Homily: 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Is 55:1-13; Ps 145; Rom 8:35,37-39; Mt 14:13-21

In today’s Gospel reading, Matthew tells us about a miraculous banquet – the miracle of the loaves and fishes – one of the few miracles described in all four Gospels. But this passage is actually a story of three banquets.

The first is a birthday banquet that King Herod had thrown for himself. It was during this banquet that Herod had John the Baptist murdered, simply to please his wife and stepdaughter. Deeply upset when told of John’s death, Jesus wants to be alone with His apostles, to grieve and pray with them in peace and quiet. So he sets off in a boat, headed for a deserted area along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. But the crowds won’t hear of it and follow him on foot. Jesus can’t escape, even for a few hours.

Feast of Herod and the Beheading of John the Baptist

Seeing thousands of people lining the shore, he’s moved with pity, sets aside his own needs, and spends the day among them, healing the sick, teaching them, caring for them. We get the impression that Jesus almost loses track of time, and as evening comes, the Apostles, those most practical of men, become concerned. Can’t He see it’s late and the people are hungry? He’s spent the entire day with this demanding crowd. Enough is enough! And so some of the Apostles approach Jesus and suggest He dismiss the crowds. Let them go so they can buy food in the surrounding villages.

"Give them some food yourselves"

Jesus’ response is extraordinary: “There is no need for them to go away; give them some food yourselves.” The Apostles must have been shocked. Feed them ourselves? Has He gone mad? We hardly have any money and only five loaves of bread and two fish. These 12 practical men, these realists, still had so much to learn. They had watched as Jesus turned water into wine. They had witnessed thousands of cures. And still they thought only in human terms.

In effect Jesus is telling them, “You seem to have a problem. Go ahead and see if you can solve it yourselves.” But the apostles don’t hear this. Their faith, still in the embryonic stage, allows them to hear only the apparent absurdity in His words. They haven’t yet accepted that there are some problems we humans simply cannot solve without divine help.

And so Jesus, no doubt with a sigh and a shake of the head, orders the crowd to sit down on the grass. He then takes the food, and in words remarkably similar to those He would later use at the Last Supper, blesses and breaks the loaves, and gives them to the disciples, who then distribute the food among the crowd. 5,000 men, and probably many more thousands of  women and children, hungry and weary, eat and are satisfied.

In an ironic twist, Jesus turns the Apostles into waiters at His banquet. The men who wanted to dismiss the crowds become instead their servants. This banquet, this miraculous picnic hosted by Jesus along a normally deserted shore in Galilee, was a banquet of love, so different from the banquet of death thrown by Herod.

Jesus feeds the hungry, and in doing so, gives His Apostles something to think about. Did they make the connection to the psalm we prayed only moments ago? “The hand of the Lord feeds us; He answers all our needs.”

Yes, the Apostles experienced the miracle; it would be hard not to as they watched the bread and fish multiply in their own hands. And yet it would seem they only recognized its full meaning much later. They didn’t recognize the sign of the bread. Neither did they see how Jesus has used them, multiplying the bread in their hands, not His own, and distributing it through them. They didn’t grasp the meaning of the 12 baskets full of fragments, far more then they started with, showing that the Bread of Life, the Bread He would later give the world, would never be exhausted.

"This is my body..."

And so a story that begins with a banquet of death, and moves to a banquet of love, ends with a banquet of life, a banquet of eternal life. Jesus didn’t institute the Eucharist that day in that deserted place; no, He waited until the Apostles were ready. He waited until the night before He died. But He did provide His disciples with a glimpse of the banquet to come, the banquet at His altar, a banquet that would feed, not thousands, but millions every day.

The Eucharist is a marvelous gift. But how much do we value it? When you are hungry or thirsty, do you think only about your next meal, or do you think also about your next Eucharist? When you sit at the dinner table with family and friends, do you take a moment to reflect on the miracle of the Eucharist at God’s table?

Jesus fed the stomachs of the thousands who had followed him in Galilee. Today He feeds the souls of His followers throughout the world, providing them with perfect nourishment, giving them Himself – Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. The Eucharist is so valuable, it’s invaluable. The fathers of the Second Vatican Council called it “the source and summit of the Christian life.” And the most wonderful thing about the Eucharistic miracle that will take place a few moments from now on this very altar is that God has sent each of us a standing invitation to this banquet.

Today’s Herods also send out invitations to their banquets, invitations to turn away from God in sin, invitations to reject the Bread of Life for a culture of death, invitations that the world pressures us to accept. But as St. Paul tells us in today’s 2nd reading, by accepting Christ’s invitation, we can conquer all that the world throws at us. With the Eucharist to nourish and strengthen us, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.

Praised be Jesus Christ!