For God, too much is not enough: 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

Oro Valley Catholic · For God, too much is not enough: The 18th Sunday

“What is every love? Does it not consist of the will to become one with the object it loves?” – St. Augustine
 
Love’s ultimate object is God  “Saul, why do you persecute me?” Acts 9:4. “What you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.” Matthew 25:40. In the sacraments, God and humanity become one  When you love Christ’s members, you love God When you love you don’t love one thing alone because everything is connected in love.  Our experience of love begins with a loving face over our cribs and we continue to experience love as we grow.  God’s love first comes to us through the love of other creatures. If love leads to the goodness of God we call it charity. If love leads only to our self, we call it selfishness or cupidity.  The goodness of love is determined by who we choose to love. Love God in all things and you have learned to love rightly. The right order of love submerges us into a world of moral ordering, because in order to love God in one another, we must learn to discipline our love.
 
Although this makes great sense to, we Catholics, a growing number of Americans have a grimmer reality in mind. In a godless and purposeless world, the cosmos came into existence through random chance and one day it, along with every love, every beautiful work of art and cultural accomplishment, will be incinerated. The universe will expand and cool and there will be nothing left but the meaningless abyss. In this view, we are all just individuals trying to be good as we determine, enjoying our pleasures and transient connections that will all turn to dust.
 
Charles Taylor, a philosopher, calls this bubble of life, “the buffered self.”  The buffered self is a human consciousness disconnected from the transcendent, from any meaning or purpose beyond my lifetime. For the buffered self, love doesn’t go anywhere. It is just a feeling that passes until replaced by another equally meaningless feeling. Matter, atoms, protons and the like are all that reality is or can be. Our own self is an illusion. Any purpose in life is also an illusion. Atheism is the grim religion of a decadent society.
 
Meanwhile, Christians and mostly everyone who has ever lived believed the contrary to be true. The “porous self” was open to a transcendent dimension of existence that exceeds ordinary, daily experience. Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas all knew that material objects come and go, that we inevitably pass away, and that all art and culture will cease to exist. Catholic theologians and believers would agree that this world is going away, but there are windows from this world to the City of God. You can see the City of God from here through the lens of love. Today’s Gospel story is about transcendence, the presence of another world. Maybe we really need our current plague for our own good. Let’s see what happens.
 

Beauty and Love: the transcendent in the daily

The Gospels are a coherent, connected account of the meaning of the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth. Today’s story about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes is only rightly understood in the context of the entire Gospel. Let me first offer a bird’s eye view of the Gospel of Matthew and then lead a deeper dive into this story we already know well, the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.
 
Temptation in the Desert
In Chapter Three of Matthew, this story is told about bread.  Recall that Jesus is baptized and then lead into the desert where he is tempted. At the end of forty days in the desert, forty days always meaning a time of purification, Jesus is tempted by Satan
 

 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry.  The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.”  He said in reply, “It is written:  ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’” Matthew 4:1-4

 
Rocks are about something more than rocks, power is about something more than power, bread is about something more than bread. They point to the source of life, the Word, the wisdom, the reason, the logos of God. Let’s examine another story towards the end of the Gospel of Matthew.
Jesus and the Eucharist
In the 26^th chapter of Matthew this story is told about bread.
 

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples said, “Take and eat; this is my body.”  Then he took a cup, gave thanks,  and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins.  I tell you, from now on I shall not drink this fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it with you new in the kingdom of my Father.” Then, after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. Matthew 26:26-30

 
Bread is again about something else; it is about the passion and the death of Christ. It is a window into another world. The Eucharist is the sacrament of a new and eternal covenant. It is about the loving, self-sacrifice of the Son of God. Ultimately, it is about the excessive love of God for us otherwise meaningless specks of cosmic dust that fight, cheat, steal and are capable of being just generally sinfully nasty.  The story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes is smack dab between Jesus’ temptation in the desert and the last supper. Why?

The multiplication of the loaves and fishes: The Excessive love of God for us
You know the story well. Perhaps, you have heard this story, taken out of context, and reduced to a morality tale. For instance, everyone had some bread tucked under their cloaks and Jesus inspired them to share and there was enough for everyone.[i]  Nice interpretation, but that is not what this story is about. This story is about a God that loves us excessively. Remember the Gospel concluded,
 

“They all ate and were satisfied, and they picked up the fragments left over—twelve wicker baskets full.” Matthew 14:21

 
Twelve baskets and twelve tribes of Israel and twelve apostles. Plenty left for everyone.
 
Jesus is more than just a great preacher or rabbi; he has Divine power over creation.   And one of those miracles involves multiplying loaves of bread so that a large number of people can eat them.[ii]  The story is about God’s excessive love for us.  The same story of excess is present in the story of the Wedding at Cana, Jesus changed water into wine, according the story, to between 130 and 190 gallons, a somewhat unusual quantity for a private banquet!  John 2:1-12. Jesus is the real bridegroom at that country wedding.
 
Both stories ultimately point to the central form of Christian worship, the Eucharist. The Eucharist is about Divine abundance, which infinitely surpasses all needs, expectations and demands, legitimate or otherwise. Both stories refer back to Christ, the infinite self-expenditure of God.  In nature, life squanders a million seeds all for one living one. Why are there so many stars beyond counting? Have you ever tried to count all the barnacles on a rocky seashore? Our God spews life, natural and supernatural. Excess is the form of salvation history, where, in an incredible outpouring of himself, God expends not only a universe but his own self in order to lead man, a speck of dust, to salvation. Pope Benedict wrote,
 

Only the lover can understand the folly of a love to which prodigality is a law and excess alone is sufficient. Yet if it is true that the creation lives from excess or superfluity, that man is a being for whom excess is necessity, how can we wonder that revelation is the superfluous and for that very reason the necessary, the divine, the love in which the meaning of the universe is fulfilled?” — Introduction To Christianity, 2nd Edition (Communio Books) by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, et al.

St. Augustine and the Love of God
When we love others completely, there is something Divine in it.  Love bind us tightly to those around us. We witness how powerful such ties are when we are at the bedside of those we love as they die. Even in grief we hope. Parents don’t want to let go of their children go; lovers are incomplete without their other half.  St. Augustine of Hippo,” is special in that he is among the first in our great tradition to realize that love is one and that all love is ultimately divine. We encounter the God who is love in the enfleshed reality of our simplest loves.  
 

A right will, therefore, is loving another as another person, to see them as another Christ. A perverse will is an evil love that desires only one’s own purpose in love, to see the other as only useful to my purposes. If we think love is only an affection, we miss the transcendent mystery of love. St Augustine wrote in his City of God, about rightly ordered love in all its manifestations.

 
Thus, love longing for what it loves is desire, and love actually possessing and enjoying what it loves is joy. Love seeking to escape what opposes it is fear, and love experiencing what opposes it, when it actually happens, is grief. These feelings are all bad, then, when the love is bad, and they are all good when the love is good.  Augustine, Saint. The City of God: Books 11-22 (I/7) (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century) (Kindle Locations 3242-3245). New City Press. Kindle Edition.
 

The God we worship, the ultimate goal of our many loves, is who we ultimately seek union with. We love and worship the love who is God, because that is what we are made for. St. Augustine, speaking of the worship of the God who is love and the love who is God said,

 
For no one would say that he had served the interests of a fountain by drinking from it, or that he had served the interests of a light by using it to see.  Augustine, Saint. The City of God: Books 1-10 (I/6) (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century) . New City Press. Kindle Edition.
 
Love is the greatest good for the human person because love is our destiny, it is what we are made for beyond the simplest struggles of our lives. It is like the transcendent reality of the loving God present in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and the miracle of the Eucharist. When St. Augustine used to give communion to the people of Hippo, his diocese, he would say, “Receive who you are.”.
 
When we protect ourselves from love, we are buffered from a desire capable of being fulfilled, the joy that comes from possessing, the bulwark against all fears and the door that leads through the grief of death. Bread is about something more than bread. Desire, joy, fear and grief all point to the source of love. The Eucharist is the sacrament of the covenantal love between the Church and God. We Christians are a porous people, because we believe all material reality, including bread and our many loves, point to the reality of all love that still dwells amongst us, causes us to desire him and transcend with him, even the plague.