The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 8.1-9
Our Lord’s desire for the crowd drew them to Him. His compassion moved them to stay put for three days. They forgot to eat; they lost track of time; they were caught up in being with Him as much as hearing His voice and chewing on His words – because of His love, His empathy, His desire for them.
Our Lord’s desire leads to His compassion for the crowd primarily because they have not eaten. They have entered a three day fast, and may faint on the way home. But the fast and the fainting that concerns Our Lord—that makes plain His desire—is not simply about lack of food for the body, but also being deprived of food for the soul. Not only have they not eaten. They have not sat down and banqueted with God, as He designed them to do. And so, just as they are drawn to Him, He desires them to eat with Him.
Seven loaves and a few small fishes—that’s more than enough. For the point is not what and how much. The point is that they dine with their saving Lord – with the Jesus who will give His all for them. Making little more than enough, then, is easy when compared with laying His life down. A broken body and shed blood—that is the all that Christ gives, and not just for them, but for the life of the cosmos. And so, for the moment, in a deserted place, Jesus provides more than enough. Yet He is anticipating the time when His desire will be to feed with Himself as many as desire Him.
Our Lord desires that the crowd—and that we all—truly encounter Him. Not just see His miracles and hear His words. Not just be soothed by His teaching or find truth in His way of life. And not just be uplifted with His stories or inspired by His example.
A true encounter with the Lord Jesus means that everything Our Lord is and does is not all used up in that past time. A true encounter means that the newness of the Word made flesh never grows old. God in our flesh is always new, always enlivening and revitalizing our flesh.
So what you’ve heard happens then is not just about then. Our Lord still desires us to eat with Him.
‘We may not even be aware of it, but every time we go to Mass’ we are there first of all because ‘we are drawn there by his desire for us.’ We are drawn by His desire for us to be with Him, inseparable from His body. We are drawn by His desire for us to be in the always now and never ending present – in Him and the life-saving event that He does and is.
Our Lord desires us. Each one of us. Regardless of our struggles, or fears, or disordered passions. He desires us even if no one else does, even if we don’t really desire our own selves. He desires us, most especially when we are hurting and broken, or feel unseen and place-less, or are overwhelmed with sadness or apathy.
Our Lord desires us. He desires you as an individual, and me as another, so that with all His own we may be all be ‘us’ in Him. Jesus desires you, so that He might embrace you in an ‘us’; and by embracing us, let us intimately commune with and in Him; and by communing, transform us to be, all together, the version, the image, the person, the likeness, the humans He designed us to be in Him.
Our Lord’s desire for us draws us to this Mass. And when are truly present in this Divine and sacred work—then we are aligning our desire with His desire; our will with His holy will. And then we are making the most of our love, since our love is authentic and real only when it is tied to His love for us.
This desire for Our Lord, drawn by His desire for us; this alignment of our will with His will—this is the foundation of true asceticism, and demands more than any self-restrain or fast or discipline or habit. For His love moves us to give up what we love, and what others say is most important. And Our Lord’s care for us leads us to a true self-care which is located, not in how we improve ourselves, but in what Our Lord offers in order to convert and better us. When we surrender to this love, this compassion and care and desire of God for us, then we are in line and participating in His Spirit and His desire.
From the very beginning, the Spirit has enlightened the Church to perceive and believe that Our Lord’s desire is fully realized not in a mental construct or an emotional experience. Rather, Our Lord’s desire centers around food. In fact, you can say that God created the world as a fruitful garden so that we would eat with Him. For eating with the Holy Trinity is both Our Lord’s desire for us, and the way He honors and nourishes our dual nature of body and soul.
This ‘eating with God’ reaches its highpoint in the Eucharist. ‘That which was visible in Jesus, that which could be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands, his words and his gestures, the concreteness of the incarnate Word — everything of Him had passed into the celebration of the sacraments’—and most specifically, into the Eucharist.
Let us come to see, then, that the Mass guarantees an unparalleled encounter with Christ.
In the Eucharist, Our Lord’s entire being enters into our entire being—both our being as individuals who consume Christ, and our being as those tied together into His one body, the Church. In this way, He bears our burdens as He becomes literally one with us; and we bear one another’s burdens since we all partake together of the one bread and one cup of His body.
The Mass, then, is not some vague memory or commemoration or reminder of the Last Supper all those millennia ago. That kind of historical remembering does us no good. We need the remembrance that draws us into Christ; that places us at the foot of the cross; that immerses us in the full effects of His resurrection.
The remembrance that does us good, then, is His remembrance – where Our Lord sees us and truly desires us, and brings us into His mind and His ever-now, so that we join the Holy Apostles at the Lord’s table.
‘We need to be present at that Supper, to be able to hear his voice, to eat his Body and to drink his Blood. We need Him. In the Eucharist and in all the sacraments we are guaranteed the possibility of encountering the Lord Jesus and of having the power of his Paschal Mystery reach us. The salvific power of the sacrifice of Jesus, his every word, his every gesture, glance, and feeling reaches us through the celebration of the sacraments.’
Then we can say, ‘I am Nicodemus; I am the Samaritan woman at the well; I am the man possessed by demons at Capernaum; I am the sinful woman pardoned; I am the woman healed of hemorrhages; I am the daughter of Jairus raised from the dead; I am Zacchaeus with Christ entering my house; I am Lazarus called from death to life; and I am Peter.’ For like them, I am healed, raised from my dying body, pardoned, renewed, and given boldness, confidence, and fearlessness in the face of death.
Here, then, is the whole reason God became human—He fervently wants us eat with Him. The Lord prepares us to sit with Him by washing and purifying us in the blood which flows from His most sacred heart. And that same blood, together with His life-giving flesh, continues to pardon, to heal, and to save as we consume Him while His love consumes us.
So His desire is more than a heart-felt longing. He invites us to receive the offering of Himself which He Himself offers. This is now Our Lord love us concretely. This is the way He satisfies his own thirst for us, which existed from the moment we were conceived, and which took Him all the way through the cross.
Through the prayers of His saints, may we desire Our Lord as His desire draws us into Him and to each other in Him; to whom belongs all glory, honor, and worship: world without end.