Sunday, July 24, 2011
The 6th Sunday after Pentecost
My dear faithful:
Two weeks ago our Gospel for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost
told the story of the fishermen who fished all night and caught nothing,
only to let down their nets again at Our Lord’s command, upon which they
landed more fish than they knew what to do with.
It was a tale of caution and of hope:
caution lest we lose hope. For just as
the darkest hour precedes the dawn, so too do our trials come before our
glory. Just as the sorrowful
mysteries precede the glorious mysteries, we must learn the lesson that
we must suffer before we are rewarded.
We must sew before we can reap.
We must work before we are paid.
And, like Christ before us, we must die before we rise again into
the glory promised us by Him, for them that love Him.
This is perhaps a bitter lesson for some.
But it should not be so.
Not if we shrug off the bad part, ever mindful of the good which
is to follow. The lesson
here is to accept the Crosses that befall us in this life, because it is
through the Cross that comes our salvation, and it is after our Cross
that comes our Resurrection.
Now why am I dwelling on a lesson we learned two weeks ago?
Because in today’s Gospel, we find another example of this same
lesson. And it comes to us,
in the form of a few little fishes, perhaps some of those same fish that
those fishermen brought on to their boat that morning in that other
Gospel story. For now we are
no longer by the side of Lake Genesareth, with its teeming waters full
of fish. In today’s Gospel
we find ourselves out in the wilderness miles from anywhere, following
Our Lord to hear him preach, and in the company of 4,000 other men,
women and children who have come for the same purpose.
Remember, this is the desert.
It’s hot and we are hungry.
There is nowhere to buy food.
And we have been out here three days.
If we brought food with us, we have eaten it long ago, and now we
are not just hungry, we are literally
weak with hunger.
Perhaps some of the children and the elderly amongst us have
already started to faint and drop by the wayside.
It’s a long way back home, we have no food for the journey, and
things are not looking good…
Perhaps we remember our ancestors of long ago, who once also passed
through a desert and were hungry.
We remember that God gave them manna from heaven, and maybe we
look into the skies to see if food will drop down upon us like the bread
of angels. But if we do, it
is because we have not yet realized that we do not need to look into the
heavens to find God. God is
here with us in the form of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
And it is He who will feed us.
Three days we have spent following Our Lord in the desert.
Three days without bread, just as in a few months from now Our
Lord’s disciples would experience an even worse three days of darkness
during which the Bread of Life lay dead in the sepulcher.
But again, this is our lesson, the darkest hour before the dawn.
For now, just as our children and grandparents faint away before
us and we realize our apparent folly in following this Man into the
wilderness to die, He stops and asks them, How many loaves have ye? And
they said, Seven.
This would not exactly have inspired us with renewed confidence.
Seven loaves of bread, and four thousand people.
That would mean that 571 people would have to share each loaf.
In other words you’d be lucky to get a single
crumb of this bread.
But Our Lord simply tells us to sit down, and then he blesses the bread
and those few little fishes that someone had brought along and which had
probably dried out in the hot sun.
And he broke the bread and divided it up among the people and
wonder of wonders, we all eat and are filled.
Not only that, but the leftovers fill seven baskets afterwards.
That’s as many baskets as there were loaves in the first place.
Even the 7 entire loaves would not have filled these 7 baskets.
Our lesson is very clear.
When we are in the most need it is then that God will help us.
As our need increases, thus our help approaches.
Never despair, because God shall surely make speed to save us and
will make haste to help us.
Our help is in the Name of the Lord, who hath made heaven and earth.
The people in the wilderness first heard the Word of God preached to
them by Christ, and no doubt confessed, at least in their heart, their
love and trust of him, and then were fed miraculously with the 7 loaves
and fishes. Today, we, in
our own great wilderness of this apostate world, confess our love and
trust of God, and we in our turn are fed miraculously with the 7
Sacraments. We first confess
our sins, and then are fed by the Bread of Angels, with that greatest
miracle of all which is the Holy Eucharist.
In the words of the great Sequence of the Feast of Corpus Christi
composed by St. Thomas Aquinas,
Sumit unus, sumunt mille:
quantum isti, tantum ille: nec sumptus consúmitur.
(Whether one or thousands eat,
all receive the selfsame meat, nor the less for others leave.)
The days in which we live are dark days indeed.
Our ship, our barque of Peter, has foundered on the rocks, and
we few remnants gallantly try to row our little lifeboats through the
storm which gets worse and worse.
But remember that time that St. Peter and the Apostles themselves
were in peril on the sea, fighting the storm through the three watches
of the night. It was not
until the fourth watch of the night, that darkest hour that precedes the
dawn, that Our Lord approached their boat:
And lo! Christ
walking on the water! Let us
renew our prayers to Our blessed Lady, Star of the Sea, to help us
persevere through the darkness and on into the ever-increasing struggle
with the deep. For the worse
it gets, the greater shall be our reward.
In
the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.