<em>"You open wide your hand, O Lord, and grant our desires.</em>"
The psalm for Sunday’s Mass unlocks the Gospel of the feeding of the five thousand: John says Jesus feeds the crowd from his own hand, not through the hands of the apostles, as Matthew, Mark and Luke recorded.
Perhaps Jesus fed some of the crowd directly and the apostles looked after the rest - there is no need to assume a contradiction between the evangelists - but John is emphasising Jesus’s direct role.
He also includes an unmistakable echo of the Eucharist through the detail of Jesus "giving thanks", a verb that occurs in all the accounts of the Last Supper.
John is underlining that this miracle of multiplying loaves is a foreshadowing of the Holy Mass when bread is not multiplied but transformed into Christ’s body to feed not our bodies but our souls.
And the fact that he says Jesus himself gives the bread directly helps us understand Holy Communion: through the Sacred Host, each one of us personally and directly touches Jesus and receive his divinising grace.
Touch is the only two-way sense: you can see without being seen, hear without being heard, but you cannot touch without being touched. This makes it the most intimate and relational way of interacting with someone, and Jesus makes this possible through Holy Communion.
This peerless gift brings with it abundant grace. Just as the five thousand ate "as much as they wanted" and there was still a surplus, so we can never exhaust the grace of a single reception of Holy Communion.
The only limit is how much we want, not how much Christ gives, since he cannot give more than his very self, body, blood, soul and divinity. He always wants to give us more than we desire, and our desires can always grow and be purified.
This superabundance comes from the paltry offering of a small boy, five cheap barley loaves and two fish. When we come to Holy Mass, we present our little offering of our work, service and prayer that week.
Just as Jesus multiplied the food by "giving thanks", he magnifies our offering at Mass by uniting it to the great thanksgiving sacrifice of himself to the Father.
When we don’t have enough money, food or patience and time, let’s give thanks with Jesus to the Father for the little we have, and he will increase our offering as much as we want.<br><br><em>(Photo credit: iStock by Getty Images.)</em>
