence, we have the responsibility to cooperate with His grace not only for ourselves, but for the whole world, so that His coming into the world will not, for any soul, have been in vain. 

Peace and blessings!

Fr. Thierry

"For the vision is yet for the appointed time; It hastens toward the goal and it will not fail. Though it tarries, wait for it; For it will certainly come, it will not delay”(Habakkuk 2:3).