August 2, 2020
Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 2, 2020 – Isaiah 55:1-3; Romans 8:35, 37-39; Matthew 14:13-21
I haven’t been away on vacation in a long while, so last weekend I booked myself a room at the Hotel Garnett. I got the panoramic view of Rt. 17 and I took the “no fun” package … and it was not. But here I am, back again, and glad to be here.
There’s an old Irish joke, and it’s based on reality, of course. In the old Irish villages it was customary for men not to go to Mass; that was something the women did. But they all went out to the church together. The men would stand across the street, leaning against the stone walls, smoking and talking, until their womenfolk came back out of church and they all went home together. Teenage boys would start to do that around the age of 10 or 11. They’d run off to Mass and then they’d come home, and their mothers would say, “Did you go to Mass?” And they’d say, “Yes.” And the mother would say, “What was the Gospel?” The traditional answer was, “The loaves and the fishes, Ma.”
And the reason why they got away with that lie all the time was because “the loaves and fishes” is one of the most common stories in our scriptures. In four Gospels, the story appears six times. And since it appears so often, you must realize that it was being used even before the scriptures were written, and all during the time they were written, being used to teach things about our faith. To put them in the context of the story. So as you move from one version to the next of the story, certain things change a little bit, and those changes tell us what that particular writer wanted his people to learn from the story. That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to a couple of things in the story.
The first one is the introduction. St. Matthew says to us, “After he heard of the death of John the Baptist, Jesus went off by Himself.” There’s no other place in the six stories where that’s the introduction. Most of the time Jesus comes from some other place to this place. You have to wonder what it was that Matthew saw there. Imagine what it was like for Jesus to hear that John the Baptist had been executed by Herod. Remember, they’re only six months apart in age. And because they were kinsfolk, they probably saw each other frequently enough to have been childhood and teenage friends. And then Jesus went to hear John preach, and got baptized by John, and followed John. It was only after John was in prison that Jesus took up the fallen staff and began to preach Himself, and His preaching started to verge far away from what John the Baptist had been saying.
So Jesus is terribly aggrieved that John has died, and died such a merciless and cruel death. He wants to be alone. Just like all of us want to be alone at times of great sorrow. But He can’t be. The crowds chase Him everywhere. So when He comes upon this large crowd, searching for him, He’s filled with fear, loathing, whatever. And Matthew tells us, “And He began to cure their sick.” And that’s the only place in all the stories of the loaves where Jesus’ reaction to the crowd is to cure the sick. Most of the time His reaction to the crowd is to teach them because they are like sheep without a shepherd.
But now you can imagine what Jesus is doing. He’s wandering through this crowd, talking to people. “I see that you have your hand like this, what’s the trouble?” “You don’t look well.” “Tell me what your problem is.” And doing what He can for them, here and there performing what we would still today consider a miracle of healing. He goes through the whole day like this, He’s channeling His own grief and rage into the despair and pain of other people. And moving forward through His own grief by moving forward through them. Until He finds the day is spent.
Now since He was alone, He went away alone, which means the disciples were not with Him, they were part of this crowd. So now, toward the end of the day, they come up to Him. You know, when you see movies, when you see paintings of this event, it’s staged like a crowd scene, because there are lots of people there, lots of bustling going on. But I imagine it from Matthew’s gospel a very different way. They come up very quietly to an exhausted Jesus and say, “Listen, the day is gone. You’ve got to let them go. They have to go get something to eat.” And Jesus says to them, “They don’t have to go. You give them something to eat.” And they say, “We don’t have anything. All we have is five loaves and two fish.” Then Jesus whispers to them, “Bring them here to me.” And that’s how the miracle begins.
Do any of you remember the commercial whose tagline was “Abbondanza!”? Do you remember what the product was? It was Celeste pizza. “Abbondanza!” It wasn’t “abbondanza,” but that was it. However, there was a restaurant in New York City that could easily have used that tagline – Mama Leone’s. Mama Leone’s was founded because of the friendship of the great tenor Enrico Caruso with Mrs. Leone. He’d go to her house for dinner. He finally persuaded her to open a little restaurant so she could serve this kind of food to … she had enough room in the restaurant for 37 people when she started out. But she became a huge enterprise. She became the biggest and most famous restaurant in all of New York City. The thing is that Mama Leone’s Italian food wasn’t really very good. You can get better Italian food in most of the restaurants here in Wurtsboro, or anyplace in Sullivan or Orange County.
So then, what was the draw? It was the way it was done. It was served family style – a big table of people reaching across one to the other, passing dishes of meatballs, and passing dishes of pasta, and passing the salad, and having a grand old time. And she would wander through the restaurant, talking to people. “Hi ya.” "How do you like my spaghetti?” “Having a good time?” “Oh, I see you brought your son, your daughter.” All that kind of thing. That’s what made it abundant, “abbondanza.” It was the way in which it was done.
And today’s Gospel is about the abundance of God. That’s why it was paired with the first reading. Notice the first reading begins, “Come, all who are thirst. Come to the water. Those who have no money, come eat without pay, without price.” It’s about the abundance of God.
So the story goes on, and you notice that the number of the food is 5 loaves and 2 fish. He also wants us to add them together. It adds up to 7, which is a perfect number in Hebrew numerology, because it’s divided only by one and by itself. So the idea is that this is a perfect meal. It doesn’t lose to the seven sacraments. That kind of abundance from God comes later in the Christian story. In essence, all the sacraments were there. But they were not clearly separated one from another. As a matter of fact, you probably should look at it the other way – that the church, examining its sacramental life and its faith life, finally comes to the conclusion, focused through the story of the bread and fish, that it has 7 and only 7 official channels of grace. And they become the seven sacraments.
The other number to notice is the 12 baskets left over. Twelve, of course, is the number of the tribes of Israel, but it’s also the number of the apostles. And notice what the apostles do – they are given from Jesus, the give to the crowds, they gather so it can be given again. That’s a little snapshot of the church’s essential function. We receive from God in Christ, we share with others what we have received, we gather so we can share again.
There’s one other thing to notice about the story, and that is the way in which Jesus’ actions are described. He took. He blessed. He broke. He gave. The suggestion in the story is that the abundance of God comes to us in Eucharist.
But there’s something besides that that’s locked into the first story. There’s one word that’s used twice in Isaiah’s reading today. Along with the idea of abundance and richness of food, twice in the story he talks about heedfulness. In order to appreciate the generosity of God, we have to be heedful of what God says, what God does, and what God calls us to do. And, if we do, then “abbondanza!”