Bread of Joy

 

Every Sunday this summer, the second reading at Mass has been taken from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans. Today’s text [Romans 8:35, 37-39] is a rhetorical flourish, which concludes the first half of Saint Paul’s letter.

What will separate us, Saint Paul dramatically asks, from God’s love for us as revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord? His answer: nothing! Not that there isn’t plenty out there to get in the way of our experience of God’s love! Paul knows only too well what obstacles there are and how powerful they seem to be. He even enumerates a bunch of them: anguish, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword. We could, of course, add to that list - war, public and private corruption, political polarization and division, downward mobility, the death of the “American Dream,” chronic illness, aging, and any number of other social, political, and personal problems. Even the gospel account we just heard of the feeding of the 5000, [Matthew 14:13-21] a happy, feel-good story if ever there was one, begins with the potential danger posed by the murder of John the Baptist!

Paul’s point is not that these things are not real or that they don’t threaten us, but that God’s power is so much greater than the forces that oppose it – and so can overcome all obstacles that threaten to separate us from God and the salvation his love intends for us. Instead, in desperation (in Paul’s time as again in our own) people tend to turn to all sorts of falsehoods – spiritual falsehoods like cosmic forces and social falsehoods like political power - in order to cope with threats from present things and future things.

Paul’s conviction, based on the love of God revealed in Christ, is that God’s power is way greater than those threats. If, however, we really believe in God’s omnipotence and in his love for us as revealed in Christ, then we will react differently to the many stresses and challenges we might otherwise be beaten down by. In this threatening and dangerous world, an all-powerful God who didn’t also love us would only add to the danger. That was precisely what made Paul’s preaching seem so liberating to so many pagans then – and continues to attract people to the Christian message today.

If God had not revealed himself – and his love for us – as he has done in his Son Jesus, we too would be equally desperate, clutching at anything that promised to placate otherwise uncontrollable cosmic forces or perhaps more mundanely to marshal aggressive political power to protect us against real or imagined scapegoats.

God, however, has revealed his love for us – not as an abstraction, but as a person, Christ Jesus our Lord, whose heart is moved with pity for us and satisfies us with food we could never buy on our own.

There will always be an insurmountable gap between our meager human resources – our 5 little loaves and 2 fish – and what God can accomplish on our behalf. Once we are willing to put ourselves at his disposal, however, God’s great love for us, present and active among us in Christ Jesus our Lord, will transform us by his blessing and enable us to accomplish, on his behalf, what we could never ever have imagined doing on our own – to conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us.

And, so, the same Christ who feeds us whenever we assemble in his presence also commands us – as his disciples, as his Church –to reject pessimistic false alternatives and to join him wholeheartedly in feeding the world with the bread of joy and trust that comes from recognizing and perpetuating his presence in our world.

Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, august 2, 2026.