Miracles Happen

Father Pothin’s reflection for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

The Gospel. St. John vi. 1.

Miracles always involve the impossible – otherwise they wouldn’t be miracles! Impossible, however, is a relative term. What may be an insurmountable obstacle to one person may well be within the realm of capability of another. But there are supernatural miracles – the ones where it requires divine intervention to bring about the solution. That is the kind we are dealing with in today’s gospel. Here, we have the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000. Feeding that many people without adequate resources is quite a challenge.

The Lord likes to begin where we are and with what we have. Often the Lord wants to show us that many of the problems we face are too big for us to handle. At the same time, He wants us to offer whatever resources we might have as a part of the solution. In the economy of the kingdom, this is how it always seems to begin. When Moses was facing the daunting task of leading the children of Israel, God asked him a question. “What do you have in your hand?” God took that rod as unique point of contact with the power of God manifesting on the earth. As Scripture later declares: The Rod of Moses had become the Rod of God. One thing needs to be said about God’s intervention, it cannot be reduced to a mere formula. The miracle (the feeding of thousands) was not worked from nothing, but from a first modest sharing of what a simple lad had brought with him. Jesus does not ask us for what we do not have. Rather, he makes us see that if each person offers the little she has the miracle can always be repeated: God is capable of multiplying our small acts of love and making us share in his gift.

Our Lord does not wish us to remain without doing anything if the instruments which we have at our disposal are insufficient or even scarce. Jesus asks us for faith, obedience, daring and always to do whatever we can; not to omit using any human means that is available to us and at the same time to count on Him, conscious that our possibilities will always be very small.

Andrew gave Jesus all there was available, and Jesus miraculously fed those five thousand people and still had something left over. It is exactly the same with your lives.  Left alone to face the difficult challenges of life today, you feel conscious of your inadequacy and afraid of what the future may hold for you. But what I say to you is this: Place your lives in the hands of Jesus. He will accept you, and bless you, and he will make such use of your lives as will be beyond your greatest expectations! In other words: surrender yourselves, like so many loaves and fishes, into the all-powerful, sustaining hands of God and you will find yourselves transformed with “newness of life,” with fullness of life Don’t wait until you have all the human means, don’t wait till all difficulties disappear. On the supernatural plane there is always fruit. Our Lord sees that. He blesses our efforts and He multiplies them.

— Fr Pothin