18th Sunday Ordinary time, cycle A. Sunday 30-31 /07 / 2005

My dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Did you ever try blowing up a balloon right out of the bag from the store? You feel like your lungs are going to explode because, no matter how much effort you put into blowing, blowing, blowing, the balloon does not fill, right? This is exhausting! What do you do? Do you throw the balloon away and give up? . . I don’t think so!! So what do you do? One way you can do is to prepare the balloon, you might take each end and you stretch it out, working the balloon until it is ready to be filled. It really makes a difference when the balloon is stretched out; the more space we create for the air, the bigger the balloon can become. (If you don’t believe me, you can try at home.)

My dear brothers and sisters, Today’s gospel is about tugging at our hearts, stretching our Christian love and being prepared to be filled with the generosity of Jesus. What do we mean by this. Let us goes back to the gospel today. The miracle of the multiplication of 5 loaves and two fish is so central to the gospel message that it is one of the few miracles found in all four gospels. The scenario is uncomplicated. The compassion of Jesus attracts a large crowd and soon they find themselves in a deserted place where no food is available. The disciples point out that there is a real problem here since no food is readily available for this large crowd. Jesus seems quite unconcerned and tells the disciples to provide them with food themselves. Their response scarcely conceals their amazement that the Master should not notice how impossible that is: five loaves and two fish are all we have here. But Jesus responds by asking them, quite simple, to give him the few loaves, which he then blesses and breaks, giving them to the disciples for distribution. Let’pause here for a moment to see the movement of this action: the disciples gives to Jesus what they have, five loaves and two fish, Jesus accepts it and blesses it and gives them back to the disciples. And the disciples then passes on, distributes to others. How beautiful gesture of giving, blessing, and passing on are, they really makes the miracle to happen.
We know from the gospel that he gives us far more than enough. After the thousands had been fed, there were 12 baskets of food left, all from five loaves and two fish! As we are stretched to what may seem to be the limit and we cannot imagine how we can find enough for anyone else, we find we have more than we need for others and ourselves. When the disciples asked Jesus to send the people home, it was because they were convinced that they could not stretch the love that the crowed felt for Jesus to include complete strangers and that there would be many unhappy people who would go hungry. The loving spirit of Christ could only go so far as they saw it. What they did not realize is that when Jesus is in your life, the hunger for food and the hunger for spiritual happiness is satisfied.

Our challenge today is to continue to stretch our hearts, filling them with love for family and friends and strangers and then, giving that love to all. Those who are in need surround us. They are in our homes, our neighbourhoods, our towns, and our nations and around our world. The more we give, the more we will find ourselves filled with the spirit of giving. We need to pray for the kind of Christian generosity that Jesus expects from his followers. He will care for us as we care for his people.

I like to end with the story. A rich woman found herself with some time to spare in London ‘s airport. She bought a cup of coffee and a small bag of cookies. She staggered, laden with her luggage, to an unoccupied table. She was reading the morning paper when she became aware that a shabbily dressed man was seated at her table, eating a cookie. She did not want to make a scene so she leaned across the table and took a cookie herself. A minute or so passed. More rustling. He was helping himself to another cookie! The back and forth continued until they were down to the last cookie in the package. She was very angry but she still could not bring herself to say anything. Then the young man broke the remaining cookie in two, pushing half across to her, ate the other half and left. Sometime later, when the public address system called for her to present her ticket, she was still fuming. She opened her handbag to get her ticket ready and was confronted by her package of cookies. Imagine her embarrassment. She had been eating his. So whose cookies are the cookies anyway? Like everything else, eating cookies is fun when all the parties have the capacity to share. We might be surprised to learn that others paid for ours. Five loaves and two fish can sometimes be one generous heart – giving all so that others could eat their fill and be satisfied. Amen.