Fr. JC Maximilian

[“The multiplication of the loaves,” by Giovanni Lanfranco, 1582-1647]

One of the most beautiful, and theologically rich chapters in the Gospels is the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, which we hear the beginning of today. This chapter is so important that we spend five weeks, starting today, reading from this one chapter. This chapter is known as the “Bread of Life” discourse, and contains a profound teaching on the Eucharist.

St. John tells us that this event, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, occurs near the time of Passover. Passover is the most important of the Jewish holy days, for it recalls the mighty works of God in freeing the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt. In particular, the Feast of Passover commemorates the Angel of Death passing over the homes of the Israelites which were marked with the blood of the sacrificial lamb, on which the people were feasting. A sacrifice within the context of a meal — a very important theme for us to keep in mind.

Jesus, in the Bread of Life discourse, starts to reveal that He is the real sacrificial lamb on whose Body and Blood we will feast. The great work of God which will be accomplished in Christ Jesus will not be simply a liberation from a physical enslavement. Rather it is the liberation from sin and death. It is the food that brings us to eternal life.

In this first part of the 6th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, Jesus is concerned about feeding the “large crowd” that followed Him. The crowd has been drawn to Jesus in their suffering, and Jesus has been healing the sick. Jesus surrenders Himself to the reality of human suffering so that He can truly feed them.

Let us focus on three sayings of Jesus in today’s Gospel to help us understand this wonderful mystery. Jesus asks Phillip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” This question highlights the human impossibility of the situation. Yet it also strengthens the faith of those who hear it. How often do we find ourselves in impossible situations? Perhaps it is unemployment, or an illness, or family discord. Yet faith in Christ Jesus turns what seems absurd and futile, when left to human devices, into a cause of celebration and rejoicing. “To receive the Bread of Life, we must first sacrifice our negativity, our self-reliance, and our negligence towards God” (Cameron, To Praise, To Bless, to Preach: Spiritual Reflections on the Sunday Gospels, Cycle B, p. 101).

Next Jesus tells His disciples, “Have the people recline.” As the Apostles invite the crowd to recline on the grass, they are also encouraging the people to put their trust in Jesus. In other words, the Apostles foster hope in the people. The certainty that they have now in their relationship with Jesus gives them a certainty about the future — Jesus will provide. Elsewhere in the Scriptures, we are told “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope….” (1 Peter 3:15). We, as witnesses of Christ, are to foster hope in those around us. By fixing our eyes confidently on Jesus, we unite ourselves to the Lord in a communion of holiness.

Lastly, Jesus commands the disciples to “Gather the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted.” Why did Jesus insist on gathering up the left over fragments? It was to emphasize that what the people had just experienced was much more than an ordinary meal; it was an extraordinary encounter of Divine love. This extraordinary encounter of God’s love, experienced through the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, will find its fulfillment on the hill of Calvary in Jesus’ death on the Cross. The Divine love is without limits.

The disciples gather up the fragments so that they can be shared with others. Likewise we gather up the fragments — the brokenness — of our lives so that in our suffering, united to the Cross of Christ, God’s love is released for the salvation of the world.

To partake in the Bread of Life, we must be willing to make an offering of ourselves that is equal to Christ’s. As He gave His all for love of us, we must give all we have for love of Him.

[Icon of Jesus, the Eternal High Priest. Chosen for this Year for Priests]

St. Mark tells us in today’s Gospel reading that when Jesus got off the boat, upon seeing the vast crowd, “His heart was moved….” “His heart was moved….” What an amazing phrase, when you stop to think about it. What a very different image comes to mind when you hear, “His heart was moved…”, then the image one gets when you hear Aristotle describe God, philosophically, as “The unmoved Mover.” With Aristotle’s description, you only get an impersonal, abstract construct or idea. But when you hear Jesus described as having His heart moved, you know that we are speaking about a person. When we are talking about Jesus, we know that we are not talking merely about an abstract concept or idea. Rather, we are dealing with a God who loves us so profoundly that He took on our human nature so that He could be one with us. Jesus has a human heart; He took one on purpose so that He could be close to us. Jesus really cares for us. Jesus feels our needs and struggles even more deeply than we feel them ourselves. And he continually reaches out to be our leader, our light, and our strength. When we accept these gifts, he is pleased, truly gratified. But when we reject them, he is hurt, truly stung by our ingratitude.

Through the Holy Spirit and the Church, he extends his friendship to us, trying to draw us more fully into the indescribable joys of his own divine life, so that someday, when the time is right, we may enjoy that place he is preparing for us in heaven. We all know this, but how deeply do we believe it? Not deeply enough; that’s why the Church constantly reminds us that God urgently desires our friendship. Every human being desires to live in communion with God; only those who find Christ get to live out that communion in the form of a real, human friendship.

Two of the most beautiful signs of God’s love for us, which the Church has continued to encourage all of us to receive frequently, are the sacraments of the Eucharist and Confession. It is not surprising that these two were so special to St. John Vianney, the patron saint for parish priests. This year we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of St. John Vianney’s death, and Pope Benedict XVI has taken this opportunity to proclaim the Year for Priests, a year in which the whole Church reflects on the gift that God has given to the world by establishing the Catholic priesthood.

For those who do not know much about St. John Vianney, he lived in France during the 1800s. His journey towards priesthood was a long one; he was not considered a very good student. When he was finally ordained, he was sent to Ars, which was considered one of the most unfavorable assignments. Ars was basically a town bars, brothels and gambling joints. Few of the people went to Mass, and even fewer went to Confession. St. John spent long hours, days, and years witnessing to God’s love for the people of Ars, and God’s strong desire for them to turn away from their sins, and embrace the friendship that Christ offers everyone. His persistence in God’s love paid off. There came a profound spiritual renewal in Ars. St. John would spend long hours in the confessional – 12 to 15 hours a day – celebrating the sacrament of God’s mercy not only with the people of Ars, but also with the many pilgrims who came to hear him preach at Mass. St. John had a deep love for the Eucharist. He would spend hours in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. One of my favorite quotes from him is when he was asked what he does during his long time in adoration, St. John said, “I look at Him, and He looks at me.”

Two days before St John Vianney died at the age of seventy-three, he received Holy Communion for the last time. He was extremely weak, unable to rise from bed, completely exhausted from his decades of tireless service to his little parish of Ars. The parishioners gathered around his rectory, kneeling in prayer, tears streaming down their faces. After receiving his last Holy Communion, he whispered: “How kind the good God is! When we are no longer able to go to him, he comes to us.”

That’s what Jesus does for each of us in the sacrament of the Eucharist – he makes it easy for us to find him and go to him, and when even that is beyond our power, he himself comes to us. That’s the Heart of our Savior, a heart burning with love for us.

In this Year for Priests, this message is especially powerful. The Holy Father, in deciding to call for a year in which the Church puts the spotlight on the priesthood, is not trying to feed the egos of the priests. He is trying to remind all Catholics that God is present, active, and interested in our lives. God hasn’t abandoned us and never will abandon us. The priest, the priesthood, the sacraments, still around in spite of persecution, cultural transformation, and scandals – are proofs that God is still with us.

There are at least two things each one of us can do to help the Church celebrate this Year for Priests. First, we can pray for our priests. Jesus turned some very rough and very normal fishermen into the Twelve Apostles, men who were faithful to their mission up to the point of giving their lives for it. If Jesus did that with the Twelve, He can do it with today’s priests too – and we can help with our prayers. Second, we can pray for God to call more young men to the priesthood. In today’s Gospel we heard how Christ’s heart was moved at seeing the crowds, who were “like sheep without a shepherd.” That is a good description of popular culture in our society today, which often reveres celebrities who are models of self-indulgence more than self-sacrifice. We need more reminders in this world that there is another way to live, another purpose beyond satisfying our basic instincts. Priests are meant to be those reminders; we should all ask God to give the world more of them.

As we continue with this Mass, and as we then in Holy Communion we receive the bread of life from our Good Shepherd, let’s thank Him for not giving up on us, and let’s promise that we will do our part to keep His plans moving forward.

[La Petite Bergere, by Jean F. Millet]

I am sure that most of us know that Harry Potter is the boy who lived in the cupboard under the staircase at his aunt and uncle’s house – at least until the second book or movie. How many of you have heard of the girl who really lived in the cupboard under the staircase? That really was the bedroom of St. Germaine of Pribac. St. Germaine was born in the late 1500s into a middle class family in Pribac, France. When she was a small child a serious illness left her with a crippled hand. Her mother also died when she was still a little girl, and her father remarried. When her stepmother started to have her own children, she started to treat Germaine more as a servant, eventually forcing her to sleep in the cupboard underneath the stairs. At age nine, despite her crippled hand, Germaine was sent out into the fields to shepherd the family’s flock of sheep. Basically her family just wanted her out of their way.

Despite this poor treatment, Germaine found great consolation in her deep faith. She made herself a Rosary out of some string – kind of like this one – and she prayed the Rosary everyday as she watched the sheep. When she got older she would gather the younger children in the village and teach them the Catechism. And she never missed Mass. Even if she was out in the fields, as soon as she heard the church bells chime, indicating that Mass was going to start, she would stick her shepherd’s staff in the ground, tell her guardian angel to take care of the sheep, and then walk over to the church to attend the Holy Sacrifice. Her guardian angel did a good job; she never lost a sheep.

What’s even more important, she grew in holiness and happiness, becoming an inspiration and example even for her harsh stepmother. She was so gentle and wise, in fact, that God couldn’t wait to get her home to heaven, and she died in her sleep when she was only 22-years-old. She heard the voice of God’s love in those church bells, and she heeded what she heard.

HEARING and HEEDING. This are two important things from today’s Gospel. Jesus and His disciples are in Nazareth; the village where Jesus grew up. As He teaches in the synagogue, we are told that the people were “astonished” at what they heard. They wanted to know where Jesus had gotten all this wisdom. His words made a big impact on the villagers of Nazareth, yet they took offense at Him. Jesus was “amazed at their lack of faith.”

How do we make sense of these two reactions by the people of Nazareth? Their lack of faith consisted of their perceiving the truth of Christ’s words, but refusing to welcome that truth into their hearts. They did not want what they heard to change their lives.

Faith, then, which is the foundation of Christian life, involves two things. It involves hearing God’s word, and also heeding that word. God is always speaking to us, and we usually hear him – in our conscience, in the teachings of the Church, in the words of the Bible – but oftentimes we don’t heed what we hear, and that stunts our spiritual growth.

This was God’s constant complaint in the Old Testament, as we just listened to in today’s First Reading. God sent them prophets over and over again, to show them the way to a meaningful and abundant life, and they heard what the prophets had to say, but they didn’t heed it; they “resisted” it, they “revolted” against it.

Following Christ means both hearing and heeding the Word of God; it means keeping “our eyes fixed on the Lord… as the eyes of servants are on the hands of their masters.”

Our fallen human nature is like spiritual gravity; it’s always pulling us towards following the easy path of comfort and self-indulgence, to go with the flow of popular culture.

Today we can ask ourselves: What has God been saying to us that we have been resisting? It may have something to do with a relationship – someone we need to forgive, or ask forgiveness from, for example. It may be bringing some long-hidden sins to the fountain of God’s mercy in confession. It may be some part of Church teaching that the world around us disagrees with, and which we have not accepted or tried to understand more deeply. Or it may be an interior nudge from the Holy Spirit to go deeper in our prayer life, to take a step towards our true vocation, or to make a change of direction in some other way that has long been weighing on our hearts.

God’s wisdom, power, and goodness are infinite and unbreakable. When he asks us to change, in little ways or big ways, it’s always because he loves us and he is drawing us towards spiritual excellence. The residents of Nazareth resisted that draw, that change, and as a result, Jesus “was not able to perform any mighty deed there.” Today, as Jesus renews his commitment to us in this Mass, let’s promise to hear and also to heed him, every day, so that his mighty deeds will have free rein to work wonders in our lives.

[This homily is based on the Homily Pack for “Jul 5, 2009, Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B),” from www.epriest.com.]