A reading from the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. Jesus saw a vast crowd. He pitied them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them at great length. It was now getting late, and his disciples came to him with a suggestion.
This is a deserted place, and it is already late. Why do you not dismiss the people so that they can go to the crossroads and the villages around here and get themselves something to eat. You give them something to eat, Jesus replied. At that they said, are we to go and spend two hundred days wages for bread to feed this crowd? Jesus asked, how many loaves of bread do you have?
Go and see. When they learned a number, they answered five, five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus then said, make the people sit down on the green grass in groups or parties. The people took their places in hundreds and fifties, neatly arranged like flower beds. Then taking the five loaves and the two fish, Jesus raised his eyes to heaven, pronounced a blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to distribute.
He divided the two fish among all of them, and they ate until they had their fill. They gathered up enough leftovers to fill 12 baskets, besides what remained of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered 5,000 men, and 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. Of course, this excerpt from our lord's life, it has no chronological order. But can you guess why we have it here this morning? No. It's not easy.
I mean, it's not hard at all to figure out that. This is the season of the epiphany, the revelation of Christ in his power, his glory, his omnipotence, his love, his compassion, his thoughtfulness. That that they are the nice sides of Christ. See, that's fine. Love that.
See, the crowds wanted to take Christ and make him king right after this. They wanted to eat for free. It's what everybody is mostly. Anyway, the church is giving us is to tell us something. Epiphany means revelation, to show, to display, to manifest.
Take your pick. And what the church is telling us, and there will be other instances of it, is giving us a picture of Christ in his power. Now, I've mentioned this several times to you, but there was a book written, Valley of Decision, very good book about the steel it's a novel about the steel industry up in, you know, around Pittsburgh. But in the course of that, there's a young clergyman, Episcopalian clergyman, who comes to an older minister up in around Pittsburgh, and he's having trouble with his faith. And this comes up.
The young minister says, how can you how can you make sense out of this? That you start out with two fish and five loaves, and you wind up with 12 baskets of bread, plus a lot of fish. And the older man says, well, son, there's no problem. There's no problem. See, here's what happened.
You had this vast multitude of people. Now these people were used to traveling. They weren't a bunch of dummies. See, we we think of these people as a bunch of ignoramuses. These people, they knew how to get around.
They're on the Eastern shore of the of the, Lake Of Galilee. Anyway, you had this great you had this vast crowd of people. And, here's at the end of the day, and there's no food inside. So the the disciples notice that it's the disciples who first advert to the situation, not Christ. So they come to him, and they ask him to to, you know, to disperse the crowd and tell him to go to leave and go out and get something to eat.
Well, then Christ says, well, how much food do you have here? And they take an inventory and find they have two fish and five loaves of bread. Now, according to this minister, the older man speaking and explaining this miracle to his to the younger man who was having difficulties with his faith, he said, well, Christ then raised up the fish, the two fish and the bread, and that was a message to the multitude that those who had food would share with those who didn't have food. And so, when those who had food shared with those who didn't, there was plenty to go around. In other words, this is a manifestation of love, charity, of generosity, of benevolence.
And the younger man says, well, now I understand. Thank God. Now I'm in good shape. Incidentally, gave a book review on that book and the author was in the in the audience. And this is one of the things I hit, because if you take you see, where do you get all of this background of Christ lifting up the fish and the people who are sharing their their food?
Where do you get that? That's not in the text at all. It eliminates the miraculous. This is called modernism. It's a miracle of the spirit.
You you know how I've been talking about this, how there are these elite spirits, the gnostics, where we good old solid Catholics are very grubby. We think that Christ actually multiplied the fish. We think that Christ actually multiplied bread. We are a bunch of primitive ignoramuses. We are We like the spirituality to see the beauty of the of the spirit, of the generosity that Christ's words evoke from the souls of these un generous people.
And you can go on and on and on. And that's being done. It's being done. There are plenty of sincere, very spiritual people who say it doesn't make any difference whether Christ was God, whether he was actually born of the virgin, whether he actually died on the cross, whether he actually physically rose from the dead. Those things are physical.
They belong to matter. You see this neo platonism in there? It doesn't make it it's a mystery of God's love. And that is incorporated in this image we have, and we call it Jesus. It's very lovely.
But let's get down to the nitty gritty. It did it happen? Did it happen or didn't it happen? Don't talk to me about the spirit. I wanna know what happened there.
Two fish and five loaves of bread. Did Christ multiply them or didn't he? Don't talk to me about some act of generosity that his presence and his invitation to generosity evoke, because there's nothing in the text remotely to suggest it. But if you begin by saying that miracles are impossible, if you begin by saying Christ is not the son of God, therefore not omnipotent, then you'll have to say, well, at the same time you wanna accept this text, you can't throw the text out. There it is, Saint Matthew, around eighty AD.
So what do you have to do? Well, you have to give this rationalistic explanation. Now, the the church is giving this to us too. You see, don't mistake yourself. Don't don't overestimate your faith.
We need You see, the church is wise. The Catholic church has been around for two thousand years. The Catholic church knows the heart of men and women, just as Newman so often points out. And we are weak. We are attached to the physical.
We are we are almost made captive by things in time and space. Our appetites, our emotions, our passions, our feelings, our sentiments. These are the things that impinge upon us. And yet, we are asked to rise above all of that, and to see God in a baby born of a virgin woman. Don't you need every help I can get to to believe this kind of thing.
I need everything, and the church understands it. And that's why the church is giving us this today, To tell us here, here is the here's that boy who was born of this this woman called Mary. Look what happened. Now, it either happened or it didn't happen. There's no use trying to minimize it and giving us some spiritualistic Oh, and the word is used today a lot is metaphysical.
I I love that word. I spent about two Oh, you I sweated blood over that word, but that's not the way these people today use the word metaphysical. Goodness knows what they mean by But they this is a metaphysical interpretation of the scriptures, which eliminates any actual historicity. The Catholic church stands on the fact. Notice I said Perfect past tense of the verb to do, to make.
These things happened, or they didn't happen. The church says it happened. Don't don't whittle it away. Don't try to minimize the power of God incarnate in the son of a virgin Jewish girl. That's what we're saying, that God almighty was born of a virgin girl without a father.
In other words, it wasn't a body in which then by almighty power, a a another person was infused. That was one of the Harrisons. That's not what happened at all. That wouldn't make mother that would not make Mary the mother of God. It would make her the mother of Christ.
And the church says that Mary is the mother of God. One person in Jesus Christ, and that person stood up and said, how many fish do you have? Two. How much bread? Five loaves.
Well, go and get the people to sit around. I like that part where it says they sat around and they broke up in the fifties, I'd like flour bits. I like that. It's a nice touch. But anyway, here you have this day scene on the Eastern Shore Of The Galilee.
It's a kind of a desert country over there. Here you have these thousand 5,000 men. That doesn't include women and children, according to this count. It was a vast crowd. That's what we're being told.
And what happens? Fish are multiplied, bread is multiplied. Now, is there anything wonderful about that? We're planting the wheat right now that will be flour next year. The fish are being born or whatever fish are hatched right out right now in certain parts of the ocean.
What's so marvelous? I in a certain sense? What's so extraordinary about the multiplication of living things? Many ways we have too many living things. Think of the mosquitoes.
So what's so awful if if if Christ is God? What's what's so extraordinary about him multiplying a few fish, when it's happening all the time? Oh, there's nothing more prolific than fish. But you see, there's some who will not admit the grubby fact. Notice that I mean grubby right down to earth, that Jesus was really a human being and the son of Mary and God.
In the name of the father and the son, holy spirit. Amen.