Rejoicing to Give the Lord our Loaves and Fish, 2nd Friday of Easter, April 28, 2017

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Second Week of Easter
Memorial of Saints Gianna Beretta Molla, Peter Chanel and Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort
April 28, 2017
Acts 5:34-42, Ps 27, Jn 6:1-15

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted: 

• The readings of the Easter Season are an annual mystagogical catechesis of the way in which we live together with the Risen Jesus. In this second week, we begin with Nicodemus, which allows us to ponder Jesus’ words about the meaning of Baptism, the rebirth from above God gives us by the Holy Spirit so that we may go wherever the Spirit blows us, so that we might think as God thinks, so that we might live the truth not as a reluctant disciple but as a fervent, courageous disciple.
• In today’s Gospel, we shift from a focus on Baptism to a focus on the Eucharist and begin what I like to call the “Second Octave of Easter,” dedicated to eight different sections of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of St. John, which focuses on how Jesus’ gift of himself in the Eucharist is not only prophesied by the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish but also prophesies the eternal wedding banquet. Jesus worked this miracle and gave us the words we’ll be hearing between now and Saturday of the third week of Easter knowing that we would be focusing on them in the Church after his Resurrection. He gave them to the Church so that we would know how to grow in the power of his resurrection, that, as we’ll hear in upcoming days, if we enter into communion with him through eating his flesh and drinking his blood, we will have eternal life and he will raise us on the last day.
• Today we ponder the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, which has various Eucharistic resonances. The first is Jesus’ compassion on the crowds. They were hungry and he was going to feed them. In the Eucharist, he feeds our souls with the only nourishment he considers worthy of them, himself. Then we see the collaboration of the apostles and the young boy. Jesus through whom all the plants, fish and animals in the world were made, could have easily created food out of nothing to feed the multitudes, but he wanted to involve his followers. All the apostles could find in a crowd of 5,000 was what a boy had carried, doubtless only for himself: five small buns and two sardines. But Jesus took them, gave thanks to God (the Greek work is eucaristein) and gave them to the crowds. Likewise in the Eucharist Jesus begins with what we give him — the bread and wine that are not only God’s gifts but the “work of human hands” — and multiplies those efforts in an even greater miracle. Finally we see the “leftovers.” Clearly Jesus could have worked the miracle without leftovers, but there were twelve wicker baskets left, one for each apostle, to remind each of them in a sense of what we’re supposed to do with the Eucharistic food we’ve received, to go and give our own bodies and blood, our own love to the extreme, our own compassion for others’ deepest hungers to those in need. There’s no need for us to “horde” the Eucharist, to keep our relationship to ourselves; rather Jesus fills our baskets to overflowing so that we may lavishly share his gifts with others.
• This gift of risen life through communion with the Risen Jesus is what makes us strong. And it’s what in turn makes us a sign. Today we see those consequences in the apostles brought before the Sanhedrin. The Rabbi Gamaliel, St. Pauls’ teacher, talked the members of the Sanhedrin out of their desire to do to the apostles what they had conspired to do to Jesus. This was a totally different theology than that which Caiphas had enunciated weeks earlier; Caiphas said that it was better for one to die than the whole people; Gamaliel said that if we oppose the apostles we might be opposing God, thoughts that should have been expressed in the illegal trial of Jesus early on Good Friday!  But there’s something very powerful in his change and in the Sanhedrin’s decision. While the words of Jesus had not sufficed to soften their hardened hearts to the possibility that he might be doing all he did by the finger and power of God, what the apostles were accomplishing did at least get him and them to wonder. These were simple men who had, it seemed, healed the cripple at the Beautiful Gate, were fearlessly and seemingly sanely proclaiming the crucified Jesus as risen, and were willing to suffer and die in testimony of that claim. The presence of the Risen Lord Jesus in them were making them, in some sense, an even more powerful sign than he had been, at least to the members of the Sanhedrin. St. Thomas Aquinas once said that if the apostles succeeded in convincing the ancient world, which was very down to earth, that a crucified carpenter had risen from the dead when he hadn’t risen, if they were willing to live and die for this lie and hallucination, then that would be a greater miracle than the resurrection itself. The “miracle” of what was happening in them by the power of Jesus abiding in them was an even greater sign that what had been given prior to his resurrection. And that sign value grew as they suffered for Christ. St. Luke tells us that the Sanhedrin had the disciples “flogged, ordered them to stop speaking in the name of Jesus, and dismissed them.” They had the disciples scourged, just as Jesus had been scourged. It shows just how messed up the Sanhedrin was that they responded to Gamaliel’s assertion by scourging men whom they thought could have been sent by God!  Peter’s and John’s reaction, however, was “rejoicing that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name.” That’s the power of their communion with the Risen Jesus. They rejoiced over being scourged, because they knew that it was allowing them to enter into an even greater participation in Jesus’ resurrection through sharing in his sufferings and given greater witness. They grasped that if Jesus was raised from the dead 40 hours after having been crucified, that there was nothing for them to be afraid of — not flaggelations, not crownings with thorns, not sham trials, not even crucifixions. God would have the final word. Their Easter joy could not be suppressed and so St. Luke tells us, “all day long, both at the temple and in their homes, they did not stop teaching and proclaiming the Christ, Jesus.”
• Today we have three great witnesses of this type of communion, three great signs of the presence of the Risen Lord even in the midst of suffering.
• St. Peter Chanel (1803-1841) was born in France and became a Missionary in the newly formed Society of Mary (Marists) and was sent to New Hebrides in the South Pacific. At first, after a ten-month journey, they were well received on the island of Futuna by the people and by King Niuliki, but the King’s fears and envy were aroused when they learned the local language and gained the people’s confidence, thinking that his prerogatives as sovereign and high priest might be abrogated. When his son asked for baptism, the King sent worries to club him to death. But his witness of God’s love, traveling so far, immersing himself in their lives, wasn’t forgotten by the people. Within five months, the power of his sign of God’s presence, his willingness to suffer for Christ and for them, helped bring the entire island to conversion.
• The second great saint is St. Gianna Beretta Molla, who died on this day in 1962.  Born 40 years earlier, she became a pediatrician and planned to dedicate her life to sick children, but at 33, she met and fell in love with a good Catholic engineer named Pietro Molla, whom she married after a year’s courtship. They sought to live the life of an ordinary Christian couple, combining their careers with their duties to their family. In the first five years of their marriage, God blessed them with three children. During the summer of 1961, they discovered that God had blessed them with a fourth. Two months into her pregnancy, however, Dr. Molla started to feel abdominal pain. She went to see her brother who was an obstetrician, who with his colleagues discovered she had large malignant fibroma in her uterus that was risking her life and the life of her child. One of her brother’s colleagues presented her the options: The first was a complete hysterectomy, which would save her own life but take the life of her child; the second was to abort the child and then try to excise the tumor while saving the uterus, so that she could have other children; the third was by far the riskiest: to try to extract the tumor alone, conscious that the post-surgical sutures could rupture the uterus later and lead to the death both of mother and child. Without hesitation, Gianna resolutely chose the third option, which was the only one that had any chance of saving her child’s life. While she was being prepared for surgery, she insisted with her surgeon to do whatever he needed to do to save the baby’s life, even at the loss of her own. The surgery was as successful as it could be. They got the tumor and the child didn’t miscarry, but both were still at risk. Gianna went on with her life joyfully trusting in the Lord. She kept repeating to worried family members, “Whatever God wants.” She wrote to a friend: “I have prayed so much in these days. With faith and hope I have entrusted myself to the Lord… I trust in God, yes; but now it is up to me to fulfill my duty as a mother. I renew to the Lord the offer of my life. I am ready for everything, to save my baby.” On Good Friday, April 20, 1962, she entered the hospital to deliver her fourth child. She told the medical team, many of whom knew and loved her as a colleague: “If you must choose between me and the baby, have no hesitation: choose — and I demand it — the baby, save him!” A healthy little girl was delivered, whom she and Pietro named Giannina, or “little Gianna.” Giannina was placed in her delighted mother’s arms. But very soon Gianna’s post-partum pains and temperature increased. She was diagnosed with septic peritonitis. The doctors did everything they could do — antibiotics, blood transfusions, injections — but nothing helped. Throughout her agony, she kept saying, “Jesus, I love you. Jesus I love you,” until she fell into a coma. A week later, on April 28th, she died. “No one has any greater love,” Jesus said during the first Mass, “than to lay down his life for his friends.” Dr. Gianna Molla became a sign of that love in human, very modern terms, what that love really means. When it came to saving her life or saving her child’s, she chose her child’s. She was willing to sacrifice everything — her career, her family, her very life — for the sake of the gift growing within her. She was able to find joy in suffering, even death, out of love.
• St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716) was a great missionary preacher in France at the beginning of the 1700s, but he really wasn’t appreciated during his life time. He suffered so much from people who thought he was making a fool of himself, being a showman, in preaching missions and trying to bring people to conversion, but he was a sign of Christ’s own “foolishness” in doing everything to try to bring us to salvation. He suffered persecution not only from those who were resisting a basic conversion but also from those clerics and good people from whom he has asking total conversion. So much of his strength came through his devotion to the one who showed him how to be a sign pointing to Christ, to the cause of our joy whose heart was pierced because she was found worthy to suffer with her Son, the Blessed Virgin Mary. He sought to help everyone become truly devout to our Lady. After he had died, his writings were discovered and since have become the greatest preparation for consecration to Our Lady, something particularly important in this year celebrating the Centenary of Fatima. He would be urging us to find in Mary the illustration of all of the lessons of today’s Gospel, because it was in her God’s word became flesh. The secret to living the Christian life, to becoming the sign necessary, to offering God all we have and allowing him to use it for a miracle, is to be found, St. Louis stressed, by reliving Mary’s mystery in Christ.
• Reflecting on the courage of Saints Peter, John and the Apostles, on Saints Peter, Gianna and Louis, we can examine ourselves as to the holy boldness with which we live our faith and to whether we are effective signs of the Risen Christ. Jesus comes to strengthen us by his Risen Life in this great miracle of the multiplication of his body and blood from the Last Supper, so that we may bear our own hardships on account of the faith, our own physical ailments, even our own death with joy and trust on account of the power of the Resurrection and come through that communion a wonder for the world. The Lord whom we’re about to receive is our “light and salvation,” and so we respond with the words of Psalm 27: “Whom should I fear? The Lord is my life’s refuge; of whom should I be afraid? One thing I ask of the Lord this I seek: To dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” Jesus gives us an anticipation of that eternal entrance into his temple by coming to dwell within our own house in Holy Communion. The more we receive our Light and Salvation within us, the more we recognize that we are indeed seeing “the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living” and the more we will recognize the grace we need from on high, like the Apostles  to “be stouthearted” and “wait for the Lord with courage!” in this world, give witness to him before the Gamaliels and Sanhedrins and those of good will, and rejoice forever with him in the next!

The readings for today’s Mass were: