“What can separate us from the love of Christ?  Famine or persecution or danger or the sword?”  This is one of those days in which it almost seems that St Paul is speaking directly to us: it might just as well have been “a reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Americans.”  “What can separate us from the love of Christ?  Pandemic or violence or injustice or uncertainty?”  The answer remains: Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.  If we remain faithful.  Nothing at all.  What keeps us going, firm in the love of Christ?  It’s his love that we experience here in worship and in prayer.  It’s the love of God we experience in the quality time we spend with our families, in our friendships: even the work that we do in our homes and offices, work done competently and with focus, we can experience the love of Christ.  Our true joy, our true fulfillment, our true nourishment, doesn’t come from what the prophet calls “those things that fail to satisfy.”  I don’t think many of us at the end of our lives will look back on our years and say, “Gee, I wish I’d watched more television.”  But we might say, “I wish had spent more quality time with my family; I wish I had prayed more; read more good books; performed more acts of charity and service for those in need.”  This is what it means to share in the love of God, and to be an instrument of God’s love in the world.  The hand of the Lord feeds us.  He answers all our needs.  And nothing can separate us from his love.  

When Christ fed the 5000, he performed an astonishing miracle: feeding such a great need with such seemingly insufficient resources.  And having so much left over.  His love is just like that.  Our spiritual needs are enormous.  But the only thing that can stop him from healing us is our own hardness of heart.  Our own unwillingness to let go of our distractions and focus on what really matters.  When Jesus fed the crowd, he didn’t simply conjure food out of thin air.  He could have done that, and it might have been simpler and gotten them all off his back more quickly.  But he didn’t.  He accepted their contribution.  He accepted their role.  He took whatever they had to offer and used it as the basis for his miracle: he took the little food they had, blessed it, broke it, gave it to the disciples who proceeded to distribute it.  They were all satisfied and there were still plenty of leftovers.  He takes what little we can offer, and transforms it miraculously into a worthwhile sacrifice.  It’s striking how much this scene points to the Holy Eucharist.  Then too, Our Lord would take the small, simple things that the apostles had with them, just bread and wine: he would break them, bless them, transform them into his very body and blood offered on the cross.  He gave these supernatural gifts back to his apostles to distribute them to the entire world until the end of time.  

God’s grace available to us in the Eucharist can never be exhausted.  The small vessels of breads and wine which will be consecrated at this Mass might seem as insufficient as those few loaves and fish on the seashore that day.  But in the hands of God, those few bits of human food will be transformed into the food of angels, the true nourishment that we need for our souls.  Every time we receive Holy Communion should change our lives.  We have this direct, personal, encounter with Jesus Christ whose body and blood we consume: he gives us the strength in that encounter to start living like he does: to get our priorities in line, to break free from those things that fail to satisfy, to live a life of sacrifice and service, to have a peace and a joy that can only come from a life lived with God and for God.  God can do all of these things for us and so much more, starting today, here and now.  May we open our hearts to him, so that he may take our lives, bless them, and transform them, so that we may be living witnesses of his love in the world.