Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD of the Catholic Theological Union. The Gospel was Matthew 14:13-21, the feeding of the multitude.
It is the generous extravagance and abundance of “the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” that we need to keep in mind in this trying, difficult, almost unbearable time in our lives. We are in that “deserted place” and it is “already late.” If you are like me, it’s not just the COVID-19 pandemic that is terrifying — and that is terrifying enough. It is the racism and hatred that has revealed itself, the shocking individualism that is prolonging the agony of these months, the painful call (for some of us — liberating for others!) to revise our history and our heroes, the dangerous disregard for science and real wisdom that is harming an entire generation. It is the disregard for human lives, especially Black lives today, that is making us pant with thirst. It is a refusal to see the harm we are causing to our planet, and to future generations of plants and animals and human children, that is making us faint with hunger. We desperately need the love of God in Jesus to feed us with hope, with compassion, with patience, with perseverance.
Jesus will do it; Jesus sees us in this deserted place and has the same compassion on us that he had for that teeming crowd on the other side of the lake. But he will have compassion not in some “miraculous” way without our help. He needs our heeding, our listening, our offering of our loaves and fishes, our partnership in his continuing mission.