One Sunday morning, the new pastor of a Church stood before his congregation and announced, “I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that we already have all the money we need for our new building project. The bad news is that the money is still in your pockets.”
Today, we take a break from the Gospel according to Mark. This break will last for five consecutive Sundays. On these five Sundays, we will read from the Gospel according to John Chapter 6. This chapter deals with the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand and the bread of life discourse. This chapter provides comprehensive teaching on the Holy Eucharist. The miraculous feeding of the crowd is the most reported miracle by the four evangelists. Each of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John reports this miracle at least once, and all together, we have six accounts of this miracle in the Gospels, which shows the importance of the miracle to the early Christians.
There is no indication that the crowd that gathered around Jesus in today’s Gospel passage came for food. The Gospel passage says they came because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick. It was Jesus who identified their need for food and turned to his apostles for a solution. He asked Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” Some scholars suggest Jesus turned to Philip because Philip was from Bethsaida (cf. John 1:44) and so should know all the local places to buy food. Philip said, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.” Jesus identified a problem: hunger; he asked Philip about what they could do. Philip responded by saying what they could not do. He gave up even before he began.
In contrast to Philip, who defeated himself even before he began the fight, Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to Jesus, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.” However, like Philip, Andrew defeated himself saying, “But what good are these for so many?” Andrew did a great job by identifying the available resource, the boy with five loaves and two fish. But he became hopeless when he compared the resource to the population of the crowd.
As much as we may want to call Andrew out for his hopelessness, we must commend him for introducing the boy to Jesus. This step of bringing the boy to Jesus made the miracle possible. Andrew recognized the problem of hunger; he identified the resource in the boy, he acknowledged his hopelessness because of the size of the crowd in comparison to the resource, but most importantly, he submitted everything to Jesus, and he stepped aside. Then the miracle began, and Jesus fed over five thousand human beings from five loaves and two fish, with twelve baskets left over.
Is the little boy possibly the only one with food in the crowd? The bread he had was barley bread, the cheapest of all breads; it was bread for the poor. It is possible that some of the rich in the crowd had bread of higher grades, but only this boy presented what he had to feed the crowd. It is possible that others in the crowd looked at the size of what they had and felt it was of no use for the crowd. Others in the crowd were likely like the man of Baal-Shalishah in the first reading, who said, “How can I serve this to a hundred men?” What is that among so many?”
There is an answer to every question and solution to every problem you can imagine. God created each one of us to be a unique answer to a particular question and a unique solution to a particular problem. Unfortunately, we focus on the entire problem and look down on our resources. This miracle in today’s gospel passage would not have been possible if the boy had hidden his little food and if Andrew had refused to take him to Jesus. My dearly beloved in Christ, what dream have you been keeping to yourself? What project have you named “impossible”? What is that program you have been thinking of beginning? Just look into yourself; you have what it takes. Bring it out, present it to Jesus, and see what he will do with you. Yes, the solution is in you; it begins with you. Just start with what you have and where you are now. Martin Luther King Junior would say, “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” Just have faith in what is available now. According to the same Luther, “Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase.”
This is more than enough lesson to learn from the homily delivered by you fr.
This is more than enough lesson to learn from the homily delivered by you fr. Your homily is Wonderful, keep it up fr.