WHAT CAN WE DO?

One of the sayings of St Mary Mackillop was “never see a need without doing something about it”. In the gospel extract we will hear today the disciples saw a need – the huge crowd of more than 5,000 were in a lonely place, it was evening and the people would be getting hungry. The disciples response to the need was to send the crowd away to the nearby villages to buy food. Jesus rejected that suggestion. His response was: give them something to eat yourselves. Don’t leave meeting the need to someone else. The disciples looked at what they had, five loaves and two fish. This would barely give themselves anything but it was what Jesus used. With his blessing and intervention a little became a lot.

The story of the little nourishing a lot is written in ways that reminded Matthews’s own community of their celebrations of the Eucharist. We in the 21st century are reminded in the same way. The language Jesus uses is the give away: takes (loaves and fish), prays a blessing, breaks for distribution, collects the fragments left over.

We know our celebrations of the Eucharist and our 24/7 lives go hand in hand, one challenging the other. We live in a world of plenty, an island in an ocean of hunger and malnutrition. God has filled our world with abundance and we are to make sure that the hungry are fed and are empowered to continue feeding. We give to Caritas and the like to fee d others from what we have. We challenge economic theories that accept hunger and starvation are inevitable. They are not and it is up to us to continue to work for global change. We are nourished at Eucharist to ensure we nourish others.

Fr Adrian Farrelly