17 Sunday B A boy with food

Four minute homilies

A boy with food

Last week we saw Jesus arriving at a lonely place to spend time with his apostles and instead found a great multitude of people. He had compassion on them and began to teach them many things. When Jesus finished talking to them the apostles hoped that he was going to send them away. But instead, Jesus told them to feed the whole crowd first. After looking after their souls, now he looked after their bodies. Jesus gives us a good example. Our souls are more important than our bodies. Our bodies are recyclable; our souls are eternal. We normally think too much about our bodies. We assume that the body is the container for the soul, but it is the other way around: the soul contains the body.

The apostles had a problem: they had to feed a big crowd without resources. Phillip said they had only 200 denaries in the money box, not enough to give them a morsel each. Andrew found a boy with some food. We too come across problems in our daily lives. Some of them difficult ones. We use our talents to find solutions. We can ask God to help us but we cannot expect God to fix all our problems. Once a man was asking God to win the lottery; an angel appeared to him and told him to at least buy a ticket.

Many people among the crowd had a bit of food when the apostles tried to solve the problem, but only one boy offered them his lunch. These people thought that if they kept their food, at least they would have had enough for themselves. It was useless to offer what they had for a huge number of people. We don’t know the name of this boy. We only know that he gave his lunch to Jesus. The boy knew that his lunch wasn’t much, but he gave it to Jesus regardless. Without it maybe Jesus wouldn’t had performed the miracle.

Why did Jesus ask for some food if he could have performed the miracle out of nothing? Because he wants us to cooperate with him. Jesus wants to use our little humanity to perform his miracles. Even though we are nothing compared to God, and he doesn’t need us, he wants us to feel useful. It is like when a father asks his little son to give him a hand with whatever he is doing.

This is the only miracle described by the four evangelists. They were so impressed that they all wanted to tell the world about it. Food was very important in ancient times. I imagine the boy looking with curiosity at what Jesus was going to do with his five sandwiches of bread and fish. He put them in a basket, where people couldn’t see them, blessed them, and began to give them to the people. You could see the eyes of the boy, open wide without blinking, counting; they became big like plates, when more than five appeared. There were thousands of them! He ran back home shouting, to tell his mum: My bread! My fish! He brought her some samples, beautiful bread, just baked; fresh fish, still moving.

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