“Give them some food yourselves.”
Why are we as Christians apparently unable to make much impact in addressing the challenges of modernity? Why does it seem like the Church does not have enough to feed the nations, both spiritually and physically?
“Are we to buy two hundred days’ wages worth of food
and give it to them to eat?”
He asked them, “How many loaves do you have? Go and see.”
And when they had found out they said,
“Five loaves and two fish.”
If we look at our task it seems daunting. The crowd is vast. We have so little to give. Logistically, it is impossible. Why, we wonder, would God even set things up to depend on us, we who ourselves have so little?
When Jesus saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
Jesus wants us to have hearts like his heart, hearts that won't send the crowd away, that care enough that they won't make it fend for itself in an uncaring world. He wants to reveal his love through us.
Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
If we think of love as a merely natural effort to good for others we see only part of the picture. The love to which we are called is only possible when we bring our natural efforts to Jesus and let him make more of them than we could on our own. There is always something supernatural and miraculous about love in this sense. Our ability to do it is always rooted in our rootedness in God, and so the result is always, in one way or another, a revelation of his power.
Then, taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven,
he said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples
to set before the people;
The bread and the fish for which the world longs go to waste if we only consider what we could do with them alone. Every act of love is a loaves and fish paradigm. It is always our bringing our insufficiency to God and receiving from him a superabundance to offer others.
They all ate and were satisfied.
And they picked up twelve wicker baskets full of fragments
and what was left of the fish.
If we sometimes seem to have enough to make a difference on our own apart from miraculous intervention, we should not be deceived. The crowds are much more vast than those who are before our eyes. The task is not so constrained as we would sometimes wish. It is indeed more than we can do on our own. But we are not alone.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only-begotten Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
Jesus cares for the vast crowds. Because we ourselves have received this care, because we ourselves have received life through him, we are meant to become channels of that life and love to others. It is time to abandon a scarcity mindset. He who brought the dead to life again in him can certainly multiple whatever we bring to him so much that there will be an abundance left over.
The mountains shall yield peace for the people,
and the hills justice.
He shall defend the afflicted among the people,
save the children of the poor.
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