Gratitude Versus Grumbling At The Way The Lord Feeds Us, 18th Monday (I), August 7, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Joan of Arc Church, Orleans, Massachusetts
Monday of the 18th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Sixtus and Companions, Martyrs
August 7, 2023
Num 11:4-15, Ps 81, Mt 14:13-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we continue to be nourished by the exhibition of the Eucharistic Miracles of the World enveloping St. Joan of Arc Church, we have in the first reading and the Gospel two of the great prefigurations of the feast of the Eucharist in Sacred Scripture. In the first, we see how the Lord for 40 years miraculously fed the Israelites with manna he would rain down upon them each morning. In the Gospel, we have one of the two miraculous multiplications of the loaves and fish to feed the famished crowd.  We could easily focus on the Lord’s generosity, or, in the Gospel, on the way that he wishes for us to participate in his miraculous self-giving by our giving him first the raw materials. But I’d like rather to talk about two fundamental attitudes that are in stark contrast in the way we approach how the God to whom we pray, “Give us today our daily bread,” wishes to feed us.
• In the Gospel, St. Matthew tells us that Jesus, “taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, said the blessing.” That blessing was a prayer of Thanksgiving to God. In St. John’s recollection, he wrote, “Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were reclining, and also as much of the fish as they wanted.” An essential element of our living a truly Eucharistic life is that we are constantly thanking God for all that he gives and does for us. The very word Eucharist flows from the Greek word for Thanksgiving.
• The need for this Thanksgiving stands out when contrasted with the attitude of the Israelites in the desert. They weren’t truly grateful for the all that the Lord had done to liberate them, showing them how dear they were to him. They weren’t grateful that, in the middle of the desert, he was raining down from heaven for them each day the manna that they could make into loaves so that they wouldn’t starve to death. No. They weren’t grateful for all of these signs of God’s providential love. Instead, they complained, they grumbled, they murmured, they moaned saying, “Would that we had meat for food! We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt, and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now we are famished; we see nothing before us but this manna.” In their grumbling they were succumbing to the same temptation we find at the archetypal root of sin. Adam and Eve had access to all the food in the garden except the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but rather than rejoicing in what they did have, they began to focus on what they didn’t have. They gave into the temptation of the serpent to dwell on how the fruit of the forbidden tree was “good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gen 3:6). And that’s where their downfall began. It’s also where ours begins.
• To live a Eucharistic life, as we were talking about yesterday afternoon, means to live one of blessing and thanksgiving, rather than complaint and envy. It’s one in which we count our blessings, not what we exaggerate to be our deprivations. And it’s through Thanksgiving, we know, that we are opened up by God to receive greater blessings. That’s what we see in the story of the ten lepers: God wanted to give them all a gift far greater than their physical cure, but it was only the one grateful leper who received salvation by faith through coming back to express his profound appreciation.
• It’s important to get practical about becoming people of thanksgiving, rather than complaint, and to learn how to thank the Lord precisely when the devil wants to tempt us to complain. For example, when we go without something we might desire, the evil one wants to tempt us to grumble, whereas it’s a tremendous opportunity to thank the Lord for the opportunity to grow in the virtue of poverty to which we unite ourselves to the poor Christ. When we’re asked by our parents or boss to do something we don’t want to do, we could complain that we’re getting singled out or dwell on the other things we might be doing or the way we think we could accomplish something better, whereas God is giving us a chance to unite ourselves to him in obedience. When we get frustrated, disappointed and are tempted to squawk about how our acts of love, of sacrifice, go unappreciated and unrequited, we could rather use them as a great opportunity to unite ourselves through that experience to Jesus’ self-giving chaste love. God cares about us and will provide us many opportunities to grow in humility, to grow in patience, to grow in the capacity to forgive precisely through difficult circumstances, but the key for us is to advert with gratitude to how the Lord might be using that circumstance to help us grow in faith. One of the things that the Israelites in the desert did not grasp was that through the daily dependence on God’s generosity, he was opening them up to daily gratitude. It was better for them to grow in faith and gratitude than to have cucumbers, fish, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. Likewise, the Lord doesn’t allow us to wallow in our favorite foods, in all the material luxuries that some mistakenly think constitute the good life, precisely in order to give us something far greater. We just have to be mature to realize that the Cross is far more valuable to us than comfort.
• Such complaints can really wear down others, especially those who are seeking to serve us in the Lord’s name. The complaints of the Israelites in the desert had gotten to the point that, as we see in the first reading, Moses almost couldn’t take it any more. Their grumbling had led him to begin to grumble. “Why do you treat your servant so badly?,” he asked the Lord. “Why are you so displeased with me that you burden me with all this people?” Later he would say, “I cannot carry all this people by myself, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you will deal with me, then please do me the favor of killing me at once, so that I need no longer face this distress.” He got to the point that he was basically asking for death, so much had the complaints and his incapacity to satisfy the people worn him down. Complaints can really impact those in the Church in the way it did Moses. Many priests will tell you that, of course, they have many beautiful experiences of grateful people, but also a regular deluge of people who basically would have complained about the menu at the Last Supper. The Church is simultaneously too hot and too cold. Masses are too long and too short at the same time. At times it feels like what Jesus himself noted about the fickleness of the crowds, “To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children who sit in marketplaces and call to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance, we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.’” (Mt 11:16-19). Jesus was criticized no matter what he did, no matter how hard he was working, no matter that was bringing them salvation. And these complaints can wear people down. Jesus himself would once exclaim, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?” The reality is that sometimes we Christians can be worse than the Israelites in the desert. This doesn’t mean that those in positions of authority don’t need fraternal correction. They, like all people, do! This doesn’t mean that some complaints are legitimate and objective. Many are. But it’s important that if we’re going to complain, our complaints are not only justified but kept in check. The questions we need to ask are: Do we say thanks to God and to others much more than we whine? Do we compliment people ten times more than we complain to them or about them? Do we take the plank out of our own eyes before we grouse about speck in others’? Are we grateful for people’s virtues as well as for their faults, which can often help us grow far more than their strengths? Do we recognize that our complaints are not innocuous, but can actually harm others far more than hurting their feelings, as we see in how the Israelites’ criticisms led Moses to ask God to take his life?
• Today we have a powerful witness in how to thank God even in the midst of situations when many would complain. Today the Church celebrates the feast of Pope St. Sixtus II and his four deacon companions, who were captured and killed during Mass in the Catacombs of St. Praetextatus on August 6, 258. Two other deacons were killed that day elsewhere. And the last of the seven deacons of Rome, St. Lawrence, was killed on August 10, as we’ll be remembering on Thursday. The Roman soldiers, following the emperor Valerian’s decree mandating their death, came in while Pope Sixtus was seated giving his homily. They decapitated him at that moment to stop his preaching and his blood dripped all over his temporary cathedra. The four deacons with him were also summarily executed and the Christians buried them across the street in the Catacombs of St. Callistus. The attitude of all of these saints was summarized by St. Cyprian of Carthage who would soon die himself by the same decree. Rather than complain about their circumstances, they rejoiced. Cyprian wrote, “Valerian has sent an order to the senate, importing that the bishops, priests and deacons should forthwith die… The officers of Rome are very keen upon this persecution and the persons who are brought before them are sure to suffer and to forfeit their estates to the exchequer. Pray, notify these particulars to my colleagues, that so our brethren may everywhere be prepared for their great conflict. That we may all think rather of immortality than death, and derive more joy than fear from this confession, in which we know that the soldiers of Christ are properly not killed but crowned!” These martyrs thought far more of eternal life than their death, far less about being killed than being crowned! They rejoiced with gratitude rather than complained. We need to fill our minds with these same thoughts in order to think like God does, rather than man does. When we think of God, of eternal life, of God’s blessings rather than about self-denial and the Cross, when we consider how much we will receive from God than what we’ll give up, when we think about our life more than about our death, then we can more easily be courageous every day and on the Supreme Day.
• Let’s finish by returning to the miracle in the Gospel. It would have been easy for one of the disciples to have complained at how little they had, basically just five buns and two sardines. But Jesus didn’t complain. He thanked God the Father. He blessed him. And God the Father multiplied that offering. Today at Mass, we may have various aches and pains. We may be struggling with the heat and the humidity of the summer. We may have heavy things to handle during the rest of the day. But all of these can be a source of thanksgiving rather than complaining, because each of them can be a source of union with God and gratitude for all the parts of our body that aren’t aching, for all the beautiful days he gives us, for the capacity to serve him and others in so many ways, even if we might not be able to do so as well as we would like. The fundamental Christian attitude is thanksgiving. As we enter into Jesus’ prayer of thanksgiving and blessing at the Mass — thanksgiving and blessing on the night he would be betrayed and on the vigil of his savage execution! — we can learn from him how to unite everything to this source and summit of the Christian life, this mutual thanksgiving of Bride and Groom, of Body and Head. And as we give thanks to the Father for the gift of his Son, we know that Jesus likewise thanks the Father for drawing us to him to receive this gift of love.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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