Have you ever been hungry?
Not the hunger from skipping breakfast, not even the hunger
of fasting, nor ever the hunger of simply not having enough to eat, rather that
hunger which is laced with the fear you might never again have enough to eat?
We, in the so-called developed world over eat. Obesity is a
major health issue.
Human beings normally eat what is appropriate and enough to
sustain life, yet we also seem to consider the capacity to overeat as a sign of
wealth.
Many elderly eat little, sometimes very little, so they can
pay the rent or for needed medicines, while the homeless only eat if they can
get into a soup kitchen or find tossed out food – of which we in the west waste
tons everyday – in the garbage – let’s not refer to ‘dumpsters’ as that is cold
and clinical. In the garbage is more accurate.
Millions of our brothers and sisters around the world, in
the so-called under developed world, because of price, government corruption,
crop failures, literally are starving, daily, frequently starving to death.
Ever wasted morsel of food is the sin of theft of food from
the mouths of the hungry.
God also said: See, I give you every seed-bearing plant on
all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your
food…[Gn.1:29]
From the very beginning of creation having created us in His
image and likeness, part of the reality of being living persons is food and
drink are needed to sustain life.
We acknowledge and give thanks that He is the source of all
food in every Holy Mass when the priest proclaims: Blessed are you, Lord God of
all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer
you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the
bread of life……..Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your
goodness we have received the wine we offer you: fruit of the vine and work of
human hands, it will become our spiritual drink.
After the long discourse/teaching of Jesus in chapter 5,
here in chapter 6 Jesus will first address and teach about the care our
Heavenly Father takes to assure we have the means of feeding ourselves and each
other.
There is another hunger we all have, though perhaps as
‘church-goers’ we might assume, erroneously, that participation, for example,
in Sunday liturgy is all we need to eat to satisfy that hunger.
When satan tempted Jesus, so hungry after His forty days of
fasting in the desert, to turn stone into bread Jesus replied: “It is written:
‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the
mouth of God.’” [Mt.4:4]
Is it possible to ever have too much communion of love with
the Holy Trinity?
“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is
restless until it finds its rest in You.” ~St. Augustine.
Man is a being who seeks. His whole history confirms it.
Even the life of each of us bears witness to it. Many are the fields in which
man seeks and seeks again and then finds and, sometimes, after having found, he
begins to seek again. Among all these fields in which man is revealed as a
being who seeks, there is one, the deepest. It is the one which penetrates most
intimately into the very humanity of the human being. And it is the one most
closely united with the meaning of the whole of human life. Man is the being
who seeks God.……Man is the being who seeks God. And even after having found
him, he continues to seek him. And if he seeks him sincerely, he has already
found him;…..This is the truth about man. It cannot be falsified. Nor can it be
destroyed. It must be left to man because it defines him. ……I will say even
more. Jesus came into the world to reveal the whole dignity and nobility of the
search for God, which is the deepest need of the human soul, and to meet the
search halfway. [St. John Paul II, General Audience address, para. 3: December
17, 1978]
This second hunger, this profound hunger which exists in
every human heart, remains unfulfilled and intensifies unless we open wide the
doors of our being to Christ: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone
hears My voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him,
and he with Me…..” [Rev. 3:20].
When praying for those who do not yet know how to have their
hunger for communion of love with the Holy Trinity fed, it is good to remember
the mercy of Christ patiently knocking at the door of every human heart,
walking with every human being, that we might pour out our hearts, our burdens
and fears, everything to Him and it will come to pass that we shall indeed know
Him and through Him the Father and the Holy Spirit [cf.Lk.24:13-35].
This hunger Jesus will respond to in the latter part of St.
John’s account in chapter 6.
So, after the discourse in chapter 5. St. John begins:
6:1-4=After this, Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee [of Tiberias]. A large
crowd followed Him, because they saw the signs He was performing on the
sick. Jesus went up on the mountain, and
there He sat down with His disciples. The Jewish feast of Passover was near.
There is a treasure of words in these four verses that were
we to check the index of a good concordance we could spend many years
meditating on all the verses from Genesis to Revelation connected to them.
It would take pages to indicate all the connected verses, so
instead just a notation of the words, with a few comments: Sea: and all the
variations such as ocean, the deep, rivers, water; Of Galilee: occurring so
frequent in the Holy Gospels in particular; Signs, i.e. miracles: scripture is
filled with such, and Jesus manifests His authority over all creation when He
heals, exorcizes, and forgives sin; Mountain: throughout Scripture mountains
are particular places of encounter with God and Jesus’ great teachings, and His
transfiguration are ‘mountain’ events; Passover: the archetype event in the Old
Testament pointing to the redemptive fullness of Passover when Jesus institutes
the priesthood, Holy Eucharist and steps definitively into the depths of His
passion, death and resurrection for us.
We can see clearly, though at the time the disciples could
not, the full implication of St. John noting that the “Passover was near.”
© 2018 Fr. Arthur Joseph
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