18th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 55:1-3
Second Reading: Rom 8:35, 37-39
Gospel Reading: Mt 14:13-21
I once heard a man say, jokingly, that he would rather go to Hell than Heaven because Hell would have better parties.
I suppose he was thinking about sex and alcohol, but how wrong he was! It is God who gives us sex and alcohol, not Satan.
God’s plan for us is perfect, unending, utterly satisfying happiness. St. Paul says that it has not “so much as dawned” on us “what God has prepared for those who love him.”
However, this Sunday’s Readings give us a glimpse. In the First Reading, God invites us to “buy wine and milk without money and without price.” In the Gospel Reading, Jesus showed that he could deliver on that promise by feeding over five thousand people.
“The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season,” the Psalm says. “You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.”
Of course, as St. Paul warns, “the Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking, but of justice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit.”
Nevertheless, eating or drinking is an image Jesus used often, perhaps because we are all conscious of the need and the desire to eat and drink as well as the satisfaction that comes from a good meal.
To most of us, our need and desire for the Kingdom of Heaven are not so evident. When I read Psalm 63—“O God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water”—I mentally add “even when I am not conscious of it.”
It is God’s gifts that distract us from Him. However, if we are honest, we have to admit that none of them satisfies us. We pile up money, accumulate possessions, enter a happy marriage, but nothing on earth really satisfies us.
That is not because we are “crying for the moon,” as some people think. Nor is it because we have not acquired enough possessions or married the right spouse.
No; it is because we were made for a happiness which this world cannot give. We were made to enjoy God.
Accordingly, Jesus told us to “stop worrying” so much about the goods of this world. “Your heavenly Father knows all that you need,” he said. “Seek first his kingship over you, his way of holiness, and all these things will be given to you besides.”
In fact, it is only by putting God first that we can acquire these things at all, because they are all his gifts. As the psalmist said, “In vain is your earlier rising, your going later to rest: you who toil for the bread you eat, when He pours gifts on His beloved while they slumber.”
The food we really hunger for, whether we know it or not, is God himself. This food is always available: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” St. Paul says.
If we work for that food, we will get it, and everything else as well. When Peter pointed out that he had “put aside everything” to follow him, Jesus said, “I give you my word, there is no one who has given up home, brothers or sisters, mother or father, children or property, for me and for the Gospel who will not receive in this present age a hundred times” as much.
We have his word for it. If we hold fast to this word, there is nothing he will not give us. We who now seem to be “crying for the moon” will actually be given “the morning star,” says the Book of Revelation.
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available on YouTube in both written and audio form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course, and will remain available until the end of August. Father will teach the whole course again, with new insights, starting August 30.