6th Sunday after Pentecost – July 8, 2012
(Gospel Mark. 8: 1-9)
(Epistle Romans 6: 3-11)
The Introit prayer in today’s Mass is interesting. “The Lord is the strength of his people, and the protector of the salvation of His Christ: save, O Lord, thy people, and bless thine inheritance, and govern them forever.” The first half teaches us what it is that gives us our courage. It is our faith: “The Lord is the strength of His people.” And we find a conviction of our own nothingness when we pray, “The Lord is the protector of the salvation of His Christ . . . govern them forever.” We are nothing without His protection. With our faith we understand, as Abbot Guéranger wrote, that “All the truth, all the goodness, all the beauty of created things, are incapable of satisfying any single soul; it must have God. So long as man does not understand this, everything good or true that his senses and his reason can provide him with . . . is . . . nothing more than a distraction from the one object that can make him the happy being he was created to be.” The Lord patiently waits for all our human schemes to fail, then He will help us if we permit Him to help.
The people in today’s Gospel were not afraid to abide with Christ in the desert and to put up with the lack of food and drink. This deprivation or fasting they put upon themselves is so important for souls who aim for the perfection of Christian living. If we allow Him, Jesus will create that desert in our hearts so that, while we are in the world, we are not of the world. When the Jews were led forth from Egypt by Moses, they said: “The Lord God of the Hebrews has called us; we will go three days' journey into the wilderness, to sacrifice unto the Lord our God.” (Exodus 3:18) Today we read the Disciples and thousands of believers retired to the desert. There they were fed a miraculous bread. Let us develop the habit of avoiding the frivolities of earth and retire into the interior desert of our hearts and souls. We will receive this miraculous Bread today, the Body of Jesus Christ, and it is in this Bread that we will find Christ most liberal with His graces.
In his Epistle today, St. Paul speaks of how Baptism changes our lives through the forgiveness of sins, “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with [Jesus] that the body of sin may be destroyed, and that we may serve sin no longer,” so that we also reckon ourselves “to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God.”
Three thousand years ago King David was established for us as a type of confession and repentance and of a person being “dead to sin, but alive to God.” After his sin with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah, David was confronted with these sins by the Prophet Nathan. Despite his high position, despite his wealth and power, David did not resent Nathan for chastising him, rather, he made an immediate and complete confession of his sins and wept with sorrow for what he did. How far the mighty fall we say. But it is not the might and wealth that makes great men fall, but pride that makes them fall so far. King David rejected that pride and made a humble and complete confession and repentance of his sins. What we admire today of David is not his wealth and power but rather his humility of heart and love of God. That has survived these past three thousand years, and will continue to survive into the future. David’s wealth and power died with him as it does with all of us.
Today’s Gospel reading tells us of the miraculous multiplication of seven loaves and a few fish. A similar miracle occurred some time previous to this as reported by St. Matthew (Mt. 14: 13-21) and involved five loaves of bread and two fish. Our Lord didn’t always feed people through miracles. If He had, people would have followed Him for the sake of the food and not for what He had to say. We know He saw that these people were in danger, because He said, “If I shall send them away fasting to their home, they will faint in the way; for some of them came from afar off.” So in His compassion He fed them.
The Apostles still were hesitant to believe in His power, even after the miracles He performed previous to this. And so they asked Him, “From whence can any one fill them with bread here in the wilderness?” Jesus did not rebuke them for their unbelief, and by not rebuking them He teaches us today that we should not rebuke those who are ignorant of the Truth or those who do not understand. Instead of rebuking them He asked, “How many loaves have ye?” After having the people sit down Jesus took the few loaves of bread and gave thanks to His Father – thereby teaching us to give thanks for our daily bread. After giving thanks He did not give the bread to the people Himself, but gave it to His Apostles to distribute, and the same with the fish. In doing this, our Lord shows us that His gifts, the Sacraments, and especially the Eucharist, are to be dispensed by his priests, as His Apostles were later to become.
There is a fundamental lesson in today’s Gospel about who Jesus Christ is. He says to His Disciples,” I have compassion on the multitude.” In this statement we see the sympathy and pity of human tenderness that shows us Jesus was fully human. And in the miracle of feeding thousands of people with a few loaves and a few fish we see our Lord’s Divinity. Today’s Gospel is a clear presentation of the truth that Jesus Christ has two natures, one human and one Divine.
Both miracles of the multiplication of loaves and fishes, the one reported by St. Matthew and the one from today’s Gospel, took place on a mountain. Seven hundred fifty years before these events Isaias the Prophet described the coming Messiah saying “the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of mountains and it shall be exalted above the hills.” (Isaias. 2: 2) Long before the Messiah appeared his lofty bearing was described for us.
Who are those our Lord speaks of who “came from afar off?” Certainly some came from a great physical distance, but mystically, the meaning refers to those who after sins of the flesh, and sins of lying, thieving, murdering and others, have now repented and come to the service of the Lord. For the more a man sins, the further away from God he is. Those Jews who knew Jesus to be the Messiah came to Him from close at hand, because they had learned of Him through the Law and the Prophets. But the Gentiles who believed Christ, in a manner of speaking came from afar because no sacred writings from their past had prepared them to believe in Him. +++
We Celebrate the Tridentine Latin Mass
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