Galatians 3:23-4:5; Matthew
14:14-22
It
is easy for us all to fall into the trap of being religious consumers. Even as we select the products we want in a local
store or online, we tend to approach the spiritual life similarly, looking to
satisfy our religious needs and desires as we please. If we are not careful, we can easily distort
the way of Christ into a self-centered endeavor that has little to do with offering
ourselves to the Lord and much to do with distorting the Faith according to our
own preferences. No matter how
doctrinally correct our beliefs may be or how strictly we practice our spiritual
disciplines, we will not embrace Christ’s healing of our souls by serving
ourselves.
It is, of course, much easier to focus
on getting what we want in any area of life than on accepting the responsibility
to offer ourselves in obedience to Christ’s command. In response to the disciples’ assumption that addressing
the hunger of the crowds did not require anything of them, the Lord said “They need not go away; you give them
something to eat.” Since it had been obvious to the disciples that they did not
have the provisions to feed all those people, they had asked Christ to “send
the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” The disciples had only five loaves of bread
and two fish, an absurdly small amount of food for a large crowd. But they still obeyed when “He said, ‘Bring
them here to Me.’” The Savior then
“blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples
gave them to the crowds. And they all
ate and were satisfied. And they took up
twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand
men, besides women and children.”
The
Lord revealed His identity as the Messiah by miraculously supplying food for
hungry Jews in the desert like manna from heaven in the Old Testament. The five loaves remind us of the five books
of law in the Hebrew Bible, while the two fish recall the two tablets of God’s
commandments received by Moses. From
these small amounts of food came such an abundance that twelve basketsful were
leftover, which reminds us of the twelve tribes of Israel. Five thousand men and their families were
fed, which again recalls the five Old Testament books of law. The Lord
miraculously satisfied the hunger of a multitude in a way that showed He is the
Messiah Who fulfills the promises to Abraham, which are now extended to all who
respond to Him with humble faith. As St.
Paul wrote in our epistle reading, “And if you are Christ’s, then you
are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”
By His command, Christ taught the
disciples to take responsibility for offering themselves to meet the needs of
their neighbors. He showed us all that
sharing in His life requires an offering of ourselves and our resources to
become instruments of His salvation of the world, regardless of how tiny and
inadequate we may think our offering is.
Adam and Eve did the opposite by becoming merely consumers of the
creation as they disobeyed the Lord’s command and indulged themselves. They
refused to fulfill their vocation to become beautiful living icons of God by
pursuing a path that leads only to weakness, despair, and death. The New Adam offered Himself on the Cross in
order to liberate us from such a depraved state through His glorious
resurrection on the third day. We unite
ourselves to His offering when we lift up our hearts and offer bread and wine
for the celebration of the Eucharist in the Divine Liturgy. He has restored and fulfilled the original
purpose of food and drink to bring us into the eternal communion of love shared
by the Persons of the Holy Trinity. His life becomes ours as He nourishes us
with His Body and Blood as participants in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.
When “He
looked up to Heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the
disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds,” the Savior provided an
image of the Eucharist. The disciples did not know that when they handed over their bread and
fish to the Lord on that particular day.
But had they not offered what little food they had collected to Christ, the
miraculous multiplication would not have occurred, and the crowd would have
gone hungry. Likewise, if no one offers bread and wine for the
celebration of the Divine Liturgy, no one will receive Communion.
By
miraculously satisfying so many with so little, Christ revealed what it means
for us to live eucharistically as we offer ourselves and our resources for the
fulfillment of His gracious purposes for the world. We must not offer only bread and wine or think
that communion with Christ concerns only what we do on Sunday morning. Far from it, we must live every day as those
who share in His life, offering every aspect of our existence in the world for
His blessing and fulfillment. No matter
how tiny or inadequate we may think our offerings are, He multiplies them to
accomplish His gracious purposes for us, our neighbors, and our world.
Contrary
to the religious consumerism so popular in our culture, Orthodox Christians
have a vocation to become persons in communion who transcend the individualism that
so easily prevents us from offering the loaves and fishes of our lives. Regardless of whether we have grown up
Orthodox or are now encountering the Faith for the first time, we are probably
in Church today because some dimension of the life of the Church appeals to us. It is good for us all to be here, but the
more that we have united ourselves to Christ in holiness the less that we will
focus on what we like and the more that we will lift up our hearts to offer
ourselves in union with His great Self-Offering for the salvation of the
world. “Thine Own of Thine Own, we offer
unto Thee on behalf of all and for all” includes not only bread and wine but our
every thought, word, and deed. It
includes our stewardship of all our abilities and resources, as well as our
attention, time, and energy.
We may
think that anything we could offer would be too small or unworthy to be of any
use to the Lord. If we feel as
inadequate as someone with five loaves of bread and two fish for feeding a
crowd of thousands of people, then we are in the ideal place to begin with
humility. Our Lord is gracious and
accepts the offerings we presently have the strength to make, such as a few
minutes of focused daily prayer, our feeble efforts at fasting, small gestures
of generosity and kindness to the needy, and our faltering steps of repentance.
He will bless and multiply the small
offerings of time and energy that we make to sustain the life of our parish,
such as teaching Sunday School, helping with chanting, supporting Coffee Hour, or
serving as an usher. It does not really matter
if we are eager or inclined to make such offerings, for the Savior says to us
all: “You give them something to eat.” We need to abandon the mindset of
self-centered religious consumers and learn to embrace our true identity as those
who “have put on Christ in baptism” and are members together of the Body of
Christ.
As St.
Paul taught, we are “Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise”
and “all one in Christ Jesus,” regardless of any human characteristic. The more that we offer ourselves to Him in our
daily spiritual disciplines and in sacrificial service of the Church and our
neighbors, the more that we will live eucharistically as those in communion
with the Savior Who offered Himself without reservation for the life of the
World. The less that we obsess about getting
what we want from the Lord and the more that we focus on lifting up our hearts,
the better prepared we will be to offer ourselves to Him for the fulfillment of
His gracious purposes for all who bear the divine image and likeness. He
calls us all to do precisely that.
