Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Fourth Sunday of Lent, Extraordinary Form
March 14, 2021
Gal 4:22-31, John 6:1-15
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
The Fourth Sunday of Lent is traditionally called Laetare Sunday. That name is taken from the first words of today’s Introit from the Prophet Isaiah: Laetare Jerusalem: “Rejoice, O Jerusalem, and come together all you who love her. Rejoice with joy you who were in sadness, that you may exult and be filled from her consoling breast.” A few verses later in the passage from the 66th Chapter of Isaiah God tells us, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; in Jerusalem you shall find your comfort. You will see and your heart shall exult.” These words were given as a promise to those who were in exile in Babylon that they would return to God’s holy city and both they and the city would have their sadness turned into joy as they received from the temple God’s comfort and consolation.
That command to rejoice and the reason for it constitute an important promise of hope for us as we continue our Lenten journey in the state of the desert and our lifetime exile in this valley of tears. God wants us to know the end of the journey. He wants us to grasp that he is with us to strengthen and console us. Even those of us who are mourning, those of us who are sad over problems in the world, in the Church, or within, God wants us to know that he desires to console us like a loving mom and embolden us like a strong dad.
Today’s readings drive that point home. The first reading about Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, Sinai and Jerusalem, and the earthly versus heavenly Jerusalem, is an allegory, a typical form of analogical rabbinical argumentation that St. Paul employs in his Letter to the Church in Galatia. He did so essentially to reinforce the main point of his Letter, which is about how Christians are saved by faith in God not by the works of the Mosaic Law; therefore they can be said to descend spiritually from Isaac, the son promised to Abraham through whom God would make Abraham the father of many nations. After God had made that promise to Abraham when Abraham was 75 and Sarah was 71, he had them wait for 25 years for its fulfillment. Sarah lost hope and asked Abraham to use her servant Hagar to conceive a child, which he did, and named him Ishmael. But Ishmael was a son of the flesh, as St. Paul calls it, a son of human work. God, however, eventually visited their home through three angels and fulfilled the promise he had made: Sarah conceived and Isaac was born. Based on Sarah’s long-awaited joy, St. Paul is able to state that God says to each of us in the Church, “Rejoice you barren one who born no children; break forth and shout, you were not in labor; for more numerous are the children of the deserted one than of her who has a husband.” Just as Isaac was a miracle baby, so each of us, as sons and daughters of God born “not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God” as we pray at the end of the Mass in the Last Gospel, born in the womb of the Church at baptism, are a miracle, a chosen one. But the allegory can be extended further. Just as Isaac at the age of 13 would carry the wood of the sacrifice to Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem to be sacrificed, it seemed, by Abraham, so Christ, and we with him, head toward the same mountain, as the Lamb God the Father provided, carrying the Cross, and participate there in the triumph of the supreme sacrifice of love. We rejoice over our spiritual genesis. We rejoice over our vocation. We rejoice at how fruitful the Church has been as we make so many spiritual sons and daughters of God, of Abraham. We rejoice, St. Paul says at the end of today’s passage, at the freedom for which Christ has made us free, so that we might choose to live fully in God’s image.
In the Gospel, we continue pondering the deep roots of joy. St. John tells us the setting: “The Jewish feast of Passover was near.” Lent happens as Passover draws near, as we prepare for what Jesus did during that the new and eternal Passover on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. Jesus through the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fish, wanted to give us a taste of the nourishment that comes from God and the comfort and consolation it brings. A large crowd was there, because they had seen his miracles of curing the sick.
He led them up a mountain, a symbol of the prophesied mountain of Jerusalem, and fulfilled a prophecy that God through Isaiah earlier had said: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will provide for all peoples, a feast of rich food and choice wines. On this mountain he will destroy the veil that veils all peoples, the web that is woven over all nations. He will destroy death forever. The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces; the reproach of his people he will remove from the whole earth. … On that day it will be said: ‘Behold, this is our God to whom we looked to save us! This is the Lord to whom we looked; let us rejoice and be glad that he has saved us!”
That prophecy would have three successive and more exalted fulfillments. The first would be in the multiplication of the loaves and fish. The second would be what that miracle pointed to: the celebration of the Holy Eucharist in which Jesus would give us the choicest food and drink imaginable, himself. And the miracle of the Eucharist would in turn point to the eternal wedding banquet of heaven.
Each of these is part of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. Each is a profound source of joy. God wants us to rejoice, first, at the way he responds to our prayer to give us each day our daily bread. He prepares for us the food we need. Our gratitude should be supreme. Then he prepares for us the Holy Eucharist and makes it possible for us to receive him each day. A year ago, because of the pandemic lockdowns, we couldn’t receive him even on Sundays. That involuntary fasting should make our joy great this year. Then he summons us to the eternal nuptial feast and we look ahead each Lent to that everlasting Easter celebration. In all three, we say, “Behold Our Lord to whom we looked to save us. This is the Lord to whom we looked; let us rejoice and be glad that he has saved us.” We rejoice over our Savior and the ways that he generously redeems and provides for us.
But God’s generosity is even greater than that. He who has made us in his image and likewise wants us to incorporate us into his blessings, so that we might more deeply participate in the joy he wishes to give us through them. We see that in the way Jesus worked this miracle. He asked Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” Philip, flabbergasted, replied, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.” Calculate what your annual salary is; he was saying that half of it wasn’t enough to buy antipasto for this crowd of 5,000 men, probably 5,000 women and 10-15 thousand children. But Andrew had found a boy with five loaves and two fish, something that might have been able to feed him and a friend, but insufficient for a family, not to mention Jesus and the apostles. But Jesus started the miracle with that meager offering. St. John tells us, Jesus “took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were reclining, and also as much of the fish as they wanted.” Just in case you’ve heard people say about this scene that Jesus just catalyzed a miracle of sharing in which people took out the food they were hoarding and gave it to others and it fed the whole crowd to satiation and filled 12 baskets of leftovers, notice that Jesus himself took and distributed. In St. Marks’ version it says that Jesus gave them to the apostles who in turn distributed them to the crowds. They were all coming ultimately from the five loaves and two fish that Jesus miraculously multiplied. Five loaves and two fish plus the Lord was enough. The point is that God who had created all the food in the world could have easily worked the miracle ex nihilo, like Creation. But he chose rather to begin with the small contribution of a boy. He often chooses to act that way. We see it at the wedding feast of Cana. He could have created out of nothing an Amarone wine fountain, but he incorporated the efforts of the servants, making them scamper back and forth to the well in Cana to fill up six thirty gallon water jars, which they did zealously to the brim. Then he did his miracle, making 180 gallons of precious wine, enough for 912 wine bottles (750 ml). We see that he could have carried out his mission of salvation all by himself, but he wanted to involve the efforts of the apostles, the disciples, and you and me. Jesus’ trust in us, his calling and commissioning of us, is likewise a cause of great joy.
Even Lent is a time in which God wants our cooperation to work a moral miracle sanctification in us. He asks us to consecrate our time to him in prayer. On a given day, responsibilities may be such that all we may have are five minutes and two seconds, but he can start there. If we can give him more, however, he would like us to give him more. Similarly he wants us to be generous in our fasting; the hungrier we become, the more grateful we will be for all of his blessings, beginning with daily bread, not to mention daily Mass and the hunger and thirst for holiness that will lead us to heaven. He wants us to become generous distributors of his providence through our almsgiving, as we share with others the blessings he has multiplied in our life. What we can give away might be a sacrifice that might not seem all that great, but when given to the Lord with faith, as we see in the Gospel, he can do incredible things.
Whenever I ponder the miracle of the multiplication of the five loaves and two fish, I think about the late Cardinal Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, a Vietnamese prelate who died in 2002, whom I had the privilege to get to befriend in Rome when he was the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in Rome. As soon as the Communists took over South Vietnam in 1975, they arrested him, who was then the Archbishop of Saigon, 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 then his “stomach medicine.” He had no stomach ailment at the time, but his family knew that that was the way to smuggle in some secret wine. Every night, in darkness, he would put a very small piece of bread, three drops of wine from his “stomach medicine” bottle and one drop of water on the altar of his hand and celebrate the Mass from memory. He made a small tabernacle out of an old cigarette case to bring the Eucharist, when he could, to those Catholics under arrest in the camp. His guards maltreated him. He was often starved for days and taunted. He was at one point in a place where the only light that would come into the vermin infested cell was through the area underneath the solid door. He couldn’t tell what the dates were and was trying not to lose his mind. He cried out to the Lord in prayer, asking what sense it made for him to be in prison when the people the Lord had sent him to serve desperately needed to shepherd to guide them as the communist wolves were on the attack. He desperately wanted to be doing something, rather than in a filthy, damp prison cell apparently doing nothing. But in prayer, the Lord led him to meditate on the passage from today’s Gospel of the young boy with the five loaves and two fish. He wrote about his discovery in a 1997 book called “Five Loaves and Two Fish.” Thuan recounted the Lord had helped him to see that he might not be able to give the Lord very much, but he could start by giving him all whatever he had— the little attention he was able to muster, his daily Mass on his hand, his sufferings and sacrifices — knowing that when they were offered to the Lord in the same spirit as that young boy, 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 day calendars to jot down whatever spiritual insights the Lord gave him. He started to pass them under his door to a young boy named Quang who would pass by his cell, and Quang would 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. 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 came to realize 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 to help keep the Vietnamese faithful in the face of a brutal Communist regime. Eventually he was freed, came to Rome, was made President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, a Cardinal, and was asked to preach the retreat for the Pope and the Curia in the great Jubilee of the Year 2000.
The great lesson of his life is that no matter what our situation, whether good or bad, the Lord is asking for our cooperation, our five loaves and two fish, and the faith that when we place them in his hands, he can do great things. That’s what we do, of course, at Mass. In the Eucharist, Jesus again takes bread, blesses it, breaks it and gives it once more in a multiplication that is even more miraculous than on the Galilean hills, stretching across the centuries, in every land, from the Upper Room to here at St. Agnes Church. This is a sacrifice that has fed billions of God’s children and prepared them for the heavenly banquet. In the way Christ established it, he shows how he wanted our intimate involvement. We use not grain and grapes, but bread and wine, a combination of his gift and the “work of human hands,” since God intended from the beginning our own contribution in this one great sacrifice to the Father, this sacrifice of Christ together with His Mystical Body, the Church. It’s through the Eucharist that God comforts us as a mother comforts her child. It’s in the Eucharist that he prepares a rich feast. It’s here where Jesus, who came into the world so that his joy might be in us and our joy might be complete, wishes to fill us with his joy as we enter into communion with him. And it’s from here where he gives us the courage and the generosity to offer our whole lives to him and his service, so that the Lord, in feeding us now, may use us and all we have to feed the multitudes. The offertory awaits. Let us put on the paten all we have.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Galatians
For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the freeborn woman. The son of the slave woman was born naturally, the son of the freeborn through a promise. Now this is an allegory. These women represent two covenants. One was from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; this is Hagar. Hagar represents Sinai, a mountain in Arabia; it corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery along with her children. But the Jerusalem above is freeborn, and she is our mother. For it is written: “Rejoice, you barren one who bore no children; break forth and shout, you who were not in labor; for more numerous are the children of the deserted one than of her who has a husband.” Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of the promise. But just as then the child of the flesh persecuted the child of the spirit, it is the same now. But what does the scripture say? “Drive out the slave woman and her son! For the son of the slave woman shall not share the inheritance with the son” of the freeborn. Therefore, brothers, we are children not of the slave woman but of the freeborn woman.
The continuation of the Gospel according to St. John
Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee. A large crowd followed him, because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick.Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples. The Jewish feast of Passover was near. When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, he said to Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” He said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little [bit].” One of his disciples, Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people recline.” Now there was a great deal of grass in that place. So the men reclined, about five thousand in number. Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were reclining, and also as much of the fish as they wanted. When they had had their fill, he said to his disciples, “Gather the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted.” So they collected them, and filled twelve wicker baskets* with fragments from the five barley loaves that had been more than they could eat. When the people saw the sign he had done, they said, “This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world.” Since Jesus knew that they were going to come and carry him off to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain alone.
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