Sunday’s first reading about the prophet Elisha closely parallels the gospel. The story contrasts a servant’s doubts that God will provide with the prophet’s faith there will be enough.
When humans trust God to work with and through whatever they are and have, the results are amazing! Not only is there enough, but as God’s word promises, there are leftovers. “God is indeed near to all who call,” as the psalm verse for Sunday proclaims.
Elisha feeds one hundred.
A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack.
Elisha said, “Give it to the people and let them eat.”
But his servant said, “How can I set this before a hundred people?”
So Elisha repeated, “Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Holy One, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’”
The servant set the food before the people, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the Holy One.
2 Kings 4.42-44
Prophetic people insist that God can take a little and convert it into more than we can hope or dream or imagine. A relatively unknown holy woman, Caryll Houselander, started a weekly soup kitchen called “Loaves and Fishes” in London, England, during the aftermath of World War I. She and her friends opened a modest kitchen that represented all that they could beg, borrow, and buy. Amazingly, the goodness of other people added to what the friends could provide and they fed multitudes.
Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin initiated the Catholic Worker houses on a similar faith assumption. The growing lines of depression-oppressed people drew them to set the loaves and fishes they had before the many who hungered.
God does not desire the people to remain hungry. Regardless of the multiple shapes that hunger can take, “the hand of God feeds us.” If we, or those we know, have hungers that remain unsatisfied, whose problem is it?
Sunday’s scripture readings suggest that the fault does not lie with God’s power, for faith assures us that the psalm is right, “God is near to all who call on God in truth.” If God insists, as Jesus and Elisha do, that the people eat, but hungers persist, where is the problem? Oh, oh!!!
- What feeding has God done through you?