Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost

August 3, 2008

Homily for the Anglican Usage Mass

of the

St. Thomas More Society

celebrated at

St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church , 1013 Wood Street

Scranton, PA

Matthew 14:13-21

            In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen

            If you have a copy of the most recent edition of The Catholic Light, you can see on the front page my picture.  I did not do anything special other than to concelebrate this Mass last Friday night in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Humanae Vitae.  That short encyclical by Pope Paul VI is one of the most significant documents of the twentieth century, and it was integral to my own conversion to Catholicism.  I was attracted to its wisdom in large part because Pope Paul VI predicted so accurately the consequences of the widespread use of contraception.

            One thing he predicted was modern man’s abuse of his body.  Section 17 of Humanae Vitae reads, in part, “One must necessarily recognize unsurmountable limits to the possibility of man’s domination over his own body and its functions; limits which no man . . .  may licitly surpass.  And such limits cannot be determined otherwise than by the respect due to the integrity of the human organism and its functions” (HV 17).  These two sentences illustrate that Pope Paul VI foresaw how we would manipulate our bodies, once we began treating our fertility as if it were a disease that needs to be medicated with a daily pill.

            The steroids crisis in contemporary athletics, the billion dollar plastic surgery industry in this country, seventy year old women using invitro fertilization to get pregnant, and the millions upon millions of people who have mutilated their bodies to avoid conceiving another child—all these societal trends can be traced back to our modern lack of “respect due the integrity of the human organism and its functions”.

            The different ways we abuse our bodies all have one thing in common.  We are seeking physical perfection—even the person who sterilized himself tells us he has been “fixed”, again as if his fertility were akin to cancer.  Yet, in the pursuit of physical perfection, we have left God out of the equation, and, as a result, are on the road to spiritual destruction.

            I bring all this up because the Gospel today indicates that the physical and the spiritual cannot be separated.  Man is, after all, both soul and body.  What he does to nurture his soul improves his physical well-being and, when we choose to do what destroys our bodies, we also jeopardize our souls.  Let us look at how today’s Gospel makes this point.

            Today’s miracle is the feeding of the 5,000, though St. Matthew indicates that, with the women and children, whose numbers we do not know, we cannot nail down how many people Jesus really fed.  Jesus fed this huge number of people with just five loaves and two fish, and afterwards the disciples gathered up twelve baskets full of broken pieces. The miracle of the loaves and fishes reminds us quite naturally of God feeding his chosen people, the Jews, as they wandered in the wilderness.  God sent the Jews manna from heaven, and here Jesus shows us He has the power to do the same thing.

            To understand what Jesus did, however, we much recall something that Moses said to the Jews while they were yet in the wilderness.  He reminded them that “Man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 8:3).  Just as the manna in the wilderness pointed the Israelites to their dependence upon God, both physically and spiritually, so the feeding of the 5,000 points us to our dependence upon Jesus, a dependence that is again both physical and spiritual.

            St. John, who like St. Matthew, witnessed and recorded this miracle in his Gospel, tells us what happened after the 5,000 ate their fill.  They followed Jesus, looking for more bread.  If you look at chapter six of St. John’s Gospel, you can see how Jesus gently rebuked the people for being so simple.  He tells them quite explicitly that the miracle He performed points to who He is, that His power to fill their stomachs with bread points to the reality that He is the living bread that can fill their hearts with life.

            Moreover, the bread that Jesus provides, His very own body, will ensure eternal life, life after death, for those who eat it.  The physical has spiritual implications, and unless one believes the spiritual implications of the physical, he should not come to Jesus looking for bread.  Indeed, Jesus’ discourse on the bread was so offensive to some of the bread seekers that they walked away.  They did not want eternal life:  they just wanted another fish sandwich, and in connecting the physical to the spiritual, Jesus was asking way too much.

            But we all understand the connection.  A few years ago, I went to the hospital to see a man who was dying from cirrhosis of the liver.  In talking to his family, I found out he could have had a liver transplant.  But the doctors had decided he was ineligible.  I asked why.  They told me, “To get a new liver, he has to stop drinking.”  The man was an alcoholic, and the spiritual transformation had not taken place.  They could have fixed him up physically, but because the spiritual healing had not happened, even with a new liver, he would have been right back where he started—staring death in the face.

            The New Testament is replete with stories of Jesus healing the sick.  Even today’s Gospel recounts how He healed the sick in the crowd that followed Him.  Yet just as the bread pointed to a greater reality, so the physical healings Jesus performed pointed to the spiritual healing God the Father desires us to have through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ.  If the sick people Jesus healed did not have faith in His power to heal their souls, His miracles performed for them were of limited value.

            Just the same, our physical perfection is of limited value if it comes at the expense of our souls.  So, as we seek to improve our bodies physically, we cannot do anything that might cause us to lose our souls.  The abuse of our bodies for the sake of their purported improvement is nonsensical.  When Christians undertake such abuse, they demonstrate a profound lack of faith in the resurrection of the just, when all the redeemed will receive incorruptible bodies like the one Jesus has.

            What we ought to pursue instead of physical perfection is simple physical improvement.  We cannot make ourselves perfect, and eventually we will die anyway.  Only God can make us perfect and preserve us from eternal death, and if we attempt physical perfection and eternal life without God’s help, we place ourselves on the path to perdition.  We would do better to recognize our earthly body’s limits and pursue spiritual perfection by the power of Jesus Christ.  By doing so we can be sure we will not hurt our bodies or our relationship with God.  Most importantly, we can look forward to heaven, where God has promised we will get the perfect body we always have wanted.