Preparing the Table for the Lord

December 13, 2024 - Friday of the Second Week of Advent

What I really enjoy in today’s Old Testament readings the imagery that describes righteousness as yielding fruit and the wisdom of righteousness resulting from keeping God’s Torah as a power that transforms us into trees of life and light. I particularly enjoy the result of meshing the image of fruit and light to see that the Tree of Life is also a Tree of Light, as symbolized by the seven branched lampstand, the Menorah, in Israel’s Temple, and by our Christmas Trees.

It is also the feast of Saint Lucy, virgin and martyr, patron saint of light and sight. In his Divine Comedy, Dante places her in the Celestial Rose opposite Adam (Paradiso 32: 136-139). The probably point here is that on account of Christ’s beatitude promising that “the pure of heart shall see God,” St. Lucy points out the way of regaining the beatitude, the access to the Tree of Life which Adam and Eve began to lose first by sinning with their eyes (Gen 3:6). Ultimately, I think, the key has to do with how we see and look at people.

Let us move to the Gospel of the day to show us how these themes may inspire us to prepare the Table of the Lord this Advent.

Fiat, Corita Kent (1918-1986)

Jewish life places great value on meals as a way of binding together the experience of faith-inspired conversation with the experience of familial love and festal food. The Gospel here highlights that Jesus adapted this practice by eating with “tax-collectors and sinners,” i.e., people on the margins judged by most to be lost. He explained His practice through parables like the Parables of the lost sheep, coin and son. Jesus ate with sinners because in his eyes they were precious. If He by his righteousness and mercy was a Tree of Life and Light, a source of light and life to people, then what he was doing by means of this practice, by being born into our midst, was, as it were, erecting a living Christmas tree, a Tree of Life and Light, whose luminous fruit and shining lights were made up of people.

By eating with people who were lost, by going to their homes and becoming their guest, he also became their host. As a result, his disciples came to recognize him at “the breaking of bread” and when they did so, they experienced an “opening of the eyes” by which they came to know that He wants us to recognize that on such occasions, when we come to see each other as members of his Body, that He is present among us and that we. All of this is symbolized by the Host which we are invited to partake in at the “breaking of bread.”

Oh Lord, help us this Advent to experience an opening of the eyes at the breaking of bread, to see Your Presence in our midst, in the body of those who are nurtured at your table, so that we may become the branches and fruit of the Luminous Tree of Life that You established in Our Life by the gift of Your Birth in our midst, by the gift of Christmas. Amen.

Gregory Glazov, D.Phil. (Oxon.), Professor and Chair of Biblical Studies, Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology

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