18th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Taken, Blessed, Broken, and Given... For Others

Today’s Gospel reading begins by telling us that after Jesus learned of John the Baptist’s death, he withdrew. He got in a boat to be alone. We might wonder, was he grieving or perhaps even fearful? If so, we might wonder why. We feel those things, but we would say that those feelings come from an incomplete faith. But Jesus did not have an incomplete faith as we do. It seems that something about news of the Baptist’s death effected Jesus and he went to be alone.

But as we hear, Jesus wasn’t given the chance to be alone. The people, unaware of whatever he was processing in his heart, wanted to be near him, and followed after him. When Jesus saw them, instead of feeling resentment or crying in exasperation, he was moved with pity. He began to respond to their needs.

Considering all this made me think of how we tend to respond to trouble in our hearts. It’s normal to close in when faced with someone’s death or other hardships. And while we should be afforded time to grieve and to process, maybe there’s something to the idea of processing our troubled hearts through our service to others. It's not that there’s no value in retreating and going within, but the fact is, when we’re responding to others in their needs, it tends to draw us out of ourselves and even our pain.

But this also true for us in whatever ways we tend toward being overly self-focused: my needs, my time, my space, having it all my way. With too much navel gazing, we eventually find that so much self-focus brings emptiness.

As many of you know the word vocation means ‘a calling’. God gave each one of us a vocation to call us out of ourselves for the good of others, whether as spouses, parents, religious or as single persons. To be clear, how a single person finds his/her path to self-giving is not so clearly defined, but the call is there. Our lives, which God gave us, find fulfillment when they offered for the good of others, when our lives become a sacrifice for others.

The account that follows in the Gospel, where Jesus feeds the multitude with five loaves and two fish is meant to tell us something deeper than a mere sharing of food. It’s about Jesus’ self-giving. The miracle that occurred of creating abundance out of very little is a prefiguring of what we see on that cross and what we receive from this altar. While looking up toward heaven, he took, blessed, broke and gave. St. Matthew says this of the five loaves and two fish, but it’s meant to be understood as Jesus himself. His very body was taken, blessed by God, broken for us and given to us: a life-giving act and true self-giving.

But we too in our living out our vocations or in discerning what our vocation is, are likewise called to be taken, blessed, broken and given. We surrender and allow ourselves to be taken and blessed by God. We are broken, in that God reshapes us from our fallen human condition, and then we are given for God’s purposes, for the good of others.

As we trudge though these oddest of times in our lives, approaching six months at this point, it can be hard to know how to give our lives over for others, even if we wanted to. With all the ways that life has become disrupted and our normal day-to-day, week-to-week structure dismantled, we may feel lost and adrift.

Until we can get back to interactions and activities that allow us to serve in more obvious and easier ways, I believe our challenge is to find new ways to give of ourselves, within our currently small sphere of reach, within our homes, but also within our hearts, and in our prayer—loving others and loving ourselves. In the ways that we are called to be like the Eucharist, perhaps all this is being broken apart in a new way, breaking apart an old way, to give way to a new way of loving.

In just a moment, from this altar, we will hear that four-fold action described at the Last Supper: “(Jesus) took bread, said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples”. The more we allow God to do this to us, the more our lives become conformed to Christ, the more we truly become a worthy sacrifice, given for others, even in the weirdness we’re experiencing.

So, in your life, are you closed-in on yourself? Do you feel empty? It could be that you’ve failed to see the bounty that God has put in front of you. In that case, try to prayerfully focus on gratitude. But it’s also possible that God is calling you to something more; some way in which he wishes to take you from where you are, to reshape you, bless you and give you to something greater. The more we find ourselves able to look beyond merely ourselves, the more we find the One who calls us and thus the more we come to live in His love, a love that overcomes all pain, all emptiness.