At all our Masses last weekend we read about the multiplication of the loaves and fish. Jesus fed 5000 men and all the accompanying women and children with 5 barley loaves and 2 fish. I don’t think those fish were whales…it was a true miracle. This weekend we will be reading the passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus identifies Himself as the Bread of Life. He is the real Bread which Moses’s manna from heaven and the five barley loaves are but a symbol, a type, a shadow. Read John 6 when you have time. It is a true revelation of yet a more substantial true miracle.
I found a few quotes online about magnets and signs that people actually have on their refrigerators.
"A messy kitchen is a happy kitchen and this kitchen is delirious."
"If we are what we eat, then I'm easy, fast, and cheap."
"Thou shalt not weigh more than thy refrigerator."
"My next house will have no kitchen, just vending machines."
"A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.”
In the world’s most well fed country, we spend a lot of time talking about our next meal, often while in the midst of eating a feast fit for a king! We miss the current blessing longing for the next one. Or we compare the current blessing to a past blessing that, at least in our memories, far surpassed the “stuff” we have now. We are like the people in the Gospel who had just experienced a miracle at the hands of Jesus and then rudely demand,
"What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?
What can you do?
Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written:
He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”
The crowds want to see more. This hankering for more blinds them to what already is present to them at that very moment. Miraculous though the multiplication of the loaves and fishes was, it was still just ordinary bread. The manna in the desert - the bread that had come straight FROM HEAVEN - was perhaps even more impressive. Can Jesus pull off something like THAT? Can he top Moses?
Well, of course, Jesus' ultimate point in this chapter is that just by being there, just by standing in their presence, he already was topping Moses or anything else that had ever appeared on the earth. They were looking straight at the bread of life, that bread that had come down from heaven to be made in human form. But they missed it. They couldn't see it. And maybe part of the explanation for this is because they were still looking to the past, still thinking more about what Moses did once upon a time than the new thing God was doing before their very eyes.
This week, take time to see the blessings already present in your lives. If you can’t see them, perhaps you too are blinded by dwelling on the past or wanting more when you have Jesus, the Bread of Life, already present, waiting for your attention.
In Christ Jesus,
Father Mike