A Homily for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

+ Et manducaverunt, et saturati sunt. “And they ate, and were satisfied.” With these few words Saint Mark summarises Our Lord’s miracle of the feeding of approximately four thousand people with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.
 
We are quite familiar with this Gospel passage—perhaps too familiar with it. It is certainly an amazing event in the public ministry of Our Lord—so much so that it was regarded by the early Church as sufficiently important that it is recorded by all four evangelists. Why? What does it have to teach us?
 
In the first place it teaches us the compassion of Almighty God. “I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days, and have nothing to eat; and if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way; and some of them have come a long way,” Our Lord says most beautifully. There is no reason to suggest that He had invited this crowd or had any obligation to feed them, but nevertheless He has compassion for their most basic of needs after three days in the desert.
 
His compassion is, however, impractical. It is unrealistic. “How can one feed these men with bread here in the desert?” His disciples retort in the face of the sheer impossibility of realising their Master’s desire.
 
Yet He, the Master, proceeds untroubled. “How many loaves have you?” He asks, and then, giving thanks he breaks the loaves and gives them to His disciples to distribute. Gratias agens fregit, et dabit discipulos suis, the Gospel says.
 
We must not miss the strong parallel here with the Roman Canon, that ancient witness to the Eucharistic practice of the Church that is the anchor of the substantial unity of the Roman rite, which contains the words tibi gratias agens benedixit, fregit, deditque discipulis suis (giving thanks to Thee, did bless, break and give unto His disciples) at the consecration of the bread. Indeed, here we may begin to understand the importance of this miracle for the early Church, for it is a foreshadowing of the action of Our Lord in giving thanks at the Last Supper, of His self-immolation, of His very body being broken on the Cross, and of His glorious Resurrection from the dead in which, impossibly, He miraculously gives Himself anew to His disciples. Indeed, it is a foreshadowing of all that is made present to us anew on our altars at each celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass—nothing less! Et manducaverunt, et saturati sunt. “And they ate, and were satisfied.”
 
There is much to contemplate here and we would do well to take time so to do during this week (as does the Church’s Sacred Liturgy when she celebrates this Mass again on the ferias of the coming week). For the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish—and its prefiguration of and consummation in the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ—has much to teach us.
 
In our perseverance in our Christian vocation in the particular form it takes for each one of us, how often have we—do we—fear fainting along the way for lack of sufficient nourishment? How many times do we find that the tasks and duties that confront us apparently impossible? How frequently do we complain that we have insufficient resources—personally, materially, spiritually—to hand? Our world is so full of numbers and statistics and budgets and forecasts that there is no room left for miracles. Our calculations are so cold that any possibility of the Providential action of Almighty God is simply frozen out. Even in monasteries at times people can think that numbers, not faith and observance, are what is most important.
 
My brothers and sisters, it is precisely here, in our hyper-analytic ever-predictable world, that the Church’s Sacred Liturgy announces the Gospel anew this morning, teaching us to offer all that we have, no matter how little it seems to be, calling us to allow the Lord to bless it and to break it—to bless and to break us—and thereby to convert and transform us into something/someone through whom He can work miracles, through whom He can feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick, etc. (cf. Mt 25: 31-46)
 
“How many loaves have we?” How are we going to manage to persevere in the Catholic faith today, this week, this year, in spite of the lack of resources we have, in spite of the attacks of the world, the flesh and the devil—indeed in spite of the grave internal divisions within the Church herself? The answer is in this miracle, a miracle in which we participate anew this morning in this very celebration of Holy Mass.  
 
If we offer ourselves completely to Our Lord and allow Him to bless, break and give us (perhaps in ways we may never have imagined) we shall be fed, and through our self-offering so too shall others. The miraculous compassion of Our Lord shall be experienced anew in our days in and through our faith and self-sacrifice. And once again it will be possible to marvel: Et manducaverunt, et saturati sunt. “And they ate, and were satisfied.”