Day: March 10, 2024

“They filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley-loaves”

Paradise and wilderness are the complementary images that belong to the pilgrimage of Lent as the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Today’s Gospel wonderfully encapsulates the soul’s journey as imaged in other cultures, religions, and philosophies in one way or another, such as: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plato’s ascent from the Cave (and the descent back into the Cave!), Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, and of course, Dante’s great poetic and theological master-piece, The Divine Comedy, to name but a few. Yet the story which informs this Gospel most completely is the story of the Exodus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

We so easily forget that the Christian faith largely arises out of the Fathers reading of the Hebrew Scriptures first and foremost. That has shaped profoundly the doctrinal, devotional, and liturgical reading of the Scriptures as a whole in the life of the Church, and often expressed in the hymns of the Church. This Gospel story is essentially a recapitulation and intensification of the themes of the Exodus, the paradigmatic journey par excellence of the pilgrimage of our souls. This mid-Lent Sunday highlights the images of paradise and wilderness. For the pilgrimage journey to God cannot be accomplished simply by us on our own strength and merits. With this Sunday we begin, paradoxically, to enter into the deeper meaning of the Lenten pilgrimage: it can only happen through the provisions of God’s Providence for us in the way of our journeying. This Sunday sets before us ‘a taste of paradise’ in the wilderness of human experience. God provides out of our lack or little. Ultimately, God provides himself as Holy Week and Good Friday show us.

John’s Gospel begins with an emphasis upon God’s all-knowing and all-embracing will in contrast to our human limitations. Jesus in the wilderness sees a great multitude and asks Philip “whence shall we buy bread that these may eat.” John immediately adds parenthetically that this is to prove or test Philip “for he himself knew what he would do.” This already alludes to the Exodus in which Israel was put to the test while also presuming to put God to the test. Philip’s response is about our human limitations and inadequacy to solve the problems of the world through economic means. “Two hundred penny-worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may have enough.” It is a telling critique that extends to our modern world. The expansion of production in part through the techniques of industrialization and the false infinity of consumer desire haven’t and can’t solve the problems of the world to which they themselves contribute. The problems of our world and ourselves are fundamentally spiritual, not merely material.

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