Life blessed, broken and shared
03. August 2014
For the last three weeks, we have been listening to parables. So many parables - telling us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. It is like:
seed sown on rich soil...
seed sown alongside weeds...
a mustard seed...
yeast mixed with flour...
treasure buried in a field...
a pearl of great price...
a net collecting fish of every kind...
Such a rich array of images! But if we’re honest, some of them were hard to understand, and they probably didn’t say very much to us. But that is the idiom Jesus used. “All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables. He spoke to them only in parables”
But in today’s Gospel, he speaks not in parables, but by his actions. There are no complex riddles. We don’t need an interpreter to tell us what is happening. Jesus takes, blesses, breaks and shares bread and fish. And through those actions, somehow the Kingdom of Heaven broke through and was made present in that place beside the See of Galilee. A miserable amount of food was miraculously made to feed a great multitude. Five thousand men,“...not counting women and children.”
For those who were there, the Kingdom of Heaven of which Jesus had been teaching was not an idea or a doctrine, but a reality. That wonderful yet distant promise which we heard about in parables over the past three weeks was no longer distant, but was truly present to them.
This miracle is, of course, especially important to the monastic community of this abbey, because of its presence and ministry at the Church of the Multiplication at Tabgha, in Galilee. There, in the famous mosaic on the floor of the sanctuary, there are just four loaves of bread depicted. The missing loaf is the bread of the Eucharist, made present on the altar which stands above the spot where the miracle is said to have occurred.
There too, the bread is taken, blessed, broken and shared. And today, at this altar, as at every Christian altar around the world, bread will be taken, blessed, broken and shared. And in each place, the Kingdom of Heaven will miraculously break through and be made present, as the Lord Jesus Christ shares his body and blood with us in the Eucharist.
O sacred banquet!
in which Christ is received,
the memory of his Passion is renewed,
the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory to us is given.
The disciples of Jesus didn’t know what to do with the hungry crowd. They didn’t think they would be able to feed them. As disciples often do with a master, they looked to Jesus to sort out the problem. “Give them some food yourselves!” he responds, which must have shocked them. Because they could only see their limitations, and the tiny resources at their disposal - five loaves and two fish. In their confusion, Jesus showed them the way of paschal love - not clinging to what they had, but offering it for the benefit of all. “Give them some food yourselves!”
Out of their offering of five loaves and two fish there came enough food not just for that day, but for the days to come as well. Any maybe it is here that the Gospel’s lesson for us today lies: Because for us mortals, it is faith, risk, and generous self-offering which are the gateways through which God’s kingdom breaks into the world. It is through faith, risk and generous self-offering that miracles happen and the impossible becomes possible. This week’s TV and newspapers show us powerfully how much the world needs the miracle of God’s Kingdom to be manifested: God’s Kingdom: A kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.
The Eucharist is our School of Self-Sacrifice and our Food for the Kingdom - forming us in the pattern of the Lord’s paschal mystery of lives blessed, broken and shared. The Eucharist is the miracle which sustains our fragile hope that our battered and bruised world can be transformed and made whole. As Abbot Gregory taught us last week, in the Eucharist, “we are empowered to love. For that reason, we the Church will go on celebrating Mass and living in the power of this food until the end of time.”
We proclaim his death.
We praise his resurrection.
Until he comes in glory!