Offering All You Have To Receive All You Need
2021년 7월 25일Offering All You Have To Receive All You Need
<Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time >
In today’s gospel we hear about the miracle of Jesus feeding 5,000 people with just five loaves of bread and two fish. And not just feeding them, but having enough left over to fill twelve baskets with the fragments. The number 12 signifies the 12 tribes of Israel, meaning Jesus could feed the entire nation. That’s all well in good for something that happened 2,000 years ago, but we might be justified in asking, “So how come Jesus doesn’t feed the millions of starving people in the world today?”
The sad truth is God has blessed our world with enough food for everyone. Did you know Americans waste almost 40% of their food everyday? What’s more, American are at the same time overfed and undernourished. That is, we eat a lot of the wrong foods while wasting good food. The world wastes enough food everyday to feed 2 billion people. Clearly the problem isn’t a lack of food, but a lack of commitment to do something about world hunger. It’s a scandal that in 2021 children are starving. The gospel describes the apostles reluctant to offer the little they had to feed the hungry multitude. Jesus shows if we give our all, even what little we have, God will supply the rest. Of course, us giving all we have would be the bigger miracle.