"WHAT GOOD ARE THESE FOR SO MANY?"

17^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.  John 6:1-15.

AIM: To show that our meager resources are transformed when offered to God; but that God=s power is not at our disposal.

 

Responding to the rectory doorbell, a priest encountered a young woman he had never seen before. She was weeping and wanted to talk to a priest. Amid tears she stated her problem: AMy husband is having an affair.@ Her heart was broken.

Somewhere in this church right now there is a person with a broken heart, or at least a bruised one. Perhaps it is a family problem, financial difficulty, or some bitter injustice. Or maybe the problem is your inability to get your life together.  When you look within, you see a tangle of loose ends, broken resolutions, and failures. You ask yourself: AWill my life ever be different, better?@ And deep in your heart you fear that the answer may be No. 

The gospel we have just heard describes a problem every bit as insoluble as any we face: the impossibility of feeding a vast crowd far from any source of food.  Jesus= friend Philip says the situation is hopeless: ATwo hundred days= wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.@ Philip is your classic pessimist. No sooner is a solution proposed for a problem, than the pessimist says at once: AOh, that=s no good. We tried that before and it didn’t work.@

Another friend, Andrew, is a bit more practical. Instead of concentrating on the magnitude of the problem, he looks first at the means for solving it. AThere is some food,@ Andrew says. AThere is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.@ Yet even Andrew has to acknowledge that these resources are pitifully inadequate, for he adds immediately: ABut what good are these for so many?@

This brief exchange between Jesus and his two friends is merely the prelude to the story. Jesus wastes no time in discussion. Instead he acts. We must leave to the scripture scholars the question, AWhat really happened?@ The preacher=s task is not so much to explain the gospel stories, as to show their significance for us today. What this story tells us is this. When we place our resources, however inadequate they may be, in the hands of Jesus Christ, we discover that they are inadequate no longer. 

You come here with your burdens, your problems, your pain. Some of those problems may seem insoluble, the pains unbearable. If you look only at your own strength and your own resources, you have every reason for discouragement C perhaps even for despair.

But offer those resources, however inadequate they maybe, to Jesus Christ, and you will find that they are transformed beyond imagining. When to our weakness is added the strength and power of God, made available to us in his Son Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, then great things can happen in and through even people as weak and poor as we know ourselves to be.

Look down C at your problems, your woefully insufficient means of dealing with them; look at your weakness of will, your inconstancy, your many compromises and frequent falls C look down, I say, at all that, and you will indeed have every reason for pessimism. But look up C up into the face of Jesus Christ, your divine Savior, but also your brother, your lover, and your best friend. Place your pitifully inadequate strength, which you know to be little more than weakness, into his hands; and then you will find that the impossible happens. The problem you thought insoluble may not disappear, but it will not ultimately defeat you. The pain which seem unbearable can be borne, the heavy burden carried. Whenever we place our littleness into the hands of Jesus Christ, it becomes greatness. The impossible happens. Where before there had been only discouragement and despair, there is hope and joy.

I could stop there. But this story has more spiritual nourishment for us than the message of hope for those who think their situation is hopeless, their problems insoluble, their pain unbearable. The people who experienced Jesus= miracle were so impressed that they wanted to capture his power, to make sure that it would be available to them always. That is the significance of their desire to make Jesus a king. Here, they think, is the one who can get this hated Roman government of occupation off our backs. Someone who can feed such a vast crowd here in the wilderness is surely capable of greater things still. In this expectation, however, the people are disappointed. Jesus, we read, Awithdrew to the mountain alone.@

Jesus Christ is never at our disposal. We are at his disposal. The power of God, which is at work in Jesus, is not some kind of automatic solution that we can turn on at will, like the electric light. You cannot Acapture@ Jesus Christ, any more than the people in today=s gospel who wanted to make him king could capture him.

In Jesus there is power, certainly. It is not power, however, to do our own thing. Jesus empowers us to do God=s thing. Jesus= power is the power of love.  Love is creative. Once truly touched by love, we become capable of things that previously seemed beyond us. People in love sacrifice for the one they love: they are happy to sacrifice. People touched and filled by love can run where before they could scarcely walk. That is the power of Jesus Christ: the creative power of love, a force which will not always transform our problems, but which will infallibly transform us, if we will but entrust ourselves to Jesus, and to his love for us, without reserve.

Here in the Eucharist, Jesus repeats the miracle recounted in today=s gospel.  Here we, the hungry and weary people God, are fed by Jesus Christ with bread in the wilderness of our earthly pilgrimage; that Adaily bread@ for which Jesus taught us to pray: ordinary bread, transformed on the altar through the power of the Holy Spirit into the Lord’s crucified and risen body: nourishment, support, and strength as we stumble onward toward our heavenly homeland, lying down to rest each night a day=s march nearer home.