Coffee With God

Reflection: Matthew 14: 13-21

To run away from disturbing and frustrating life situations is a natural human tendency. When faced with a burdensome relationship, setbacks in professional life, our natural reaction would be to run away from them. This is what we find in the response of the disciples in today’s gospel: That the crowd was too large and, time was too late and they were in a deserted a place – they did not want to take up the burden of finding food for all those people. So, they suggest to Jesus: Dismiss the crowds and let them find food for themselves. It looks quite normal to us, because the disciples are our representatives, who think and behave like us. While explaining the passage in the Gospel according to John, Fr. Armellini said, Jesus sees the multitude, he sees the needs of the hungry; and he gives a clear invitation to his disciples as well to look up from our little world, from our interests, and become aware of the reality in which so many of our brothers and sisters who live in hunger, in misery, who are desperate, and suffer violence. This is not the world that God wanted. Jesus has seen the hunger of humanity; hungry not only of food, but of all the needs that must be satisfied to be fully human. The life of the sick person is not fully human, neither is the life of the lonely, the abandoned, the one who lacks affection, the one who faces injustice, the one who has no home, no job, the one who cannot form a family. How to respond to all these forms of hunger so that humanity be satiated? That’s why the disciples suggest to Jesus: It is beyond our capabilities to handle. Ask these people to go away and buy their own food. Sending them away would be our safest option, so that we don’t have to worry about where would they find food, at what price, would there be someone who could not afford to buy; would there be people who would buy more and store up their tomorrows and thus there would be no more food for others to buy… Material goods are a temptation; our instinct tells us to take possession of them, to accumulate them, to keep them for ourselves, at most to share them with our family members, but then, even in the family, when it comes to money, divisions and disagreements begin. The first letter to Timothy says that the greed of money is the root of all the evils in the world. Today’s miracle of feeding the 5000 teaches us one simple truth: The wealth or treasures that we have in our hands do not belong to us. Everything belongs to God, and we are administering goods that are not ours.