July 24, 2015
A little joke from The New Yorker a few weeks ago: A priest, a surgeon, and an engineer are playing golf. In front of them is a group that is dreadful, slow, erratic, frustrating. They call the starter to complain; he explains that these are firemen who, when fighting a fire at the clubhouse a few years ago, all lost their sight. The club lets them play in gratitude. The priest says: I will pray for them. The surgeon says: I will talk to the ophthalmologists at the hospital to see what they can do. The engineer says: “Why don’t they play at night?”
Practical, sensible, easy: the way we are seduced by the mechanical solutions to life. Let’s sit down and see what makes sense. Let’s see what is the most efficient, the cleanest, the least amount of work. So an engineer would be happy in one sense with today’s Gospel, Jesus’ solution to the hunger of the crowed, but he’d be totally baffled by most of it. Jesus solves the problem with the least amount of work, but how he does it seems mysterious, irrational, out of our control.
But Jesus is working from a different angle, one that does not depend on our control, but rather on our acceptance. He works from within the richness of his Jewish tradition: not only Elisha as we heard in the first reading, but the wonder of God’s feeding the Jews in the desert with manna. When the manna came, people asked, “What is this?” And that’s where the word comes from – manna, what is this? What is happening? We are seeing an astonishing, but not unusual, dimension of God’s presence in our lives.
We live in practical, mechanical times. We think our best and only answers come from this. But Jesus is saying that there are other levels in our lives. We often miss the abundance that is all around us because we read our lives at only one level. Say a parent gets gravely ill. We want, of course, the best medicine can do. Specialists come in and out; tubes go in and out. Why can’t the doctors do more? But then we realize that what the doctors have done is give us time just to be with our father or mother, just to hold their hand, just to appreciate them for a few more hours, just to let them know they are loved. And this might well be more than months of chemotherapy and antibiotics.
The spotlight in the parable falls on this young, unnamed boy with the five loaves and two fishes. The Gospel puts it deliberately that way for us: we think we have hardly anything, we think we have nothing to offer. Yet with faith, and a totally open trust in God, all of us have so much to add to the abundance of God’s creation. It’s just a different angle. Pope Francis has asked us to look at our world less with the eyes of a mechanic, manipulating for gain, and more with the eyes of a poet or a saint, relishing it for the beauty – abundant beauty that leaves us astonished. We all have loaves and fishes; we all have far more to give than we think.
The second reading urges us to preserve the unity that we have – the unity of faith, unity of vision, unity of receiving God’s generosity, unity of giving thanks. That’s what happens when we come together for Eucharist – the simple elements we bring, augmented by our gratitude and joy in Jesus, become God’s abundant food that nourishes us through eternal life– offered now and lived unendingly. This is what it means to come to Mass: to join all of creation giving thanks to the God who lavishes so many gifts upon us.
Come and eat my food, says Jesus. The food of faith, trust, love, grace. When you do, you will see that the jar is never empty and the baskets are always overflowing.