Tuesday after Epiphany
Love is a word often used, one we associate with our families and kin; it is inscribed on t-shirts and painted on decorative plaques hung on the wall.
It becomes a cliché.
Its meaning becomes ambiguous.
Its use becomes brittle and unsure.
The first reading today speaks to us of the love required of the Church. This passage from the First letter of John is a passage often quoted, and like the word ‘love’ itself, is printed and plastered far and wide. And for good reason. It is beautiful. In its gravity, it brings conversion of the heart, mind, and hands. But too often it becomes abstracted from lived daily life. We tend to glean over its ‘radical-ness’. This is where the beauty and wisdom of the Church’s lectionary illustrates to its hearers what this love looks like.
The Psalm, echoing the illumination of Epiphany, proclaims,
The mountains shall yield peace for the people,
and the hills justice.
He shall defend the afflicted among the people,
save the children of the poor.
This God, who is Love and who calls us to love one another, defends the afflicted and saves the children of the poor. In His presence peace and justice flowers. Epiphany announces that the Nations will seek, come and be gathered before the Christ. And, even in our temptation to make these too mere, oft-repeated phrases, we are met with Jesus words in the Gospel to feed these gathered and hungry multitudes.
I have heard this passage described as a ‘metaphor’. It has been said that the ‘hunger’ experienced by the multitude is simply a spiritual hunger that needs to be satiated. This is not entirely a misinterpretation, as, in the Christian tradition, our physical hunger is analogous to a deep spiritual hunger (thus the importance of seasons and period of fasting in the Church calendar). But to suggest this is the only meaning is a grave danger. It is important to note that Jesus was ‘teaching them many things’ (and therefore providing them with deep spiritual nourishment) when the disciples asked him to dismiss the crowds to the surrounding farms and villages due to their bodily needs.
He said to them in reply,
“Give them some food yourselves.”
But they said to him,
“Are we to buy two hundred days’ wages worth of food
and give it to them to eat?”
I can imagine the astonishment of the disciples as they look out on the crowds, imagining how much it would take to feed all those gathered. Jesus’ command is economic; and the disciples’ response follows suite. But here reveals a pairing of radical love with a radical economics: Jesus asks the disciples to bring to him what they have from their own supplies, requiring the sacrifice of the community’s goods, in order to feed the hungry. The community’s sacrifice is met with divine multiplication, so that all are fed still repeat excess. May we, as the Church, meet the gathering nations with such sacrifice, both spiritual and economic.
Radical love, which is the essence of God, demands that the hungry be fed.
- Tyler DeLong