A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, He withdrew by boat from where he was to a deserted place by himself. The crowds heard of it and followed Jesus on foot from the towns. When Jesus disembarked, got out of the boat and saw the vast throng, his heart was moved with pity and he cured their sick. As evening drew on, his disciples came up to Jesus with this suggestion.
This is a deserted place and it's already late. Dismiss the crowds therefore, so that they can go to the villages and get some food. Jesus said to them, there is no need to disperse the crowd. Give them something to eat yourselves. They replied, we have nothing to give them, but five loaves and a couple of fish.
Jesus said, bring them here. Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. He took the five loaves and the two fish, looked up to heaven, blessed and broke them, and then gave the loaves to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the people. All those present ate all they wanted. The fragments which remained over and above when gathered up, 12 baskets.
Those who ate were about 5,000, not counting women and children. This is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. All of you who come here in the morning, come with something in mind.
And it may be a very complex something. It may be so complex that you don't try to analyze it. Yet I think it's safe to say that we all share one common motive or persuasion, and that is to come into closer contact with God through the sacrifice of the mass. Now there will be all kinds of consequences of that, but I believe that's basic, that's fundamental. We may come heavily burdened with all kinds of problems.
We may come with joy in our hearts. We may come for help. We may come to rejoice. We may come to repent. All of these things.
But I think the lowest common denominator is we come to to bind again, to confirm, to reaffirm, to to reassure ourselves of a of some kind of a concrete, even tangible through these externals, relationship with God Almighty through this tremendous mystery of the holy sacrifice of the mass. The thought occurs to me when we read the account of the chosen people and of their years in the desert. The Old Testament isn't one of my favorite books, but certainly when we read how the chosen people blew hot and cold, how in one minute they're and literally minutes as far as their text goes, In one minute, they're enthusiastic about serving God, getting out of Egypt, getting going, going into the promised land. And no sooner do they start going than they start complaining bitterly. And when the going gets tough, as it often did, they turn back with regret to Egypt, to the flesh pots, to the good food, to the security, to the decent homes they had.
And they said, why in the world did we leave all of that to come out here and die? And the reading today, here we have God giving them the food they needed, bread and meat and water. Their clothes did not wear out even after years. And even then, they didn't they did not proceed on a straight direct path. They wandered off.
They joined up with the pagans. I say again, one minute they were enthusiastic for God. Oh, they were his people. They would do anything he wanted them to do. And then so soon, bang.
They desert him and commit themselves to all kinds of abominations, including human sacrifice. Now this is the story of our lives. This is the story of our lives. See, some people think when they give their lives to God in a in a in a new and a fresh way, that everything's going to be smooth. And yet, in some instances, it's absolutely the reverse.
I'm sure you've seen it or experienced it, I certainly have seen it. Here's a man who's been having a problem with alcohol. His family's been in trouble, and things are going from bad to worse. And then he does an about face, he joins AA, and he straightens up, he becomes very responsible man for his job and all that, and he guards the things that can happen to his family and to him. It's just amazing how this often happens.
But you see the trouble with this thinking is it's all wrong from the start. Somehow or other we have this old testament view that that life in this world is going to be very favored by God if we do what we're supposed to do. That's the that's the book of Job. No one's improved on it. No one's improved on it.
That God rewards those who serve him, who keep his law. And the contrary of that, if you don't, you get clobbered. See, that is not whatever you may say about the Old Testament, this is not the way it is in the New. Remember, all that our blessed Lord ever promised us was the cross. But it's his cross, his cross.
There's a a movement, even among Catholics, to have the cross without the corpus, that's the figure of Christ on it, to have an empty cross. The thought behind that is that we're supposed to put ourselves on the cross. Well to me that is absolutely I can see the point and there's a lot to be said for it. But the point is to me that misses the issue entirely. The cross was an instrumentality, a tool of execution, and a very low down mean kind.
It wasn't a decent one. Only the most wretched kind of criminals were executed. Those were guilty of treason, anarchy, blasphemy. What makes the cross significant isn't the cross, it's Christ on it. It's that Christ first bore the cross.
And he said, come after me. Take up my cross, he said, and follow me, and you will find it sweet and your burden light. Now, what I the point I wanna make is that when we when we try to serve God, none of us have a perfect past. We look back and remember, and we pine for the flesh pots of Egypt. And why not?
Why not? There's nothing wrong about that. There's nothing more wrong than feeling, feeling. Notice the word I use there, feeling, regret, and a certain longing, uncertain nostalgia for the past in which there was sin. There's nothing more wrong about that than there is in the temptation to a future kind of act.
And we certainly are clear in our minds that temptations aren't sinful. Christ was tempted to despair, which is the worst sin of all. And so that the message of the the people wandering around there, first of all, it's so human. And remember, we are human. The message of hope is the message of Jesus Christ.
And as I see it, it's the message of Christ on the cross. And we come back to the idea of starting we come here in the morning to join ourselves in a very special way, in a concrete way, in a tangible way, in an imaginative way, in a way that appeals to our feelings, our sentiments, our desires, our hopes, all of us. It appeals to the totality of our being, and we call that totality the holy sacrifice of the mass. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit. Amen.