18th Sunday of Ordinary Time- Fr. Leo
Today’s gospel from St. Matthew includes the account of Jesus feeding the five-thousand. After mourning St. John’s death, and sensing his own destiny in that, he returned to the shore and was moved with pity, not for himself, but for the people. Immediately he begins to heal and teach. When it got late, the disciples we're anxious about people’s need for food and prudently suggested that the people be dismissed so they could feed themselves.
Surprisingly, Jesus invites them to feed the people with their own food; five barley loaves and two fish. Jesus blesses the food, and God’s abundance provides more than what is needed to feed the crowd. Truly a miracle! God’s bounty, his love for us, always exceeds our expectations. Just as the disciples witnessed the abundant catch of fish, so they witnessed the abundance of food to feed a hungry crowd.
Through this experience, Jesus was trying to help them become aware of a miracle far beyond the multiplication of loaves and fishes. Jesus was bringing them to understand that God’s extravagant love and care for us is the greater miracle. He wants them to recognize, trust, and live in the Spirit itself, who changes hearts, not just material things. Jesus’ food is God himself. Everyone who ate by the side of the shore experienced this Spirit, and their oneness in that Spirit.
What Jesus wants more than anything for the crowd and his disciples, is the faith to trust and to experience the Father’s infinite love. This is the true food that is eternal life now and after physical death. Nothing can separate us from this union as St. Paul tells us in our second reading from his letter to the Romans. No persecution, or death itself, can separate us from the love of God.
The fastest way to his unity in God is contemplative prayer. Centering prayer is entering that private place where God speaks to us through silence and slowly brings us into an unaware-aware union with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who has always and will always be in our hearts. The access to this oneness always comes in the moment- the eternal nowness of God. This oneness of being comes in stillness when we allow the Spirit to pray in us. This makes real our oneness in God and God in us.
Let us take time this week to commune with God in Scripture and in silence. As always, a great entrance point is to pray, “Our Father, who are above all, we praise you, and ask that your will be done in us that we may live fully in you and you in us.” Then God will be all things and all people and things will be in our experience of God.