30th July 2006Seventh Sunday after Trinity

Fr David Cherry

II  Kings  4  :  42 – 44 ;  Ephesians  3  :  14 – 21 ; John  6  :  1 – 21

“When Jesus lifted up his eyes (he) saw a great company come unto him….” words from today’s gospel.

To come as a little child is to discover the Lord of abundance and that there is always enough.  

If meditating on the gospel, allowing it to come near us, to impinge on you and me is to put us in a different place, what is that place?  Where do we find ourselves in today’s gospel?

If you had to take this gospel passage and read it through slowly; then close your eyes and begin to imagine the surroundings, the hills, the weather, the smell of the sea of Galilee, what Jesus looked liked, how he lifted his eyes and so on – where would you be?

You might find yourself at Jesus’ feet; you might find yourself a long way off on the outskirts of the crowd, an observer; you might find yourself somewhere in between; perhaps attentive, probably distracted by the beauty of an infant, or amused by something else.  What would you be feeling?  What would be stirring in you?  Where are you in this story?  What has brought you here?  Do you know why you have come here?

This Lectio Divina, ‘reading for salvation’ (rather than for information or as examiners of the text); reading so that we are examined by the Word is how the gospel becomes personally meaningful as well as challenging. Entering into the story and allowing yourself to be there is a form of meditation which St Ignatius, whose feast day is tomorrow, calls ‘contemplation.’  You allow the scene to form around you and allow your own reactions to emerge.  

Allowing the gospel to have an effect on you is what it’s for.  It is meant to impinge on our lives and who we are.  It is meant to transform us at a very deep level as we allow it to engage with us.

And this allowing today’s gospel to work on us in this way is important because we are used to an ‘us’ and ‘them’ stand-off.  Crowds are usually over there –often on television : crowds escaping bombing, crowds starving, crowds in need – over there.  I don’t want to be part of the crowd.  But in this gospel, we are invited to ask: where am I in this crowd or in relation to this crowd?

But here in the gospel is a crowd.  And I am invited to be in it.  I am invited to see that I am one of the hungry, lonely, dis-eased; I am one of those seeking something more; wondering what it’s all about.  I am invited to a different place which involves a movement from observer to participant; from on-looker to one of the needy.

And the model of what that looks like is a boy with two loaves and two fishes: a boy who comes in the midst of people wondering what on earth they will do, to offer what he has.  
Unlike today’s children, in those days a child was not regarded as yet fully human.  A child was powerless, a victim of others’ whims, of no significance.

But here is an insignificant child who comes in hope and trust.   There are those other words of Jesus: “unless you become as a little child…”; unless you find your place, among the weak, the hungry; unless you can own up to how you really are, you won’t be able to receive a thing.

Jesus lifts his eyes and sees a great company.  I am one of them.  They are one with me.
In last Sunday’s gospel Jesus lifted up his eyes and was filled with compassion ‘for they were like sheep without a Shepherd.’

To come as a little child is to come with the little one has, the little one is and to discover a Lord of abundance and not a God presiding over a world where he gives to some and not to others – that’s what we do.  And it has nothing to do with God.  To come as part of the needy crowd, to own one’s own neediness (how we hate others to think we might be needy) is to begin to see that that is the truth of all humanity and the rest is a type of mascarading.  To come as a little child is to discover the Lord of abundance and that there is always enough.  

Elisha in the first lesson is brought the first fruits of the harvest (note – not the ‘left-overs’) and tells the servant:  “They shall eat, and shall leave thereof.”  A hundred men ate and there was left over.  

To come as a little child, in hope and trust, is also to discover that our suspicion and fear that that there is not enough is utterly false, a deception of the Evil One.  It holds us captive, without imagination.

The recent failure of the World Trade Organisation to reach an agreement is a betrayal of the Lord of abundance.  And it is not just their failure but ours for we are all participants and beneficiaries of global injustice, a global structure of sin.   It is a tragic deception that the myth of scarcity is true, and that the only way forward is the competition of markets on our own terms.  We can wonder then what the result of the WTO negotiations would have been like had they  meditated on today’s gospel every morning.

The gospel means you and I find ourselves in a different place. St Paul in the Epistle wants us to graps this abundance – the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fulness of God.

We prayed in the collect that God would graft in our hearts a love of his Name – a name which is a God who is with us and for us; and we prayed, that he would ‘increase in us true religion’- that there might be in us a growth of right relationship with God.

Here we come to the Holy Communion, to the God of Abundant love and goodness.  Here we receive from his priest the pledge of that abundance, for ourselves with a world in need.  We find ourselves amidst a vast throng, a great company of the needy today at mass, in solidarity with the hungry, in communion with them.

“When Jesus lifted up his eyes (he) saw a great company come unto him.”