The Five Loaves and the Two Fish
Meditation for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost: Matthew 14:14-22
“Then he took the five loaves and the two fish, looked up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.”
The Gospel sets before us a picture that reflects a reality we live: what is the relationship between the world and religion? What links earthly things and heavenly things? For some, religion is concerned with the hereafter and the world with present life, and each opposes the other. History has seen many tendencies to conflict: those who live for religion seem to forget the world, and the reverse is even more common. There are the religious and the worldly, and they may agree on nothing. For non-believers, the universe and its goods are meant to be used well to secure human life and well-being. For believers, all this is to be rejected because it kills the life of the spirit and asceticism, as if religion were an angelic mysticism independent of worldly affairs.
In the multiplication of the loaves we see at once how Christ joins religion and the world in the right way: how he gives the “Word” and gives the “morsel of bread”, the food of the spirit and the food of the body. In the Bible, man is not made up of two opposites, spirit and body, with the first so superior to the second that everything material deserves to be neglected. Jesus taught the crowds, and when they were hungry, he commanded: “You give them something to eat.”
But the Lord Jesus did not “feed” the crowds without a particular purpose. His gestures and words immediately remind us of other events he is pointing to. The scene shows Jesus the Saviour among his people, providing them with spiritual and material food. He is the Messiah who shepherds his people. It is God meeting people in their needs: how does he act? “He looked up to heaven (gave thanks), blessed, broke and gave to his disciples…” These are the very gestures and words he will repeat when he breaks for them his Body and Blood, true food and true drink, at the Last Supper.
John the beloved records in the fourth Gospel, after this miracle, Jesus’ famous discourse on the bread of life. The multiplication of the loaves reminds us of the crowds fed with manna in the desert, and anticipates what will happen at the Last Supper, where Christ will give not the manna our fathers ate in the desert and died, but his Body and Blood, the living bread: eating it, we live and do not die. That supper will continue through the ages in the Divine Liturgy, in the sacrament of thanksgiving, the Eucharist.
“Giving thanks” for food was a custom before Christianity: peoples were used to thanking the gods for their food. And the “table” keeps its mystery. However much materialistic civilizations reduce the mysterious value of food, food has a sacredness beyond satisfying a biological need. The table and the meal stand at the heart of every love, every meeting and every feast. The Divine Liturgy is called “the sacrament of thanksgiving” because it is a table where man thanks God for the material and spiritual goods given him: he thanks him for the life he has received and everything it needs, matter and spirit.
God blesses man with material goods and spiritual graces, and man “blesses”, that is, thanks God for this love, in response to the divine blessing. This movement is the “Eucharist”, the thanksgiving. In the Divine Liturgy, at the end of the offering and at the consecration of the gifts, the people cry out through the priest: “Your own of your own we offer to you, in all and for all.” Man thanks God for all good things when he transforms them for him. Man eats the goods of the earth and turns them into flesh, blood and life. Goods in themselves have no value unless they become a eucharistic offering through man. Nothing in the world has value in itself if it does not serve man’s “life”. And what life are we talking about? His life in Christ. Man is called “to have dominion over the birds of the air and the fish of the sea…” and so to live by them for God. The holy Gifts (bread and wine) are symbols of all earthly goods, the ones most used as daily food: we receive them from God as blessings and lift them up to him as an offering.
Everything becomes noble and holy when it serves the mystery of divine love and becomes, through man, a eucharistic offering. A cup, for example, has no value when we use it for nothing. But when we use it well, or for the holy Gifts and the most pure Blood, it becomes “holy” and precious. Any material receives its nobility from how far it shares in serving the mystery of love between God and man, that is, from how far it is an instrument of thanksgiving, of the Eucharist.
Man is called to turn the whole universe and all its goods into an “offering”; man is called to carry out at every moment the liturgy of the cosmos and the eucharist of all creation. There is no opposition between matter and spirit, or between the world and religion. The opposition is in the use: for God or without him. Matter was created to be holy, and sadly we sometimes spoil its holiness. Christianity is a call to a cosmic thanksgiving. The Christian is seriously called to use all the goods of the world and give them their nobility and value by lifting them up to God as eucharist. Nothing in the world is trivial; everything can be used within the space of divine love. The question is “why” we use something, not “what” we use! “Why”? The answer to this question, the motive, sanctifies matter or corrupts it.
The Lord Jesus fed the crowds with fish and bread using the same words he used when he fed his disciples with his precious Body and Blood on the day of the Last Supper. There is a clear test of whether any use, or any material, is eucharistic; it is a clear question we can ask ourselves at every moment, when we buy a car or sell a property, when we eat and when we sleep, when we work or rest, before every action or use: do we have the courage and faith to say, “Your own of your own we offer to you, in all and for all”?
A cosmic eucharist that sanctifies all matter, that commits itself to all matter, so that it serves the spirit and becomes true life.
Amen.
Fr. Gerard Abi Saab
