Spiritually starved? Don’t be!
by Father Francis P. DeSiano, CSP
April 16, 2015

The following is a homily based on the Scripture readings for Sunday, April 19.

When we think of eating in our culture, it’s usually with the notion of how much we are consuming. We keep looking for the perfect diet: eat anything you want and still lose weight. I heard about a hamburger, 2,200 calories, composed of seven patties of meat. I couldn’t even imagine digesting it, let alone eating it. Michael Bloomberg wanted to limit sodas; society said “no.” Companies will have to publish the calories in their food; they want to say “no.”

We are what we eat. But there’s another way to think about eating, not in terms of what we eat, but in terms of the very act of eating. Every living being eats, which means its very life depends on taking into its body what is outside, using it and getting rid of the waste. We take in elements from the universe, making them into ourselves, absolutely dependent on this, and totally frail if we don’t.

“Have you anything to eat?” Jesus asks his disciples. They are astonished at Jesus’ presence, so much so they think he’s a ghost. Jesus is going to use with them the same reality he used during his ministry. As he sat so often at table, often with sinners, before his crucifixion, so now, in virtually all his Easter appearances, he sits down at table – and reveals himself in the process.

We naturally think of this in terms of the Eucharist because those of us who exercise the privilege of eating with the Lord certain experience Christ in new ways every week. Just as we depend on food for our very being, Jesus is saying there’s where I am: you depend on me and my love, and I will nourish you without fail.

But Jesus, who shows himself eating to prove that he is real, talks about other realities of his presence that we depend on as well. We hear the phrase, “He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” For as we need the Eucharist, so also we need God’s word, and without that Word, we are anorexic and starving. Likewise we have been reading about the gathering of the first believers into Church in the book of Acts. This, too, is a form of being fed by Christ because without community we ultimately dry up and die. And we will continue to read about faith and love in the letter of John. As with Eucharist, and with Scripture, and with community, we also need to experience and how love, or else we are dying.

I think a lot of us are starving today. So many are not being fed with the Eucharist, and even many of us who come to worship let things stop there. We don’t go further, to become the fuller disciples we are called to become. As a result, we are 95-pound, weakling Christians and not the muscular believers we are called to be.

Easter time gives us the opportunity to continue the same conversion process we began in Lent because conversion is life long. It has to grow just as children have to grow; it has to be sustained just as our health needs to be sustained. “Have you anything to eat?” Jesus asks. He’s given us so much in and beyond the Eucharist, and he wonders why we leave the table with our plates barely touched.

We were stunned by the Philadelphia woman who left her 21-year-old son, afflicted with cerebral palsy, in the woods with only a blanket and a Bible. He was found five days later barely alive. She was with her boyfriend. Didn’t she know her son was starving? How could she do that?

But look at how often we starve ourselves when it comes to our faith, and we are hardly shocked at all.