Offering the Lord your gifts.

Vocation Series: Sacred Heart in Fall River
18th Sunday
By: Rev. Fr. Ron Floyd

In today’s Gospel, Saddened at the news of the death of John the Baptist, Jesus went off to a deserted place, to pray, and to be alone with his God and Father. But the crowds followed him, and Jesus had pity on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. John had been their shepherd, calling them to good pastures and to the clean waters of Baptism but John is taken away from them and so Jesus takes up his rightful place, as their TRUE shepherd.

He stays with them, as evening draws near and when they get hungry he says to his Apostles: Feed them. Echoing His future command to Peter after the Resurrection, the command he gives to His Church and his priests: Feed my lambs. This is after all what a shepherd does, He brings his flock to green pastures and to running streams so that they can eat and drink, and be renewed.

In today’s Gospel according to Matthew when Jesus tells them to feed the Crowds the Apostles simply state the fact that they have only five loaves and two fish. However, the story is a little different in John’s Gospel. In John’s Gospel, it a boy who offers his own food, bread and fish, for the crowd. The key element here is the boy’s generosity.

Lets think about it—a boy, not a man, that is someone who theoretically could not take care of himself, offers to Jesus all that he has, his own food and his own livelihood. Its not a very big offering, but it is all he has to give. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, takes the simple offering, He Blesses and breaks it and shares it with the crowds, saying, take and eat.

Jesus feeds the multitudes with what seems to be nothing. But it was something—Jesus didn’t conjure food out of thin air, rather he waited for our cooperation, our generosity. And a child leads us and shows us the way, so that Jesus can take our weak gift, and make it a great banquet.

Obviously our Lord is drawing an anology with and forshadowing the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. At the Mass we, God’s children, like the boy in the Gospel of John, offer to God simple gifts of bread and wine which he blesses through the ministry of the Priest. And taking that simple gift of bread and wine He multiplies it a thousand fold. Multipling not its quantity but its power to satisfy us changing it from bread and wine into the sacred Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He does this, so that we who receive His Body and Blood, with a clean heart, might be sanctified and strenghtened by it, and be one with him.

However, the boy in John’s Gospel doesn’t just give Jesus his lunch; along with the explicit gift of fish and bread the boy also implicitly offers his life—in the middle of nowhere, the boy risks everything giving away all his food.

Like the boy, we too are called to offer not just our simple gifts of bread and wine, but to offer our whole life to the Lord at the Mass. He gave Jesus all he had to sustain his own life confident that Jesus would repay him twenty or a hundered fold. We who approach this Altar, are also called on to make a similar gamble.

You see, today our Lord is teaching us the basic structure of reality. Our God created us to be his co-workers, to cooperate with His plan of salvation. He wants to save the world, to renew and recreate it into the paradise that He planned before we sinned, but he will not do it by force.  He will not save us with out our cooperation; and so He invites us each day to feed each other. As Christians he wants us to minister to and love our neighbor, so that from our simple offering of ourself, He can transform the world.

When we look at the state of the world, it seems as if the problems are too big as if man can do nothing to save himself. In truth, alone or even in groups of people and nations we can do nothing, unless we seek and obtain the help of God.

God, wants to take our gift of ourself and mutiply its potency, its power! At the Mass he calls us to be Holy, He gives us the food we need to be Holy, and when we are Holy, our Holiness changes the world. That’s the vocation, calling, and plan that Jesus reveals for his holy Church.

All of us in different ways are called to build up God’s Kingdom—as we pray, on earth as it is in heaven. Some he calls to be holy as parents, others as single, celebate people, and a few he calls to be Holy as priests.

If today’s Gospel passage is about the Eucharist, the Mass, then of course it is also about the priesthood. Priests are sucessors of the Apostles, who like Jesus are called to alway available to God’s people snd to feed God’s flock. In the Gospel Jesus’ wanted some alone time, He wanted to pray for and mourn the death of his friend John, but the people needed Him, they need to be healed and fed, and so he took pity on them He put his own needs aside so that he could teach, heal, and feed the flock entrusted to him.

Jesus calls priests from among men, to be shepherds and spiritual fathers to his people to govern, teach, and sanctify them. Like the Apostles in today’s Gospels, priests are called to accept the gifts of the people, to bless and multiply them in the power of the Holy Spirit
so that they can feed the people of God and strenghten them in their own vocations.

In this way priests help the people be holy,

So that the Lord our God can multiply the simple gift of our life so that even in our weakness, we can become strong, strong enough to change the World. Priests build up God’s people each and every day. Feeding them with the Word of God and the bread of life and healing their mind, bodies, and souls, so that the Christian people can help the world be holy.

This is the vocation to which I said yes, five years ago, when I entered seminary, and this is the vocation which the Lord gave me for the rest of my life, a month ago at my Ordination. Like all true callings, this is the vocation has filled my heart with so much grace, joy, and peace, because true happiness comes from doing the will of the Father.

Like all callings, to become a priest requires strenght, discipline, and self sacrifice—things that can seem foreign to the modern world. It requires you, like Jesus, to forget yourself in order to serve God’s people, day and night, when you feel like it and when you don’t.

But it is also so rewarding, to help them to live a life of holiness and to see people trying to follow God’s plan—seeing how great is God’s plan when it is lived! In this way Priests become in a real sense a Father to them: taking pride in them when they succeed in loving God and neighbor and being there for them in their times of suffering and sorrow, helping and healing them when they fall, offering them God’s forgiveness, and sanctifying and strenghtening them with the Holy Eucharist. Today I am here to invite you to think about the way the Lord God wants you to offer yourself to the Church and the World in service of your neighbor.

Like the boy who offered all he had to the Lord, I invite you to ask the Lord how He wants you to do the same. And if think you or some one you know might have a vocation to the priesthood, I invite you to take a chance, trust in the Lord, take that first step, and talk to a priest about that vocation. We’re not looking for you to make a binding commitment, but simply to consider the Lord’s plan for you. To consider how the Lord plans to multiple your gifts!