EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
1 AUGUST 2021
Last
Sunday, we heard from the Gospel of Saint John that Jesus fed a vast crowd of
over 5,000 people in a deserted place with five barley loaves and two
fish. They not only shared a feast that
satisfied all of them. There were twelve
baskets of fragments left over. Today,
that same crowd travels by boat on the Sea of Galilee seeking to find him. They have failed to see the spiritual reality
in the sign Jesus had worked for them. They
want him to continue to provide free meals to satisfy their physical hunger. They think that this Rabbi might be another
Moses who can provide manna in the morning and quails falling from the sky in
the evening.
Jesus tries
to correct their thinking. He points out
that Moses had not provided that food in the desert. It was God, responding to the intercession of
Moses, who provided the food for their journey.
He tells them that he is not another Moses. He is the new Moses, the Son of God. He invites them to believe in him, to put
their trust in him. Instead of working
for food that perishes, he invites them to work for the food that endures for
eternal life.
Then they
ask for a sign, so they can believe in him!
What an amazing request. He has
just fed the huge crowd with five barley loaves and two fish – an incredible
sign. Now they want another! They cannot see the work that he had
accomplished in the multiplication of the loaves and fish. They do not want to do the work of yielding
to the divine action and trusting that Jesus is the bread come down from
heaven.
We are
tempted to judge this crowd negatively for their lack of faith. However, we are more like their ancestors in
the desert than we care to admit. The
Israelites had trusted Moses and followed him to escape the harsh reality of slavery
in Egypt. Once they find themselves in
the harsh reality of the desert, they lose faith in God and want to return to
the security of their daily meals in Egypt.
Like them, we too can easily lose faith when our journey through the
deserts of life becomes difficult.
Instead of trusting in the Father’s love for us, we tend to rely more on
food that perishes. That food takes many
forms. It can be smugness, or a denial,
or certitude that we are right, or righteousness, or material comforts, or
pride, or even a delusion that we know everything. When we rely on any of these perishable
attitudes, we fall into the futility of our minds that Saint Paul warns about
in the second reading.
When we
reflect on the incredible sign of Jesus feeding a vast crowd with five loaves
and two fish, we become more convinced of the mystery of the Eucharist which we
share here. The Lord truly feeds us with
his very self, so that we can continue our work. He feeds us so that we can become the Bread
ourselves. Fed by the Bread of Life, we
can allow ourselves to be broken, shared, and be life-giving ourselves beyond
this Eucharistic Altar.
We need to
trust that the Lord can multiply our actions, even our smallest actions, to
feed the spiritual hungers of our world.
We can make a difference in our divided and hostile world. We can trust that the Lord has led us through
the desert of this pandemic and that he will not abandon us as we move ahead,
even in the midst of so many uncertainties.
In our parish, people have taken fabric squares and have written what we
have lost in the pandemic. But they are
also writing what we have gained, what unexpected graces we have received. Those fabric squares will be made into a
quilt that will be hung in a public place.
It will remind us that the Lord has fed us and will continue to feed us
with food that endures for eternal life.
It will help bolster our faith that the Lord is reliable. Unlike the crowd seeking and finding Jesus
for food that perishes, we seek and find the one who feeds us with food that
endures for eternal life.
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