June 19, 2022
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, June 19, 2022 – Genesis 14:18-20; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Luke 9:11B-17
Little Jimmy Dickens. Hardly a household name. Little Jimmy Dickens. But he was a fixture at the Grand Old Opry for at least a half a century. And once or twice a record that he made just creeped into the top 100. But he’s best know – his signature song – is something called “Take an Old Cold Tater and Wait.” The song was about country people getting unexpected company and having to stretch their meal, and telling the kids, “You just take a potato, get over in the corner, wait till everyone else has eaten, then you can have something to eat.” I think all of us can resonate with that a little bit. I know that my family had a summer bungalow here for years and, back in the 1950s hardly anybody in Wurtsboro Hills had a telephone. You relied on people calling the tavern, and then they’d get somebody off a barstool to run to your house and tell you that you had a phone call at the tavern, and then you’d come down to the tavern.
Well, my Italian grandmother used to come up for only one weekend of the summer with my mom and dad, Irene and Pete. But, very often, other members of my father’s family would say to my grandmother, “You know, we’re thinking of taking a ride up to see Irene and Pete, but we don’t know how to get in touch with them.” And my grandmother would say, “Oh, just go. Irene always has enough for everybody.” Which wasn’t really true, but all of a sudden people would show up in the driveway and my mother would stretch Sunday dinner to make sure everybody had enough to eat. And that’s the context of our gospel story this morning. But first I want to talk about the first reading.
St. Paul wrote the First Letter to the Corinthians around the year 50, so approximately 20 years after the evens of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. And what St. Paul says to the Corinthians is, “I handed on to you what I myself received.” And then he proceeds to describe the Last Supper using the words I said to listen for: took - blessed - broke - gave - the bread. Now, if Paul says he received that, it means he got it around the year 35, when he was converted to following Jesus. So, five years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have proof that, whatever there was of the church – little groups of Christians here and there – were meeting at people’s houses and they were repeating the words that Jesus had spoken at the Last Supper.
And I said all of those words are action words, but one is something we say, rather than something that we do. He took. He blessed. Now, of course Jesus didn’t make the Sign of the Cross over the bread and wine, because the Sign of the Cross didn’t exist until after He was crucified. Blessing was taking the bread in your hands, lifting it up and saying the blessing prayer over bread. There was a blessing prayer for almost every different kind of food in the Jewish faith. It began Baruch Atah Adonai and then you filled in whatever it was you were blessing. So you lifted up to give thanks to God for this great gift. That’s what Jesus was doing. And, when He did that, according to St. Paul, it was a symbol, an explanation, a foreshadowing, of what was going to happen to Him the next day. That He was going to give His all. “This bread is My body, broken for you.” Broken for you. “This wine is a cup of My blood, about to be shed for you.” I’m going to give my all for you.
Now, I said the same verbs appeared in the gospel story. Everybody knows the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. There’s an old Irish joke. Irish men, once they got into puberty, didn’t like to go to Mass. Mass was for the women. Back then, of course, Mass was the priest facing the wall and mumbling in Latin, and then turning around and giving a homily. So the mothers, in order to find out if their husbands and boy children went to Mass, would say, “What was the gospel?” And the standard answer was, “The loaves and fishes, Ma,” because it was so often the gospel, they wouldn’t be able to tell whether the kid was lying or not.
But the story of the loaves and fishes is told to us through the lens of the Last Supper. It’s very deliberate that St. Luke says, “Jesus took the five loaves, He blessed them, He broke them, and He gave them.” But the most important part of the story is not that. It’s what happens just before that. We’re so anxious to get to the miracle, that we miss the dialogue between Jesus and the twelve. They say to Him, “Dismiss the crowds so they can go get something to eat.” And He says to them, “Give them something to eat yourselves.” And what’s their answer? “All we have is five loaves and two fish. We could go and buy something if you want us to, but that’s all we have. It’s not sufficient.” All that Jesus wanted was for them to say that they were willing to give their all. That’s all He needed. “We could go buy something if you want us to, but this is all we’ve got.” It was not sufficient. And then, what does the gospel say? It doesn’t say that, all of a sudden, Jesus made tons and tons of bread and tons and tons of fish. It just says He took the five loaves and two fish, blessed them and broke them (I hope He didn’t break the fish, because that would be icky). But He took, and blessed, and broke, and gave to groups of fifty at a time. And what was inadequate became sufficient. It is left to mystery how it became sufficient. All that Luke wants us to understand is that, when we offer all that we have, even if it is inadequate, God can help us make it become sufficient.
You know, none of us ever enters into something wanting it to fail. On the day of a wedding, nobody gets married thinking, “I’m going to ruin this marriage.” When we join a sports team, nobody joins a sports team saying, “I’m going to play lousy so my team always loses.” Even when we do our homework, nobody says, “I’m going to mess this up so I get a failing grade.” Nothing we do we ever enter into thinking that we want to mess it up. But sometimes we are simply inadequate to the task. We don’t measure up. And maybe it’s nobody’s fault. But as long as we give it our all, we have done what we can do. And that’s the abiding message of today’s gospel. We imitate Christ, who gave His all on the cross, and showed that gift by taking, blessing, breaking and giving. On that hill in Galilee, five loaves and two fishes clearly seemed inadequate. But they gave their all.
When we give our all, we are more than adequate.