Week 18 PA Year A

“They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”

They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.”

There is a popular saying that “There is no such thing as a free lunch”. Indeed, in worldly terms that is entirely true.  If someone is offering something for free; there is usually a catch!   It is invariably because they are not only expecting to get something in return but usually to get even more back than they have given you.

Indeed, another term “a sprat to catch a mackerel” may seemingly be taken from the sage advice of fishermen, who bring us part of the food on which we depend.  But yet that seemingly harmless phrase has emphasis on the notion of a somewhat worldly, cynical view of life, that you just need to dangle a little bit on the hook to catch a far bigger fish.  In short promise little, and get more back in return.

And so, we turn to today’s readings. They are diametrically opposite to those human and worldly notions.

In our Gospel reading it is Our Lord Himself who initiated the free lunch. Or was it?  There is a very important line in todays Gospel where Our Lord addresses the Disciples directly and says “you give them something to eat” The Disciples pointed out to Him, in the same worldly terms, that we would still use now, to say that “we do not have anywhere enough to feed 5000 people” And yet he was not in anyway discouraged by their lack of faith. He proceeded to transform the food available and which His disciples distributed into far more than enough, to feed the crowd with all that they needed. But, just to prove the point, He made them gather all of the surplus scraps; which amounted to far more than the meagre few loaves and fishes that the disciples had provided in the first place.

There is the revelation that there really is no such thing as a free lunch. There indeed is the sprat to catch a mackerel.  There is the catch.  Yet a catch done to teach His disciples and also in turn to teach us, of what is in our own best interests. He wants us to work with Him and of course He will help us with that if we believe in His power

Ishiah makes the same point to trust absolutely in God.  Throughout the entire history of mankind there has been both a fear of the rational and irrational.  Why would there not be? We see all around us the complete impermanence of human life.  We see in ourselves and those around us that we visibly decay and ultimately die.  Perhaps it is even worse for us these days than it was in times long past.  We have, directly as a result of our material good-fortune, the bright colourful photographs that bring everything back so sharply to re-view times perhaps only 20 or 30 odd, years ago. Happy times which flash before us almost long forgotten, like memories of small young excited children, in recently redecorated rooms, celebrating Christmas with those who are no longer with us.  It can be a sad prospect and, in a way so irrational that even happy memories can provoke such sadness. But in seeing the transience of human life, they can do. 

Perhaps that is one of the reasons in the present day, when people just seem to deny reality, to pretend that death does not exist, that we just need to spend more on this or that thing to live forever.  Isaiah is encouraging us to take advantage of what is being freely given now.  He is telling us that merely following that which seems attractive to us and seems to be of immediate benefit, is nothing of the sort.  It will not satisfy us in the long term.  He is calling us to incline our ears, to listen to that promise, given to David.   But of course, Isaiah, the prophet, is only pre-empting in the Old Testament that which would be confirmed to all of us, by the New Testament; the promise of an everlasting covenant. Not the hollow promise of an everlasting life inhabiting ageing and failing bodies, but in food, freely given by God to nourish what can be our everlasting souls.

For as St Paul expresses his faith. That nothing in all the innumerable problems of the world in which we live, nor even in the innumerable problems that we may perceive in our own lives, can separate us from the love of Christ. We can forget the worldly cynicism of the statement that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”.  In the Communion that we will soon share, God will feed our souls with the body and blood of Our Lord and Saviour.