July 28, 2024
Today’s readings give us more than the usual chance to consider a miracle. We are talking here about events that cannot be explained by common sense and certainly not by science. The events are fully supernatural in origin, an act of God’s intervention in the world he loves.
Elisha was a great prophet in the Northern Kingdom of Israel some 800 years before Jesus was born. He was a crusader against the moral and religious laxity of his time. As a holy man, Elisha stayed close to Yahweh and therefore, he was privileged to be a vehicle of God’s power to work numerous miracles. The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves we hear about in the first reading today is rather unceremonious and even matter of fact in its brevity. A famine has been in the land and now that it has subsided, the first fruits harvested are to be offered in thanks to the Lord. Elisha relies on the Lord’s power to produce a miracle and instructs the servants to feed the people. Not only are all fed, but there is some left over. Each of the four Gospels contains a miracle of the multiplication of the loaves. To be sure, there was a physical hunger in the vast crowd that followed Jesus.
However, what appears to be even more pressing was the spiritual hunger of the people. The people were following Jesus because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick. The actions of Jesus – the forgiveness of sins, the healings, the casting out of demons – were all spiritual acts that had a profound effect on the everyday life of those who followed Jesus. Certainly, the people had physical needs; however, they had spiritual needs that only Jesus could satisfy.
How in touch are we with spiritual needs and desires, our own and those of our world? Too often our culture lures us to dismiss or cover over our spiritual needs and entices us instead to pursue money, status or power. However, deep spiritual longings have brought us to this eucharistic celebration. The rich traditions, rituals, movements and words of our liturgy unite us and allow the miraculous power of God to be made manifest. These realities satisfy our deepest longings just as assuredly as the miracle performed by Jesus satisfied the large crowd that followed him.
What is more, as in the miracle in the Gospel, there are plenty of leftovers that we will take from our gathering. One leftover is grace. Grace, the presence of the Holy Spirt, will continue to feed us throughout the week. Grace opens our hearts to touch others with the abundant love we have received from our Lord. Another leftover is thanksgiving. We gather to give thanks, and Jesus feeds us throuqh the Scriptures and with his body and blood making us more thankful people. As thankful people, we are moved to tend to the spiritual and temporal needs of others.
Our God is a God of miracles and abundance. He satisfies our spiritual longings so that we can better serve our brothers and sisters. We have been blessed with the miraculous gift of faith and abundant reserves of grace and thanksgiving sufficient to meet our deepest hungers and the hungers of our world.