18th. Sunday of Year (A)
(Isaiah 55:1-3; Romans 8:35, 37-39; Matthew 14:13-21)
Why spend your money for what is
not bread, your wages for what fails to satisfy? Heed Me, and you shall eat well, you shall
delight in rich fare.
People of God, some of you will, I am sure, have known
times when your were aware of being strangely unsatisfied, perhaps even feeling
profoundly empty, despite having many comforts and interests of various kinds;
and at such times, when you were lacking inside, all that was outside
seemed to somehow make no difference.
For many sufferers such occasions, experiences, of
self-questioning, can be dealt with in only one way: they try to forget them, distract
themselves by amusements and activities of all sorts, anything that will enable
them to put those disturbing thoughts aside for a time until, hopefully left
behind, they are forgotten altogether.
However, for people who believe that their life’s destiny is in God's
hands, and its daily course a gift from His loving Providence, those moments of
realized personal emptiness need to be understood, because God could be trying
to teach them something by such feelings of personal dissatisfaction; which, if
not understood and embraced, might leave them unable to follow God as closely
as He would wish; nor could their happiness in Him ever become deeply rooted,
for it would always be vulnerable to unexpected and unwelcome recurrences of that
strange and deeply disturbing awareness of personal emptiness and possible futility.
If, however, you do begin to think along the lines
suggested by the prophet Isaiah:
Why spend your money for what is
not bread, your wages for what fails to satisfy? …
then, you may recall other occasions that have stirred up similarly
deep questions in your mind. For example, have you ever come across someone
who, though having nothing much going for them on the outside -- little
money and few home comforts, not particularly popular or talented, and perhaps with
more than their share of family trials – yet, on the inside they seemed
to be deeply happy: content in themselves and at peace with life in general,
its future prospects, and their neighbours around. How are we to understand that: little or nothing
on the outside, but rich inside?
Of course, if such people were ill-educated and quite
content with knowing nothing; if they were idlers, happiest when doing nothing;
or perhaps if they were thoughtless people, content with never looking beyond
the present moment; then one might well say, “They may appear to be happy, but
I would never want that sort of happiness”, and having said that, never think
of them again. Such people could – with
good reason -- be regarded as being superficially
happy.
However, the ones I have in mind, those whom you may have
been lucky enough, or better, whom you may have been blessed enough, to come
across, are in no way superficial, for, though having little to boast of or rejoice
in on the outside, yet, they are profoundly happy inside. Now, that is something remarkable, for the
unthinking attitude of the superficially happy embraces living for what they
can get out of life’s personal experiences and all that happens around them,
and in that sense they are centred on themselves and cannot endure aridity or
live through and profit from sufferings, least of all can they contemplate
death other than – at best -- as a kind of sleep where thoughts are gone and
experiences are none.
The profoundly happy ones of whom I speak, however, are most
truly and completely happy since their minds appreciate truth, their hearts
love what is beautiful, and -- above all -- their souls are confident in the
goodness of God and humbly aspire to future blessedness with Him; and being thus
centred on what is over, above, and beyond themselves and their earthy
limitations, they are already close to being spiritually dead to themselves and
their own interests, and therefore remain steadfast through present trials and
difficulties, and hopeful and trusting beyond the certainty and proximity of
their own physical death.
If you have ever been blessed to meet and to recognize such
a truly happy person, or, if not, if ever you have been blessed personally
by God so as to have occasionally felt, to have become unmistakeably aware of, a
sense of emptiness welling up from the
depths of your being, then the message of Isaiah should echo within you,
prompting you to look closer at yourself saying: 'Am I spending my money on
what is not bread, my youth and my strength, year in year out, for what does
not satisfy?
Having asked yourself that question you will be eager to
hear the next words of the prophet:
Heed Me, and you shall eat well,
you shall delight in rich fare.
At that point, however, you might be inclined to answer both
your own self-questioning and the prophet’s exhortation by some such words as:
‘Very well, you prophet of 2600 years ago, I am listening, speak to me now
about my soul’s need, about the emptiness I sometimes experience, tell me of
the fullness of joy that I seek’.
Isaiah continues (NRSV):
Incline your ear, and come to Me;
listen, so that you may live. I will
make with you an everlasting covenant, My steadfast, sure love for David.
Notice how insistently the prophet repeats ‘incline your
ear’, ‘listen’! Again, however, you
might find that more puzzling and frustrating than helpful: ‘How can I hear
you, the everlasting Lord, on Whose behalf Isaiah has made promises which both
intrigue and delight me. How can I listen
and come to You Who are in heaven above, invisible, untouchable, unknowable?’
Isaiah has done his best; but now we need the Apostle Paul
-- brought up and trained to fully appreciate Isaiah’s teaching and testimony
before becoming, as the Lord Himself said to Ananias, a chosen instrument of Mine to carry My name before Gentiles, kings,
and Israelites -- to give the only full answer to our questions in today’s
second reading:
What will separate us from the
love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or
nakedness, or peril, or the sword? No,
in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
There St. Paul teaches that the richest fare of which
Isaiah spoke, the fullness of joy that we seek, is only to be found in the love of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord
from which nothing in the heavens or on the earth can ever separate us.
Let us now, therefore, turn to Jesus Himself in our Gospel
reading where we heard of Him feeding hungry people, people like us, in need and wanting sustenance:
When it was evening, the
disciples approached Him and said, “This is a deserted place and it is already
late; dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages and buy food for
themselves.” (Jesus) said to them,
“There is no need for them to go away; give them some food yourselves.” But they said to Him, “Five loaves and two
fish are all we have here.” Then He said, “Bring them here to Me,” and He ordered
the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish,
and looking up to heaven, He said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them
to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds. They all ate and were satisfied, and they
picked up the fragments left over —twelve wicker baskets full. Those who ate were about five thousand men,
not counting women and children.
From that episode we can gather that the fullness of joy to
which Isaiah referred with those words 'eat well, eat what is good', can only
come to us by literally eating the
food given by Jesus, His own Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Moreover, the prophet tells us that not just any
sort of eating will do, for he made it clear how we should eat in such a way as to benefit our soul:
Heed Me (says the Lord), and you
shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare;
Now those few words of the prophet are most important for
us today but they need to be understood according to the teaching of St. Paul
and Mother Church, for far too many Catholics seem to think that receiving Holy
Communion, 'eating well', is the one and only key to our religion and to
eternal life. That is quite wrong. We need also to heed the teaching of
Paul and Mother Church concerning Jesus in the Eucharist, for Holy Mass is far
more than Holy Communion. The Mass is,
first and foremost, worship of God, the sacrificial offering of Himself by
Jesus the Son (and hopefully by us His disciples too) to the Father. Holy Mass is glory to God in the Highest
before it is gift -- Holy Communion -- to men and women of good will. When Jesus comes to us in Communion, that is
not an end in itself: Jesus comes to us, for a few moments, in Communion in
order to communicate His Spirit to us, the Spirit of Holiness, Who is to remain
with us, abide in us, enlightening and guiding us to worship the Father as He
would have us do, with our whole lives in, and together with, Jesus:
I will ask the Father, and He
will give you another Advocate to be with you always. (John 14:16)
We, therefore, have to receive Holy Communion in such a way
as to open up our whole life and being to the Spirit of Jesus, for then, and
then only, will we experience what the prophet and the apostle foretold and
promised: our soul enjoying good things and thereby truly and fully living:
experiencing and sharing – by the Spirit -- in Jesus’ abiding love of, and
total commitment to, God the Father.
(Jesus said) Whoever believes in Me, as
scripture says: ‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him.’” He said this in reference to the Spirit that
those who came to believe in Him were to receive. There was, of course, no
Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. (John 7:38-39)
People of God, learn to live by the Spirit bequeathed to us
in Mother Church by Jesus: He alone can form us, in Jesus, for the Father, since
He is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son, and He alone loves the Father
and the Son in the fullness of Truth and Love.
When He the Spirit, becomes for us, in our lives, what Jesus promised (John
4:14):
A spring of water welling up into
eternal life;
only then, having learnt to yield ourselves unreservedly to
the Spirit's guidance, will we know the
fullness of joy and peace for which God made us and for which Jesus redeemed
us.
