CHRISTMAS IN JULY

Merry Christmas!! It is Christmas in July, right? As if the world isn’t confused enough about the true meaning of Christmas, now we are celebrating the gifts in July. A gift can reveal a lot about the character of the one giving it. 

Say you've put a lot of time and effort into finding a gift for your significant other. It's expensive and you feel it says something important about your relationship. You think, "This really shows that I know them." It's a total surprise, a gift they didn't ask for, and you can't wait to see the look on their face when they open it. But you don't get the reaction you were hoping to inspire. Maybe they appear confused or upset or even sport a fake smile. What did we miss!?

Manna, the miracle bread God gave the Israelites, is probably not what they expected and it can tells us a lot about God’s character.

• God is faithful. For forty years, yes 40 years, God provided the manna every morning to satisfy the Israelite's physical sustenance. They could go to bed each night trusting that when they awoke in the morning the manna would be there for them.
• God is generous. It wasn’t shortly after they were freed from Egypt and delivered from Pharaoh at the Red Sea that the Israelite's began to grumble God provided for them. Met their needs regardless if they did not show signs of gratefulness or were obedient to his commandments.
• God is present in everyday things. Manna didn’t look anything special, it came with the morning dew and scripture tells us that it looked “like coriander seed” (Num 11:7). Whatever it was God used what looked ordinary matter for his people each and every day.

Just as the Israelites received manna from heaven, we receive the Eucharist, the “true bread from heaven” (Jn 6:32). If manna can teach us about who God is, how much more can the Eucharist, which is God’s gift of himself, reveal to us? Jesus’ parable of the Sower reminds us that we must scatter the seed—we must sow the word of God—widely, anticipating that our efforts will have various results beyond our control. In today’s commemoration of Saints Joachim and Anne, we might reflect on the challenges faced by parents whose expectations for their children are not quite met by reality. Tradition has it that they dedicated Mary’s virginity to God at her birth, yet she ended up betrothed to Joseph and pregnant.

The other important point to keep in mind, a question to ponder today is, can we become like the good ground of today’s Gospel, trusting that what is planted here will flourish? Good ground is receptive to whatever is planted. It welcomes seed of any kind, enfolds it in warmth, encouraging its development, so the seed grows to its fullness and yields a hundredfold. May the seed of God’s unexpected blessings do likewise in our lives!