Food as the Channel of Relationships

Message from Fr. Jose Koluthara, CMI

Lord Jesus, enable me to experience Eucharist as the channel of God’s love and your abiding presence with us. Amen.

My Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Food is a basic human need that has sustained each of us since birth. It speaks of loving and caring, giving and sharing, living and growing, and even dying and rising. Through the giving and receiving of food, relationships are established and strengthened, and when they are strained the sharing of food can even renew the ties that bind us one to the other.
This Sunday and next Sunday the Gospels and the first readings will focus on food as the channel of God’s love. Through the gift of food that sustained him for 40 days the prophet Elijah was able to keep his task of preaching a powerful and challenging message to an unwilling and unyielding people. That food of hearth cake and a jug of water that he ate under the shade of a broom tree that told him that God was with him, that his mission was necessary and that God would provide food all along his journey. God had similarly provided food for the Israelites journeying through the land that they would make their home. Manna, quail and water from the rock spoke of a great and caring love that would not allow the faithful to collapse.
Jesus had communicated the same message by providing a hearty meal of bread and fish for the many (Gospel, July 30). Food was the channel he used to reveal the extent of God’s love for humankind. Jesus’ gift of bread and fish was a sign of and a prelude to the greater gift of himself, first in his sacrificial death on the cross and then in the sapiential food of his word and the sacramental food of his very self. Food is the channel Jesus chose to communicate not only God’s love but also his abiding presence with his own. When we eat the food that is Jesus, with faith in our minds and hope in our hearts, we are being given a foretaste of eternal life. In our sharing, we become one body, one with Jesus and one with one another.
Because of the oneness forged at Eucharist, it seems only right and fitting that those who are fed will go forth to feed others. Some hungers are desperate, as in the famine-ridden areas of our world and among the unemployed and homeless; obviously, those hungers must be recognized and satisfied immediately. Other hungers will require an extended commitment to justice and to charity that addresses the long-term structural causes of hunger. These too must be acknowledged and satisfied with long-term plans that will not quit until food becomes a channel that communicates sincere care and compassion for the worldwide human family. Shouldn’t everyone know the joy of hearing the words, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long” (1st reading, I Kings 19:4-8) and “If anyone eats the bread I give, that person will live forever.”? (Gospel, John 6:41-51)

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