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Celebrating Our Father's Boundless Munificence
Eighteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time
August 2, 2026
Thus says the LORD:
All you who are thirsty, come to the water!
You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat;
Come, without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk!
Why spend your money for what is not bread;
your wages for what fails to satisfy?
Heed me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare.
Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life.
I will renew with you the everlasting covenant,
the benefits assured to David.
R. The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.
The LORD is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and of great kindness.
The LORD is good to all
and compassionate toward all his works.
The eyes of all look hopefully to you,
and you give them their food in due season;
you open your hand
and satisfy the desire of every living thing.
The LORD is just in all his ways
and holy in all his works.
The LORD is near to all who call upon him,
to all who call upon him in truth.
Brothers and sisters:
What will separate us from the love of Christ?
Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?
No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly
through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities,
nor present things, nor future things,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature will be able to separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist,
he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself.
The crowds heard of this and followed him on foot from their towns.
When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd,
his heart was moved with pity for them, and he cured their sick.
When it was evening, the disciples approached him and said,
“This is a deserted place and it is already late;
dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages
and buy food for themselves.”
Jesus said to them, “There is no need for them to go away;
give them some food yourselves.”
But they said to him, “Five loaves and two fish are all we have here.”
Then he said, “Bring them here to me,”
and he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass.
Taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven,
he said the blessing, broke the loaves,
and gave them to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds.
They all ate and were satisfied,
and they picked up the fragments left over—twelve wicker baskets full.
Those who ate were about five thousand men, not counting women and children.
Just two months ago I had the privilege of writing the reflection for Corpus Christi. There we had John's own reflections on this remarkable day when Jesus provided a more than adequate picnic lunch for some 5000 people plus. John approached it from the perspective of Moses providing a miraculous food in the desert, with Jesus saying that he himself is this food: "I am the bread of life. He who eats me will live forever."
Matthew approaches the event from a different point of view. He does connect it to the sacrament of communion that they received at the last supper, but evokes not Moses' gift of food for survival but Isaiah's promise of a banquet. (See today's first reading.) The way Matthew shapes the story guides us as to how we as followers of Jesus should be providers for those in need around us, following the Father's boundless self-giving. Isaiah's poem of great lyrical beauty portrays our experience of life as a great banquet hosted by the Almighty:
All you who are thirsty, come to the water!
You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat;
Come, without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk!
Why spend your money for what is not bread;
your wages for what fails to satisfy?
Heed me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare.
Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life.
I will renew with you the everlasting covenant,
the benefits assured to David.
Everything is there for us, for all our needs and for our enjoyment. He asks just one thing, that we come to the banquet "heedfully", that we listen to what he has to say to us "that we may have life".
*****
On July 4 this year Pope Leo XIV journeyed to Lampedusa, the gateway to Europe for millions of immigrants. Greeting the crowd, he called for gestures that would make the “world of today and tomorrow… more human.”
To make the world of tomorrow more human
This is fast becoming the motto of Leo XIV's time as pope. But what does it mean? Is it just the typical defensive reaction to the threat from emerging AI? Or is it an aspiration springing from a genuine insight into the opportunities provided at this moment for a major leap forward, a leap boosted by developing technologies to take us to a new level of human sensitivity, of humanness?
The subject is right for this day, to accompany the story of Jesus providing a picnic meal with an over-abundance of food for an enormous crowd of people - because they had not thought to take food with them when they left home that morning. He felt for them in their predicament. They had got caught up in a mob mentality, hurrying out to meet Jesus coming ashore on the other side of the lake. Now it was late afternoon and the whole crowd seemed oblivious to the fact they had a long walk back home. "Better get them started," the apostles warned him. "There's no need for that," Jesus replied. "Give them some food yourselves."
"Give them some food yourselves." One of the things to love about the Scriptures is that we often come across injunctions like this that seem to grab in one sentence the whole essence of Christianity, of life itself. The story-teller makes it sound so simple, telling us that Jesus was actually that blunt, that simplistic in the solutions he offered to our problems. "What have you got? Share it, and see how far it goes."
Always start with doing what you can before looking for outside help or throwing people back on their own resources. Do what you can and there might not be anything more required.
Some commentators have suggested that when the people saw the group around Jesus sharing out what they had, they simply followed suit and shared what they had with those around them. It is an attractive idea, if only it could be made to work in our world.
There are of course many allusions to other themes in this remarkable story. The setting reminds us of God's provision for his people newly rescued from slavery in Egypt and then marooned in the desert where the little food they could find was simply not sufficient. The theme of God providing a banquet in the desert became a leitmotif running through the books of the bible, even in a warlike setting in the Psalm 22/23, "The Lord is my shepherd... He has provided a banquet for me in sight of my foes."
Here, on a rise overlooking the lake, Jesus tells the apostles to make the people sit down on the grass - this was no hasty emergency feeding. It was a picnic, a great act of hospitality with Jesus providing food in abundance. The formula "he said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds" will be repeated in the Eucharistic Meal at the last supper and in every Eucharist celebrated in Christian communities till the end of time.
*****
All this sets me wondering how we might make our Eucharists "more human", and so contribute to Leo's desire to humanise the world. We worry today about the depersonalising effect of algorithms, while we are blind to the way our rituals can mask the human factor in our traditional celebrations. Formal ritual can be dehumanising too.
The Mass, we say, is a celebration which memorialises the Passover, that fateful passing of Jesus through a show-trial, a vicious execution taking him down into the dark of death..., and the rising in a new dimension of life. No human being before him had experienced life in this new dimension, while after him everyone is destined to follow. He even called all who had died before him into this new dimension in which our foggy vision gives way to clear sight like the sun breaking through on a foggy morning.
We insist in season and out of season that this celebration is a community affair. We celebrate all together, with the priest as leader giving voice to the ritual formulas that express so well our memories and our purpose. Our wants, our needs as a community and individually, are gathered in those ancient formulas and presented before the Most High along with the gift His Son made of his life in its terrible ending. Jesus catches us up in his perfect act of homage to the Father of all. At the height of his torture he offers an excuse on our behalf: "Forgive them, Father, they don't know what they're doing." Don't we just!
Those who grow old in faithful observance of the Sunday ritual learn to know its beauty in the deep silence of their heart. They resent any crude attempt to shake them out of their prayer, their familiar contemplation of things divine. But still they may sense there is something lacking. It might seem at times that the ritual, trimmed down and neatly packaged is just too perfect, and in its very perfection it misses its goal.
"To gather together the scattered children of God" This is John's summary of the goal Jesus had in mind. He places it on the lips of the High Priest as the final consideration that determined them to take action, to arrest and put to trial this divisive trouble-maker. When we memorialise his sacrifice in our weekly Mass do we experience a gathering together? Obviously yes, at one level. We sit close together in the church in a familiar routine, and we mostly say hello, but outside the door either before or after the celebration. Our greeting of peace is a sad substitute for real encounter, and even that has been trimmed back again in some places.
If a stranger stands at the door to observe, what he will see is not a joyful festival of sharing food and drink but a dried out charade, as joyful as a dried tomato.
What if?
What if, once a month or even once a year, we were to celebrate our Sunday observance with a banquet laid out for all comers? Would the experience of sharing in God's banquet with the local community be as good as the Eucharist we celebrate in church with its fine words, beautiful singing and familiar rituals. There might be no need for a sermon to explain its meaning, no need for a ritualised greeting of peace. Over time there might even be experienced a moment of reconciliation between participants here and there. God's grace can work wonders; it is for us to provide the setting for people to meet and talk. It might even become plain that there are no substantial problems in sharing our various versions of Christianity!
We are gathered together in His name: is that not enough?