Readings & Reflections: Saturday of the Fifth week in Ordinary Time & St. Claude de la Colombiere, February 15,2020

The evil king Jeroboam frets: “If this people go up to offer sacrifices, the hearts of this people will return to their master.” Jesus Christ, his “heart moved with pity for the crowd,” feeds the four thousand with a foreshadowing of the Eucharistic Sacrifice precisely so that they will come to share true communion with their Master.

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Opening Prayer

Lord, God the harshness of life and the struggle to produce the food needed for survival have been more and more pronounced among your people amidst greed and selfishness. Lord, bless us with your grace so that we may all be governed by honesty, collaboration, and mutual support. May we all be blessed with hearts that aim to solve many of the problems (poverty, inequality, ill health) faced by our society and the global community. In Jesus, Mighty Name, we pray. Amen.

Reading I
1 Kgs12:26-32; 13:33-34
Jeroboam thought to himself:
“The kingdom will return to David’s house.
If now this people go up to offer sacrifices
in the temple of the LORD in Jerusalem,
the hearts of this people will return to their master,
Rehoboam, king of Judah, and they will kill me.”
After taking counsel, the king made two calves of gold
and said to the people: “You have been going up to Jerusalem long enough. Here is your God, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” And he put one in Bethel, the other in Dan.
This led to sin, because the people frequented those calves
in Bethel and in Dan. He also built temples on the high places
and made priests from among the people who were not Levites.
Jeroboam established a feast in the eighth month
on the fifteenth day of the month
to duplicate in Bethel the pilgrimage feast of Judah,
with sacrifices to the calves he had made;
and he stationed in Bethel priests of the high places he had built.

Jeroboam did not give up his evil ways after this,
but again made priests for the high places
from among the common people.
Whoever desired it was consecrated
and became a priest of the high places.
This was a sin on the part of the house of Jeroboam
for which it was to be cut off and destroyed from the earth.

The word of the Lord.

Responsorial Psalm
106:6-7ab, 19-20, 21-22
R.  (4a) Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
We have sinned, we and our fathers;
we have committed crimes; we have done wrong.
Our fathers in Egypt
considered not your wonders.
R.        Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
They made a calf in Horeb
and adored a molten image;
They exchanged their glory
for the image of a grass-eating bullock.
R.        Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
They forgot the God who had saved them,
who had done great deeds in Egypt,
Wondrous deeds in the land of Ham,
terrible things at the Red Sea.
R.        Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.

Gospel
Mk 8:1-10

In those days when there again was a great crowd without anything to eat, Jesus summoned the disciples and said, “My heart is moved with pity for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will collapse on the way,
and some of them have come a great distance.” His disciples answered him, “Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy them here in this deserted place?” Still he asked them, “How many loaves do you have?” They replied, “Seven.” He ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground. Then, taking the seven loaves he gave thanks, broke them, and gave them to his disciples to distribute, and they distributed them to the crowd. They also had a few fish.
He said the blessing over them and ordered them distributed also. They ate and were satisfied. They picked up the fragments left over—seven baskets. There were about four thousand people.

He dismissed the crowd and got into the boat with his disciples and came to the region of Dalmanutha.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Reflection 1 – The bread to satisfy

“Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy them here in this deserted place?”

Some people say that this statement was an insightful statement from our Lord’s early disciples who may not have expected Him to respond to every need of the people by performing a miracle. However, some say that the disciples may have spoken out of doubt. They must have failed to remember the power of Jesus as He has witnessed to them in the past. Such a state of mind and heart is not something new to most of us today as we often fail to remember what the Lord has done in our lives.  When the going gets good and better we tend to take things for granted and we forget God’s mighty power in our lives and that He alone can make a difference in us.

In today’s gospel scene, Jesus provided enough for the needs of His people. His provisions were abundant with plenty of left over to take home to their families. The multiplication of bread / fish was one great miracle of Jesus but what appeared to be greater is the fact that Jesus fed both Jews and Gentles  (Mark 7:31) together foreshadowing the eventual fellowship of gentiles and Jews (Acts 10 &11).  Jesus united both Jews and gentiles and brought peace.“Therefore, remember that at one time you, Gentiles in the flesh…were at that time without Christ, alienated from the community of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, putting that enmity to death by it.

Today let us examine our hearts and see how open we are to breaking bread with people who come from different cultures, background and persuasion. How open are we to sharing God’s word and our faith in Christ with the rest of the world? Have we been like Jeroboam in the today’s first reading who was an agent of dissent, who instead of being an instrument for unification thwarted one and led his people into further sin by setting up worship places of false gods?

“Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy them here in this deserted place?”

Translated in another context:  “Where can anyone get enough of CHRIST and His love to satisfy in this cold and indifferent world?”

When was the last time we gave more of ourselves in order to unite God’s people?

Direction
Ponder and meditate on the works of Jesus which unite and try to see how we can apply them in our relationship with those around us.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, give me your wisdom so that I may be able to deepen my relationship with you and your people, so that I may be able to appreciate and understand life and the need for all your people to be united in the Name of Jesus. Amen.

Reflection 2 – What strengthens our faith?

Mark never paints a positive picture of the disciples closest to Jesus. Time and time again they lack faith. No matter what signs they experience in their journey with Jesus they just don’t get it. In today’s Gospel we hear Mark’s second account of Jesus feeding a huge crowd with a small amount of food. How quickly the disciples forgot the earlier miracle when they ask the same question once more that they asked then: “Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy them here in this deserted place?”

It is important for us not to shake our heads in disbelief at the hardness of heart of those Jesus called his own. Are we not often the same as they? Time and again the Lord feeds us bread from heaven at this Eucharistic table. Time and time again we find ourselves failing to become what we eat – Christ himself.

Like the previous one, this is a story about the Eucharist. The Eucharist is represented by the seven loaves. In Jewish numerology seven is equated with perfection and thus with God. This must have been an extremely important story for the ancient church as it is one of the few miracles of Jesus found in all four of the Gospels, and even recorded twice in Mark.

The bread distributed to the four thousand today is to satisfy their physical hunger. This will give them the strength to leave “this deserted place” (which harkens back to the manna in the desert in the Exodus story). The bread given from our Eucharistic table satisfies a far greater hunger then the physical kind. For we who have been baptized into Christ experience a spiritual and transformative hunger, a hunger to take the Lord into ourselves so that we can, with the grace of God, truly become what we eat and drink – the Lord’s presence wherever we go.

As we approach the Lenten and Easter seasons in the coming days let our priority be to allow God to use us, to grace us as God’s instruments to be transformed into Christ, the bread from heaven, for a world desperately hungry for his presence. (Source: Timothy J. Cronin. Weekday Homily Helps. Ohio: St. Anthony Messenger Press, February 13, 2010).

Reflection 3 – Jesus alone can satisfy our hunger for God

Can anything on earth truly satisfy the hunger we experience for God? The enormous crowd that pressed upon Jesus for three days were hungry for something more than physical food. They hung upon Jesus’ words because they were hungry for God. When the disciples were confronted by Jesus with the task of feeding four thousand people many miles away from any source of food, they exclaimed: Where in this remote place can anyone get enough bread to feed them? The Israelites were confronted with the same dilemma when they fled Egypt and found themselves in a barren wilderness.

Like the miraculous provision of manna in the wilderness, Jesus, himself provides bread in abundance for the hungry crowd who came out into the desert to seek him. The Gospel records that all were satisfied and they took up what was leftover. When God gives he gives abundantly – more than we deserve and more than we need so that we may have something to share with others as well. The Lord Jesus nourishes and sustains us with his life-giving word and with his heavenly bread.

Jesus nourishes us with the true bread of heaven
The sign of the multiplication of the loaves, when the Lord says the blessing, breaks and distributes through his disciples, prefigures the superabundance of the unique bread of his Eucharist or Lord’s Supper. When we receive from the Lord’s table we unite ourselves to Jesus Christ, who makes us sharers in his body and blood. Ignatius of Antioch (35-107 A.D.) calls it the “one bread that provides the medicine of immortality, the antidote for death, and the food that makes us live for ever in Jesus Christ” (Ad Eph. 20,2). This supernatural food is healing for both body and soul and strength for our journey heavenward.

When you approach the Table of the Lord, what do you expect to receive? Healing, pardon, comfort, and refreshment for your soul? The Lord has much more for us, more than we can ask or imagine. The principal fruit of receiving from the Lord’s Table is an intimate union with Christ himself. As bodily nourishment restores lost strength, so the Eucharist strengthens us in charity and enables us to break with disordered attachments to creatures and to be more firmly rooted in the love of Christ. Do you hunger for Jesus, the true “bread of life”?

“Lord Jesus, you alone can satisfy the hunger in our lives. Fill me with grateful joy and eager longing for the true heavenly bread which gives health, strength, and wholeness to body and soul alike.” – Read the source: http://dailyscripture.servantsoftheword.org/readings/2020/feb15.htm

Reflection 4 – The Boxcar Wall

I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now continued with Me three days and have nothing to eat. –Mark 8:2

I ate breakfast the other day with a man who 60 years ago sold newspapers and shined shoes on the streets of downtown Boise, Idaho. He told me about his life in those days and how much things have changed.

“What’s changed the most?” I asked him. “People,” he said. “They don’t care anymore.”

As a case in point, he told me about his mother, who often fed hungry men who came to her house. Every day she prepared food for her family and then made several more meals because she knew homeless travelers would start to show up around mealtime. She had deep compassion for those who were in need. Once she asked a man how he happened to find his way to her door. “Your address is written on all the boxcar walls,” he said.

I wish that type of compliment could be said of all of us. In the feeding of the multitude, Jesus gave us an example of what it means to care about the physical and spiritual needs of others (Mark 8:1-9).

It would be wonderful if our homes were known as places where hungry people could find bread. But more than that, we need to pray that our homes will be known as places where spiritually hungry men, women, and children will be loved, listened to, and given the Bread of life.  —DHR  — David H. Roper

Thousands of weary ones need consolation,
Souls of the hungry are crying for bread;
Many have never yet heard of salvation,
Many are waiting by you to be fed. —Anon.

Evangelism is nothing more than one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread (Source: Our Daily Bread, RBC Ministries).

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Reflection 5 – St. Claude de la Colombière (1641-1682 A.D.)

This is a special day for the Jesuits, who claim today’s saint as one of their own. It’s also a special day for people who have a special devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus—a devotion Claude de la Colombière promoted, along with his friend and spiritual companion, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. The emphasis on God’s love for all was an antidote to the rigorous moralism of the Jansenists, who were popular at the time.

Claude showed remarkable preaching skills long before his ordination in 1675. Two months later he was made superior of a small Jesuit residence in Burgundy. It was there he first encountered Margaret Mary Alacoque. For many years after he served as her confessor.

He was next sent to England to serve as confessor to the Duchess of York. He preached by both words and by the example of his holy life, converting a number of Protestants. Tensions arose against Catholics and Claude, rumored to be part of a plot against the king, was imprisoned. He was ultimately banished, but by then his health had been ruined.

He died in 1682. Pope John Paul II canonized Claude de la Colombière in 1992.

Read the source:   http://www.americancatholic.org/features/saints/saint.aspx?id=1889

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