Words on the Word
Vigil of Olsok
2 Kings 4.42-44: A man came from Baal-Shalishah.
Eph 4.1-6: Lead a life worthy of your vocation.
John 6.1-15: He said this to test him.
Our two readings from the Book of Kings and from the Gospel speak of the same: a miracle in the wilderness. In both cases a large crowd eats its fill on food that at the outset was manifestly insufficient. The story of Elisha points forward to the scene at Lake Galilee. The Fathers considered it prophetic on the basis of a general notion of Elisha (who got a double share of Elijah’s spirit, healed lepers, and raised the dead) as a type of Christ. We read these texts reverently, but at the same time with a sense of distance.
For, honestly, who expects to witness a resurrection or to see one packed lunch feed thousands?
There’s a risk that we believers create for ourselves a schizophrenic universe. One pole is represented by the religious dimension of life with sublime notions of God, providence, creation and redemption; the other pole represents concrete daily life marked by political worry, rising prices, relational conflicts, and dreams of looking swell in a swimsuit. And so we live our lives in zigzag like a metal ball in an old-fashioned pinball game, confusedly and hopelessly drawn by opposite magnetic fields.
Thank God we have the Church! The Church is for us so much more than an institution, so much more than a place of coming and going. The Church is an existential dimension, a sacramental universe in which contradictions cease, in which two can become one. Spirit and matter are joined. Life as a whole becomes possible. Paulina Mariadotter liked to speak of the vocation each of us shares to become ‘entirely healed, whole, holy’. The sacraments give us the strength and nourishment we need along the way. The saints show us, in wonderful multiplicity, how such a universal process is enacted in specific conditions, in the experience of individuals.
Perhaps on these terms our readings can convey a concrete message after all? In both cases the context is the same. People have come together spontaneously; the encounter goes on; they get hungry. God’s blessing is upon the assembly. The Lord’s representative (first his prophet, then his Son) feels responsible for provision. What is he to do? The God of the Bible, the God in whom we believe, is all-powerful. He has the ability, unique to himself, to create something out of nothing. He could surely provide all that was needed by a majestic exclamation of ‘Let there be!’ as he did ‘in the beginning’? Of course. But that is not his preferred approach. He will rather manifest and develop the potential of what already is.
For Elisha the matter in hand amounts to twenty barley loaves and some fresh grain brought by a man from Baal-Shalisha. In the case of the assembly around our Lord, a boy holds forth five barley leaves and two fish. In both cases sensible observers notice ridiculous disproportion: ‘What’s this trifle for such a crowd?’ Indeed, it looks hopeless — though that’s probably not the right word, given that judgement is made by pure calculation, on the basis of the realism our time loves so much; hope has no part in it. Yet it is hope that trumps the game through love, in faith. By blessing and sharing what appeared insufficient (just enough for me and perhaps my closest friend) the bounds of the possible are extended. Communion comes about on the basis of something that was someone’s fully given over to all.
In this we discern a pattern of universal application. All of us have intimate needs, more or less visible or secret. All of us think at times: ‘I can stretch this far, but no farther’. It is prudent to be aware of one’s own limitation; it is blessed to know when it it is right to go beyond prudence and give all so that others may thrive. The feedings in the wilderness suggest and foreshadow the reality of martyrdom, the sustaining imperative of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice.
Here at Stiklestad, where St Olav was murdered on 29 July 1030, this motif touches us deeply. What is one life in the battle for a whole people’s conversion and unification in righteousness? If calculation is all we have to go on, the relation seems absurd. Yet we who receive the Body of Christ in this place, where Olav’s body fell to the earth like a grain of wheat, know that something decisive happened here, something by which we still live, by whose standard we are called.
I dare say we all know from experience the strength of perfect dedication, the joy and peace that flow from a dedicated life, transcending boundaries of time and space. Perhaps we also know the sadness lack of dedication can bring, an intended ‘yes’ that has never moved beyond the stage of a qualified ‘perhaps’?
Let us, then, ask ourselves immediately: ‘Lord, what du you call me to give?’ Then, let us listen carefully. What beatitude to be able to cry out with David: Laetus tibi obtuli omnia, ‘Lord, with gladness I have given you everything.’
Who knows what such a seed may render possible. Perhaps it will remain hidden; then again, perhaps not.
Let me end with a little story. In Mount Melleray, an abbey of my order in Ireland, there is an old trough measuring 3 x 1.5 metres. In the nineteenth century, the monks kept their flour in it. During the terrible Irish famine of 1840, hungry farmers came to the monks begging for bread. The monks themselves were poor (there’s next to no arable land in the place); but the abbot, who had to set out on a long journey, ordered that no one was to be sent away empty-handed. During his three-month absence 100 monks and 70 poor people were fed daily on bread baked from flower in the trough, which no one had resources to replenish, but which was never exhausted. I have known monks who knew monks who knew monks who were eye-witnesses to this.
If we live in Christ, we live within a reality that is in its essence boundless, allowing us to gauge what the word ‘eternal’ means. May God grant us grace to be readied, in generosity and faith, for eternal life and thereby to discover the only measure that is worthy of a human being.
Amen.
