Only five loaves and two small fishes?

But what are they among so many? Today’s gospel exposes the conflict between the enormity of the problem and the insignificance of the means. We all have been there. Jesus feeding of the multitudes could serve as a metaphor for our great hunger. We languish for the living Bread. It satisfies and refreshes. It revives. We die without it. This is our condition: we thirst, we hunger. Existential hunger launches all our efforts. The thirst for fullness is behind every move we make.

In our relationship to the Christ, it is a matter of food. It is manna. Our endless thirst is what makes us work so hard at physical life: producing, earning, consuming. Thirst, too, excites our spiritual longings, our proving and testing, our fretful striving for virtue, even for perfection. But our hunger is so great we can get lost in it and ignore the very truth that could satisfy.

That great truth is God’s thirst for us, even in our sin. As we progress in season of Lent, we realize that, as great as our dry thirst and wide yearning may be, it is God’s eternal hunger, thirst for us, for our faith, our trust, our love, that is the central mystery of being. Jesus is the stream of love between God and us. We are invited to eat and drink of the mystery, this outpouring of love, embodied in Jesus, the thirst of God in us. Today’s story of the feeding interprets for us the fundamental nature of our relationship to God. We are nothing without God. God is our food. God is our sustenance.