Nothing Can Separate Us From the Love of God, 18th Sunday (A), August 2, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Domus Ecclesiae Mass at the Kroeker House, Fresno, California
Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
August 2, 2020
Is 55:1-3, Ps 145, Rom 8:35.37-39, Mt 14:13-21

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the epistle, we have some of the most consoling words in all of Sacred Scripture. St. Paul tells us that nothing in all of creation — “neither death, nor life, not angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature” — can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. God’s love for us is the one constant that explains creation, redemption, sanctification and our vocation to eternal communion. Even when we sin, God’s love still remains, although we need to open ourselves up to receive it and live by it. Today we have a chance to be able to ponder this truth and examine how we cooperate with God’s love.
• In the Gospel, we see the love of God on full display. When he disembarked and saw the throng awaiting him, it would have been easy for him to have gotten a little frustrated or irritated — after all, he had tried to escape to pray — but that wasn’t his reaction. He was filled with mercy. St. Matthew tells us, “His heart was moved with pity for them.” That expression is a softening of the original Greek verb “esplangchnisthe,” which is a compound of the word splanchna, which means “viscera” or “guts” or “womb.” A more literal translation would be he was “sick to his stomach” with compassion as he saw the crowds. An even more accurate translation is that his “bowels exploded” with pity. Jesus’ compassion was like a volcanic eruption in his innards. In the Gospels, this expression is used several times of Jesus and it describes five things that Jesus, in response to these intense stomach cramps of mercy, did.
  • In today’s Gospel, we see that his heart was moved with pity for them “and he cured their sick.”
  • We also saw that he fed the crowd of 5,000 men, probably 5,000 women and likely at least 15,000 children. Similarly in the feeding of the 4,000, Jesus says in the first person what St. Matthew described about him today in the third: “My heart is moved with pity for the crowd, for they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat” and once again in response he fed
  • Elsewhere, St. Mark describes a third thing Jesus did out of mercy. He says, “When he saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity or them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things” (Mk 6:34).
  • Several times in the Gospel, Jesus’ heart was similarly moved with pity, like with the paralyzed man on the stretcher, or the women caught in adultery, on the woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house, and he forgave their sins.
  • And when Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for the crowds because they were “mangled and abandoned like sheep without a shepherd,” he told his disciples, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few, so pray the Master of the Harvest to send out laborers for his harvest,” a prayer that would be answered immediately when Jesus would from among those praying disciples call 12.
• Jesus’ visceral compassion, in short, led him to teach, to heal, to feed, to forgive, and to pray for, call and send out laborers with the same compassion on the crowds. He wants to transform us by that mercy to see things with the eyes of his own bursting heart, to notice how many are wandering without direction in life and teach them the truth and instruct them how to live by following Jesus the Way. He wants us to see how many are suffering physically, psychologically and spiritually and seek to become nurses of the Divine Physician. He wants us to notice the multitudes starving physically or spiritually and to give them the nourishment they need. He wants us to see how many are carrying around the wounds of expiated guilt or severed revelations and to bring them God’s mercy and to God’s mercy. In all of this, he wants us to become hard workers, not just bodies, in his fields and to pray insistently for other diligent laborers to join us in becoming the compassionate upset stomach of the Mystical Body.
• In today’s readings, we encounter two basic ways that we are helped to cooperate with the love of God from which we cannot be separated. The first is through prayer and the sacraments. The Gospel begins by saying that Jesus “withdrew … to a deserted place by himself.” He wanted to pray and he knew he needed to get away from the hustle, bustle, push and muscle of the multitudes. This type of prayerful withdrawal was a very common action for Jesus. The evangelists tell us that he would regularly rise early before dawn to go off to a deserted place to pray (see Mk 1:35 and Lk 4:42). When the crowds were looking for him so insistently that he wouldn’t have much time to pray some time over the course of the day while among them, he would withdraw to deserted places in order to do so (see Lk 5:16; Mk 1:45). We know that before he commenced his public ministry, he went out into the desert for a month and a half to pray and fast. As we’ll celebrate on Thursday, the Feast of the Transfiguration, Jesus took Peter, James and John up an exceedingly high mountain in order to pray. Jesus was, in short, constantly withdrawing from the crowds in order to do what was most important, which was to enter into undistracted communion with his Father in prayer. He did this not merely out of desire and need, but also as an example, to form in us a similar need and desire. We need to do this each day by making time for prayer as well as in extended time periods each year on retreat, as I will be beginning this Wednesday. Just like Jesus was regularly withdrawing to a deserted place by himself to pray, so he calls us, like he did his first followers, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest for a while” (Mk 6:31). Jesus knows that for each of us, whether priests or lay people, life can become so busy, people can sometimes be coming and going in such great numbers, that we don’t have time for the most important things, not to mention “even to eat.” And so Jesus calls us apart from everyone else not merely so that we can physically rest and eat, but so that he can give us spiritual rest — through yoking ourselves to him anew — and spiritual food. In the words of the Prophet Isaiah from the first reading, Jesus in daily prayer and on retreat tells us, “Come, receive grain and eat.… Come, drink wine and milk!” He beckons us, “All you who are thirsty, come to the water!” He desires to give us this nourishment “without paying and without cost.” In today’s Responsorial Psalm we turned to God and sang, “The eyes of all look hopefully to you and you give them their food in due season; you open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” Those are obviously words that pertain to how he seeks to feed us in prayer, to feed us through Sacred Scripture, and to feed us through the Eucharist, which is what the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish point. We look to God to give us the food we need in each season of our life. We open our hands to receive what he opens his hands to give us, as he seeks to satiate our deepest desires. Paradoxically we go into the desert to have our thirst quenched. God draws us into a place where no animals graze and no vegetation grows in order to feed us. And with faith, we go out to meet him there in prayer.
• The second way we cooperate with God is through placing ourselves and all we have are at God’s disposal. In today’s Gospel, the apostles try to dismiss the crowd “so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus says, “There is no need for them to go away; give them some food yourselves.” Jesus wanted them, he wants us, to feel responsible. Very often, we try to pass the buck on others’ difficulties, saying, “that’s their problem,” not mine. Rather than respond with compassion, we wash our hands of others’ problems as if to say, “Fend for yourselves!” But Jesus wanted his disciples to get involved. He could have easily worked a miracle from scratch to feed the hungry masses. He who created the heavens and the earth ex nihilo, who fed the Israelites in the desert with miraculous manna and quails from heaven (Ex 16:13,31), could easily have satiated the hungry multitude all by himself. He didn’t need human assistance. But that isn’t the way he wanted to act. He wanted to start with his disciples’ generosity. He wanted to involve them in his miracle. He wanted to start with the best and most people had, and bring their generosity to completion. They had meager resources, just five loaves and two fish that St. John tells us they obtained from a little boy. That’s where Jesus started. He had the same method of acting in the Wedding Feast of Cana. He who had created all of the bodies of water in the universe could have easily filled up the six 30 gallon water jars by himself, but he allowed the servants to go repeatedly to the well in the town center to fill up stone jars. If they had two gallon buckets and there were five of them, it would have taken the 18 trips, but they enthusiastically filled them to the brim. And only then did Jesus work the miracle. And so today, Jesus, having received the five buns and two small fish, looked up to heaven, said the blessing, broke the loves and gave them to the disciples to give to the crowds. The gifts multiplied not at the beginning — because they didn’t keep coming back to Jesus — but in the distribution. And Jesus “overworked the miracle,” creating more than was needed such that each of the twelve apostles was left with a wicker basket full of leftovers as a reminder of what God can do when we unite our resources to his, our compassion to his, our prayer to his.
• Sometimes we might not think we have much to give, but when given to God he can work great miracles. I was taught this lesson in an indelible way by Cardinal Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, a Vietnamese prelate who died in 2002, whom I had the privilege to get to know when he was the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in Rome. Prior to that, he was the Archbishop of Saigon. As soon as the Communists took over South Vietnam in 1975, they arrested him and threw him into prison. For 13 years he was incarcerated, nine of them in solitary confinement. The day after he was arrested, the Communists allowed him to write his family for what he needed. He asked them to send some clothes, toothpaste, a torch and his “stomach medicine.” He had no stomach ailment at the time, but his family knew that this must be a code word for them to put wine in a medicine bottle, so that he would be able to celebrate Mass and satisfy his greatest hunger. Every night, in darkness, he would put a few crumbs of bread and three drops of wine from his “stomach medicine” bottle on the altar of his hand and celebrate the Mass from memory. He made a small tabernacle out of an old cigarette case to keep with him to adore or, when he could, to smuggle Jesus to give Communion to other Catholics under arrest in the camp. His guards maltreated him. He was often starved for days and taunted. Like anyone in such a situation, he was led almost to the point of despair. He cried out to the Lord in prayer, asking him what sense it made for him to spend so much time in prison. He wanted to be out, preaching, teaching, sanctifying and encouraging the Lord’s flock, helping them to keep the faith. He desperately wanted to be doing something, rather than remain in a filthy, damp prison cell apparently doing nothing. In prayer, however, the Lord led him to meditate on the passage from today’s Gospel of the five loaves and two fish. He preached about these experiences to young people at World Youth Day in Parish in 1997 and put those eventually put those talks into a book called, “Five Loaves and Two Fish.” Cardinal Thuan recounted his prayerful realization that he might not be able to give the Lord very much, but he could start by giving him all that he had left — the little attention he was able to muster, his daily Mass, his sufferings and sacrifices — knowing that when they were offered to the Lord in the same spirit as those disciples on the hillside, there was no telling what the Lord would be able to do with them. He began to make use of little scraps of paper from old calendars to write jot down whatever spiritual insights the Lord gave him. He started to hand them to a young Catholic boy who would pass by his cell, and the young boy would secretly smuggle them to his parents, who copied them, compiled them and eventually published them as a book called “The Road to Hope,” which had a huge influence in strengthening the faith of the Vietnamese throughout the country. He started to see that he could offer up even the taunts and humiliations of the guards to the Lord each day, by trying to respond to them with kindness and love. In response to their contempt, he offered to try to help them, by teaching them foreign languages, Latin, French and English. These small deeds of love eventually led, like drips of water on a rock, to some in-roads and much later Thuan had the joy of welcoming some of those guards into the Church. While what he was doing — hidden away in a secretive solitary confinement — seemed so little in the face of the great issues confronting his country and his Church, he knew he wasn’t helpless, because with the Lord, such little gifts could bring about great miracles. His faithful witness to Christ in prison, in the face of all types of hardships, was what the Lord used perhaps more than any other means to feed the Vietnamese faithful in the face of a brutal Communist regime (which continues). We’re called to follow Cardinal Van Thuan in this daily offering of whatever we have to the Lord, in giving him whatever we have so that the Lord can use it to feed others. Whether it’s a lot or a little, if we give it all to the Lord, the Lord will multiply its effects.
• The greatest example of this collaboration in divine compassion happened not on the grassy mountainside or in Cana of Galilee. It happens right here in the celebration of the Eucharist. The raw material for this sacred synaxis is not grain and grapes but bread and wine, which is a combination of God’s fruit of the earth and vine and the “work of human hands.” God incorporates our own work and sacrifice into this great miracle to which the multiplication of the loaves and fish points. In the offertory, the priest says, “Pray, brothers and sisters, that this sacrifice, mine and yours may be acceptable to God the Almighty Father.” The Eucharist is the union between Christ’s sacrifice of his whole life culminating on Calvary is united to our sacrifice, our logike latreia, the oblation of our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, our spiritual worship (Rom 12:1-12). This is where Jesus draws us with his eyes, heart and guts full of loving compassion, to teach us, heal us, shower us with mercy, feed us and strengthen us in our vocation as the laborers in his vineyard. This is where we go each day into the desert to meet Jesus, where without paying or cost he feeds and refreshes us, satisfies our desires and quenches our thirst. This is where he seeks to unite us to his compassion and send us forth to carry his mercy to the world. This is where we bring ourselves and all our efforts, even if it seems a few bread crumbs and half an anchovy, placing them into his hands so that he can unite them to his looking up to heaven, blessing and breaking them, and then giving those gifts back transformed so that they can be multiplied in caring for the immense crowds. Jesus never stops looking at us and at the world with compassion. Nothing can separate us from that loving glance. And we ask Jesus so to transform us in this time with him in the desert that we may return to the world with wicker baskets full to feed the deepest hungers people have.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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