HOMILY FOR EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME (A)

Fr Billy Swan

Dear friends. ‘The famine is over! The famine is over!’ These were the words cried out by a mid-Western radio commentator after the final whistle of last Sunday’s epic All-Ireland football final win for Mayo against Kerry. The audio clip went viral around the world in hours. His words captured the hunger, longing and desire of the people of Mayo for an All-Ireland title for which they had been waiting 75 years. There was unbridled joy when that hunger ended last week.

For people in the West of Ireland, reference to ‘the Famine’ has a deeper meaning after the ‘Great Hunger’ that took place from 1845-1852. Over a million people died from starvation.

The first reading and the Gospel this Sunday are about hunger and thirst, food and drink. The readings speak of the human need for water and food that we need to survive but they also have a deeper meaning of the constant desire of the soul to be united to God.

Here I would like to reflect on two important dimensions of the miracle of the loaves and fish – one from the human side and the other from God’s side. This story, like so many others in Scripture, bring us back to something important about ourselves and about God.

First about ourselves. We humans are creatures who hunger. We need to eat or else we die. We hunger for real food, for what nourishes us and gives us the strength to keep living. That is why the Church and every Christian ought to be concerned for the scandal of hunger and the issues around the provision of food and clean water. ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat’; ‘I was thirsty and you gave me to drink’ (Matt. 25:34ff). Starting in our kitchens, this means trying our best not to waste food. It could mean inviting someone for dinner or for lunch – someone perhaps we haven’t met in a while and might need support and kindness.

We all need to eat. It is one of the great levellers in our human family. Eating together is a sign of friendship, communion and solidarity. Little wonder that Jesus ate with sinners and saints as a sign of his mercy towards all. On the global scale, our concern for those without food stretches our compassion to places like Turkana in Kenya, Sudan and the drought in places caused by climate change. We see warnings of this scarcity of water already during this hot summer.

But the hunger on display in the story of the loaves and fish is also of a spiritual nature. We humans are not just hungry for food but hungry for God. We hunger for many things and we often try to satisfy that hunger with things other than God. But the Word of God is clear, especially from the first reading – ‘Why spend money on what is not bread and your wages on what fails to satisfy?’

Only a deep friendship with God can truly satisfy us for unless we have that, we will always be searching and still not finding what we are looking for. But when we do turn to the Lord in our need, he never fails to satisfy our need and adds even more, in ways we did not expect or ask for. The story of the loaves and the fish is another example of God’s abundant generosity and goodness that is above and beyond our own calculated approach.

For us Catholics, this divine generosity is on full display at the Eucharist which is anticipated by the miracle of the loaves and fish. There we see our God giving Himself away in self-sacrificing love as bread for the hungry. There, his infinite love comes to meet our infinite longing in a moment of loving union. And it is this loving union between us and Him – the lover and his beloved – that is brought about and made stronger when we receive the Eucharist. This is the union that St Paul describes beautifully in the second reading today as being so strong that nothing can separate us from it, except our choice to reject him.

Friends, as we sit down for Sunday lunch today, spare a thought for the hungry in our world, those both near and those far away. We pray for a share in the great compassion of Jesus on display in the Gospel where he saw a need and responded to it, encouraging us to do the same. As we ponder our nature and our longings, we recognise our hunger for God which he alone can satisfy and does satisfy in a special way with the gift of the Eucharist, the gift of himself. Today and every day, our God invites the hungry to ‘Come’ to Him and to never doubt his generosity. He is waiting for us to feed us with what we really need.

We congratulate Mayo and rejoice with them that ‘the famine is over’. But the deepest hunger in us is not for cups or titles. May the deeper hunger in all of us be satisfied by the love of God, made visible in Christ Jesus who gives himself to us in the Eucharist as ‘the Bread of Life’ – the food that satisfies every desire.