Reflection for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2024

Reflection for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Here in the West we are preoccupied with food. That’s strange, since in most of the world, so many people go to bed hungry. Now THAT would preoccupy me, going to bed hungry. It seems that food shouldn’t be a big concern for us because we hardly have to think about it. Most of us don’t even have to go out to buy it any more, never mind grow it or kill it or catch it! Think about it, though. When someone tells you she went to a retirement party and you ask how it was, she will almost always say this first: the food was out of this world! Gatherings always involve food, and that’s a rather universally cultural thing.  It goes back to the Garden of Eden, I suspect. There, food was huge, but, sadly, it became the downfall of the human race. Almost. But God made it all turn out very, very well for us. But I am getting ahead of myself.

In today’s readings at Mass, food is huge, even in the Responsorial Psalm.  The Gospel, in fact, tells the wonderfully miraculous story of Jesus feeding five thousand men with five barley loaves and two fish—lox and bagels, I suppose. A little boy’s loving Jewish mother made sure he had lunch-to-go. And somehow, among so many people, Andrew knew about that little picnic pack. How I’d love to know the background to THAT part of the story….

Jesus had compassion on the crowd (John 6: 1-15) that just wouldn’t let Him out of their sight—like those who made the pilgrimages these last two months across the country to finally meet Jesus in Lucas Oil Stadium. On July 17, a date that’s forever burned into the souls of some 60,000 people, the old and the young, the halt and the fit, the rich and the poor, the saints and not so saints were all inexorably drawn to the place where they could gaze on Jesus for 5 days and four nights, listening to His Word spoken by people from all over the place, and the Word spoken by Jesus Himself into the depths of everyone who opened their heart’s door just a crack. No one was disappointed, I’m sure, although some may not have fully understood the whispered Life He breathed into them.

And oh, the Food, that week in Indiana! The Precious Food that undid the poison food of Eden that nearly doomed mankind to hell. The scores of thousands who ate the Bread of Life, most of them after having been inebriated by the Precious Blood poured over them and into them in the Sacrament of Mercy (100 Priests hearing confessions for 10 hours a day-after-day-after-day), kneeling, crawling, some of them, to receive their Jesus because they knew, KNEW, He was giving them the fullness of Eternal Life before they have even lived out their lives here for Him as yet….

Sixteen of our Sisters were there. They left home in the dark and arrived in INDY in the dark, but, oh, the LIGHT they were following, like the crowds in the Gospel today. Some of the Sisters came back with COVID, but it was worth it, they will tell you. Most came back exhausted, but they wouldn’t have missed it, they keep telling us stay-at-homes. When I ask them about what they ate and when, and where, (I worried they would have no time to eat, never mind find any food to eat among so many) they tell me about the evening of adoration in the shadows of that immense crowded stadium where Jesus glowed like Fire before them, in a silence so profound that it was shattering, and life-giving and cleansing and healing and the hours flew by like nightbirds, then repeated all the too, too beautiful Love the next night and the next. That was Food enough for them.

Like in the Gospels, suddenly Jesus was gone from their midst. Stadiums have their schedules, after all, and the show must go on, so they had to leave, and come home to the quiet of our little convent chapels, eyes blinking in the sunlight, but already glowing from the banquet they celebrated where the Food was “out of this world!” but lo, it’s the same Jesus, of course, who feeds them in the stillness, and makes His home in them, in us, in you.

This Gospel of the feeding of the five thousand is timely, to say the least. The little boy whose mother’s foresight enabled Jesus to feed five thousand has no name (nor does his mother), but what a miracle he was part of. The 60,000 in Indiana may have felt lost in the crowd at times, until Jesus found them one by one and fed them in the way only He knew they needed.

Then in today’s Gospel He was gone. But for the rest of their lives, those five thousand must have thought of that day so many times, wondering just how Jesus did that. Perhaps they never knew, but they knew they had been fed in the way each needed, because He cared about them, and for them. What stories they must have told their grandchildren and their friends. And so do we have stories to tell of the way Jesus feeds and loves and cares for us as only He can. You and I may not have gone to Indianapolis, but we go to Mass each week to meet Jesus and allow Him to make His home in us.

We are a long way from Eden and from the place we read of in the Gospel today, but Jesus is waiting for us right where we are this moment.  Close your eyes, as I am closing mine, and find Him in your Inner Room where He waits.  Crack the door open and find Him there. He is our Bread of Life, today, tomorrow and forever.  How blest we are to live in a culture, the Catholic Culture, that teaches us we are NEVER far away from Him. He is the Banquet we long for, the Light in the shadow, the stillness, the Mercy we seek.

Come, Lord Jesus. Do not delay. Hurry the moment, Lord. Hurry the moment.