Giving: - Generosity or Obligation?

Message from Fr. Jose Koluthara, CMI

Giving: - Generosity or Obligation?

This Sunday’s readings invite our attention to issues related to basic needs. In the first reading (Is 55:1-3), we find God providing the banquet of bread and word for all the hungry and thirsty. In today’s Gospel (Mt 14:13-21), we see Jesus hosting a banquet that he provides and over which he presides. There is no question as to who should eat. Those present are simply described as a vast throng who moved Jesus heart and whose ills he cured. We are not told in the Gospel that the disciples were to pass through those gathered and select those whom they deemed worthy enough to eat. We are told only that those present ate their fill and lots of leftovers remained. Several thousand ate that day with no question of their worthiness, or lack thereof, being raised.

We are also told that the responsibility for satisfying the hungry and thirsty of this world was, on the same day, placed on the shoulders of Jesus’ disciples. “Give them something to eat yourselves”, challenged Jesus, and immediately, feeding the hungry became part of the job description of the Christian.

When we look at these texts and others like them it is clear, writes Larry Hollar (Hunger For the Word, Liturgical Press, Minn.: 2004) that the blessing of food and the need to speak out for vulnerable people who lack food (or are deprived of it) are not some marginal afterthoughts or occasional footnotes in the Word. These issues are integral to the identity of those who worship the God of Israel and who follow Jesus Christ. This God raised up leaders in the midst of famine, offered manna to the wanderers in the wilderness, blessed the Sabbath gleanings of the hungry disciples and fed multitudes in a deserted place.

This love of God, insists Paul in today’s second reading (Rom 8:35, 37-39), comes to us in Christ Jesus who blesses, breaks and gives both bread and word, body and blood at every Eucharist gathering. Just as food and God’s provident gifts to the hungry are never far from the scriptural story, neither can those who claim to believe and love this God do so without translating faith and love into the service of the needs of the hungry.