We continue from last Sunday in St. Matthew's Gospel watching Jesus unveil His Divine identity. His powers to heal, to restore, even to raise the dead derive from a simple, though most profound fact: while we have life, He alone is Life. He is the Creator. And proceeding from Him is the mind-bending miracle that He alone can bring about: animate, stirring, sentient, holy life. I am still filled with wonder as an old man as the humble ant standing on my palm. He looks left. He looks right. He preens and grooms himself. We humans must always stand back in reverence at this feat, for we shall never attain it. Yes, we can participate, even cooperate, but, be sure of this, even the ingredients of life are far beyond our slender powers of understanding and our primitive technology. Is this not amazing, far away from anything we can conceive, but still more confounding is our lack of reverence for this holy magic. But that is matter for another reflection.
Today, Jesus is alone in the wilderness with the multitudes. How many are there? "5,000 men, besides women and children" (Mt 14:21). Were there over 40,000, given the average family size of eight children and two parents, together some unmarried men and women? Possibly. Yet, He feeds them all "so they all ate and were filled" (Mt 14:20) .... with twelve baskets of bread left over, perhaps a fitting riposte to His unbelieving Twelve Disciples.
Jesus quite obviously reprises His provision of manna for the people Israel in the Sinai wilderness many years ago. But lest we be transported into an abstraction — stepping into the storied pages of Israel's foundation legend (as pleasant and edifying as that may be) — He makes it real for the Disciples, laying the challenge at their feet:
Now, recall the setting. The Disciples came to Jesus and said, "This place is desolate! Send the people away! It is past time that they should leave!" And Jesus, with a sense of indignance since they don't think of sharing what they have, said, "You give them something to eat!"
You see, the Teacher forces them to take the full measure of what He is about to do. This is necessary in teaching, by the way. As young college professor just beginning, I would often tell my student something truly amazing, which took me years to understand with clarity. And they would respond by looking out the window or perhaps chewing bubble gum. I learned how to solve this. I would give them the problem to solve and say, "You solve it." After a moment of silence, they would venture answers, one by one. To each I would say, "That's an interesting approach." I would recite the proposed solution's many merits but then we would come to the dead end. After several of these, I would reveal the one way through the obstacle course. And would receive this information like five, gold coins.
Jesus says to them, "You give them something to eat!" They look at each other; they hem and haw; and then Jesus performs the miracle which only God could do. He feeds them all.
The Disciples' had said,
| "We have here only five loaves and two fish." (Mt 14:17) |
.... enough to feed a large family, let us say. But which family? Having selected the lucky family who will eat, the Disciples might have a chore that they are able to complete: the human-scale task of denying themselves and feed a family. They will wait at table. This would be a godly act, a sanctifying act, uniting provider with those provisioned, and, we might say acting in God's Name (according to the same Gospel of St. Matthew):
| .... for I was hungry and you gave Me food; (Mt 25:35) |
But one family is not chosen from among tens of thousands of families present. They all have been chosen. They all have been singled out as being the most beloved. And the grace that God bestows upon each in nowise subtracts from the Divine favor received by any other family. Isn't this miracle constantly the quality of God experienced by each of us from our birth? We feel His holy presence. Each boy and girl does. And this nowise subtracts from each one's sense of His power and grace.
We learn in the Matthew's Gospel, "But the very hairs of your head are all numbered," by the Father, such is His solicitude. And we know the truth of this as we go forward in life constantly in His care: constantly watched, constantly guided, constantly loved, constantly provided for.
We are, in a sense, alone with Him. Jesus says,
|
But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door,
pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. (Mt 6:6) |
You see, we are meant to be alone with Him.
Uncanny coindidence is His hallmark, and we learn that God the Father is the Master of all timings (Mt 24:36). But such a claim is impossible! Do we say that each of us is the center of the universe? For if we say that He orchestrates the ostensibly unrelated events around us such that they dovetail into a deeply personal meaning for each of us, then we are saying that we are center of universe, the most important one. But isn't this preposterous?
How often I have been invited to preach at a church and been taken aside later by a parishioner (or sequence of parishioners) who told me that he had been struggling with something urgent and that my sermon had spoken to very the particulars of this struggle. It has liberated them, they said. It had unlocked a door. How could I have known? How could I have been privy to these details? It was startling. Perhaps unnerving.
Many years ago, I recall being desperate for a certain sum of money. It was a very large sum. And a deadline was approaching. (I was putting a relative through medical school.) I had already sold my high school ring, my stamp collection, my coin collection, everything that wasn't nailed down .... I couldn't see how I could lay my hands on this sum. I sat pondering in my office at Bell Labs, for I couldn't work. And my eyes happen to fall on a piece of paper on my desk. The piece of paper said, "Call Prudential." You see, I wasn't a suggestion but a command (an imperative verb). So being a godly man, I did. And someone appeared at my home to discuss a home equity loan. There was an attactive grace about him. I would say he had a certain radiance. Now, home equity is an easy thing to calculate, and I knew that my home's available value fell far short of sum that I needed. But I went through the steps anyway. (Call Prudential!) When I finally was notified, the sum awarded turned out to be exactly what I needed, and to the dollar. So awed was a local priest when he heard this story, that he asked permission to preach on it. (Naturally, he wanted to see all the papers himself.) C. S. Lewis has word for this. It's not a coincidence; it's a God-incidence.
So, I ask you again, am I the center of the universe? and the answer is, Yes ..... and so is everyone else. Like the feeding of the multitude, each person ate to his fill and in a way that did not subtract from the favor bestowed on anyone else. You see, the Kingdom of Heaven (and this is hard to imagine for us) is not a zero-sum game. There a limitless blessings and graces for everybody.
We all are provided with a life-lesson teaching this very principle concerning God's solicitous love. It is called family. Consider the large family. Sr. Mary Anne had six siblings. Sr. Mary Martha had twelve. Now, each one of these boys and girls knew that he or she were the apple of mother and father's eye. Each knew that theirs was the special place under their wing. It did not matter that mother and father loved all of their children. In fact, this made their love even better, more decent, somehow more right, and certainly more self-sacrificing and hold.
And this is our God: decent, right, good, and Whose power far exceeds all the armies on earth .... but is gentle and caring with His eye even upon the sparrow.
Yes, the world is filled with
little dramas,
as many dramas as there are people.
And each person is the protagonist of his or her own drama.
Yet, they do not bruise each other.
They do not subtract from each other.
Each is a spell-binding story to the God Who watches with all of this attention.
And all are held safely in the palm of His hand.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.