A Word for the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

And when it was evening, His disciples came to Him, saying: this is a deserted place, and the hour is already late; send the multitudes away, that they may go into the villages and buy themselves food. But Jesus said to them: they need not go away; you give them something to eat. (Mt 14:15-16).

Once the Lord sailed away alone in a boat to a deserted place, for prayer; the people, hearing of this, followed after Him from the cities on foot. When He came out, Jesus saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion for them, and healed their sick. Now when evening came, His disciples came to Him and said: this is a deserted place, and the hour is already late; send the multitudes away, that they may go into the villages and buy themselves food. What? What are you saying, Apostles of Christ? — That the people, for the sake of food and drink, should leave their Lord, and deprive themselves of His converse, sweeter than honey? Did He not Himself say: «do not worry about your soul: what you will eat, or what you will drink? Is not the soul more than food?» (Mt 6:25); «but seek God’s Kingdom first, and His righteousness, and to you all this will be added» (Mt 6:33). Oh, no—the people will not leave the Lord: what are food and drink to them? Food and drink are always with them; but the Lord in the flesh is not always with them; and He Himself is, for them, both food and drink; see how eagerly they listen to His every word, how their eyes drink in His divine countenance: oh, this is, for them, a true delight—to see and hear the Lord Himself; and they have forgotten about food and drink. And now He Himself will prepare for them a wondrous table.

This Gospel teaches us that the hearing of the Word of God, and, in general, the care for the enlightenment, sanctification, and strengthening of the immortal soul, is dearer than all else to a man, and that food and drink are secondary things, and will be added to a man who seeks the Kingdom of God and His righteousness: «for the laborer is worthy of his food» (Mt 10:10). So too, in the wilderness, the Lord fed everyone freely, with a wondrously prepared table, for the labor of hearing His word. Further, the Gospel teaches us to share even the last of our goods with our neighbors who have need of them, and to have no greed or miserliness at all, and that a man needs very little to satisfy his hunger and thirst—only his daily bread, and something a little richer besides; that various delicacies and drinks do not make up our daily sustenance, and may be used only rarely; otherwise they will weaken our body and our soul.

Our soul, brothers and sisters, is immeasurably more precious and more noble than the body: it is the image of God—that is, to put it more simply, a kind of portrait of God—and is immortal; it is endowed with reason and free will, with the capacity to be sanctified by the grace of God, to rise higher and higher along the steps of virtue, to be conformed more and more to God, to be deified, and to attain the greatest blessedness in God. But the body is earth and corruption, and must of necessity die and return to the dust from which it was taken; at the resurrection of the dead it will rise again, but as a spiritual body. Meanwhile our soul is in a most pitiable state of fallenness, in a state of darkening, estrangement from God, and enslavement to the devil, to sin, and to the passions. It perishes in sin, and may perish forever, tormented in the unquenchable fire. What, then, ought all of us to care for most, in this temporary sojourn upon the earth? For the enlightenment of the soul, for its salvation, for drawing near to God, from whom we have become estranged through sin—for the righteousness we have trampled underfoot, to which we have become strangers—for holiness in our whole manner of life, and the rejection of a cunning life. This is what we ought to care for; and only then for food, and drink, and clothing—but with moderate, disinterested care, as for things of secondary and temporary importance. Let us not, then, brothers and sisters, pervert God’s order; let us care first for the enlightenment, the nourishment, the comfort, and the salvation of the soul, and only then for earthly, so-called goods—food, clothing, dwelling. Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.