17th Sunday of the Year

The Gospel of John chapter 6 is the subject of these five Sundays. 

 The chapter is a movement of the disciples’ hearts from a state of provision to decision.

It is hard for us to identify with real human hunger unless we have fasted. We are so comfortable with ready access to prepared and stored food without much effort on our part to prepare a meal. We have not known real need.This is unprecedented –  but it was not always so.

In Famine times in Ireland in the 1840s, a story is told of the Cistercian (Trappist) monastery of Mount Melleray in Co Waterford. During the potato blight due to people’s dependency on a single crop, there was nothing to eat. People starved in their thousands. A holy monk of Melleray predicted that as the monks gathered their corn and wheat that there would always be enough to feed the poor. As people came continuously for food and word spread it seems the grain stores were bottomless. Far and above an annual harvest supply there was always grain in the stores. This was undoubtedly a miracle and attributable no doubt to the efficacy of the faith and prayer of the monks.

A similar story is told of the miraculous supply of bread for the poor who came to the monastery where Venerable Solanus Casey was a priest-brother in the 1940s.  A bread van supplying bread to the community seemed to feed far more in the soup kitchen that was physically possible.

The miraculous provision of bread is given to us in the Gospel today but was not the first time God provided –there was the manna in the wilderness, Elijah himself was fed bread brought to him by birds, Elijah was able to feed a widow, her son, and himself sufficiently from her last remaining cornmeal. In the first reading of today barley loaves fed far more than was physically naturally possible. God intervened. God provided – though not without human help.

The compassion of the few for the many is rewarded once a total commitment is made.

The key words today however are the words of Jesus: ‘You yourselves give them something to eat’.

This is well illustrated in a little cartoon I read recently:  a person related to a friend, ‘sometimes I’d like to ask God why he allows poverty, famine and injustice when He could do something about it’. ‘What’s stopping you?’ the friend asks. The first man says: ‘I’m afraid God might ask me the same question.’