Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning, beloved in the Lord, we’ve heard one of the six accounts of the multiplication of the loaves. It is surely significant that this event appears more than any other event in the life of Jesus. It is told more times. It is told so many times that some people, reasonably, think he must have been doing it pretty often. I don’t believe that that’s necessarily the case, but it is surely significant that this is the favorite way the Church depicts Jesus: is bread coming forth from his hands.

And notice that it’s bread. The fish are mentioned as well. I suppose if we had a meal with bread and fish, we would say we had fish sandwiches. I think that’s what we would say. In other words, we would lay a lot of stress on the fish. But notice it’s bread. That gets the— That’s the primary. You notice that it’s over the bread that you get this verbal expansion, the famous four verbs. He takes the bread, says the berakhah, breaks the bread, and gives it to his disciples. Those four verbs are significant and tell you why the emphasis is on the bread.

The people at the time that this happened, I’m presuming they were kind of surprised since all they had was four—according to John’s version, five barley buns and two little dried sardines—and 5,000 people ate, it says, besides women and children. And when it was all over they took up twelve baskets for what was left over. What did this mean to the people who participated in it?

Well, they were good Jews, and they knew, as good Jews, that the Messiah was to renew the experience of the exodus. They knew this, and that’s why, in the gospel of John, chapter six of John, after this happens, Jesus has to go up to a mountain to pray because the people want to make him their king. For political reasons, he wanted to avoid being made king, and for spiritual reasons it was important that he not be called king, because, as he says later on to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” In other words, the people there expected this and received this as a messianic sign: The Messiah is here. The Messiah is here.

This has to do with a journey through the desert, and that is what I want to talk to you about first. It is important this bread is given in the wilderness. The translation that the deacon was sort of forced to read this morning said this is a lonely place. That’s not what the meaning of the word eremos [is]; it means it’s a solitary place. It’s the desert: eremos. Eremos is the Greek root that gives us the word “hermit.” Go out into the desert. This is supposed to be part of the desert experience, and that’ll be point one.

The journey of the chosen people through the wilderness, through the desert, for 40 years, was always taken from earliest times as paradigmatic of the Christian life itself. The Christian life is not only the entrance into promised lands; it is also the journey through the desert. Now it’s the entrance to the promised land, which is why, after the people receive holy Communion for the first time, on the day they were baptized, they got a second chalice which was mixed with milk and honey. That was sort of a washer after you received the holy Communion. It was a symbol that they were entering into the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey, in other words, the fullness of salvation—but it’s still a salvation in this world, which is why the desert journey is also paradigmatic of the Christian life.

One sees this in several places in the New Testament, for example, the eleventh chapter of 1 Corinthians. Just look at that. Paul goes through the things that happened in the desert, and he applies these things to the Christians themselves at Corinth. The epistle to the Hebrews is all about the journey through the desert. Chapters three and four of Hebrews are a commentary on the 95th psalm: “Today if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as the day of provocation in the wilderness, when your fathers tempted me, tried me, and saw my works 40 years.”

There’s where we are. And if sometimes we experience the desert, we’re supposed to. It’s normal, natural, that we follow Jesus into the desert. Why? To be tempted. That’s why you have the temptation accounts of Jesus, right after his baptism by John. You have the temptation accounts in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Jesus goes in the desert to be tempted immediately after his baptism. That’s a way of saying to Christians, “This is what you can expect when you’re baptized.”

Notice that when Jesus goes into the desert, what’s the very first temptation in Matthew and Luke? What’s the first temptation? It has to do with food! Food. Bread. What’s the first temptation the human race experienced on this earth? Food! It’s very significant. The initial temptation has to do with man as consumer. There’s where the devil finds it’s easiest to get to human beings, through the paradigm of man as consumer. Adam and Eve have plenty to eat, but God saw the serpent come in, and this serpent says, “You know, he’s holding something back. I mean, the really good stuff is on this tree! And you don’t have all that you really deserve!”

The first temptation has to do with the first need, namely: What shall we eat? What shall we eat? And that’s the temptation of which Jesus speaks in his Sermon on the Mount. What shall we eat? He says, “Don’t worry about that. Behold the birds of the air, the sparrows. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” That’s the most basic aspect of our life in Christ. It is to be constantly fed by the Father and to depend on the Father’s substance, which brings me to point two.

Bread and trust. Bread and faith. You see, the bread in the wilderness is called “manna.” Very, very significant word: manna. It’s the daily bread. Remember the story of the manna in the wilderness? It’s always worth reviewing, that story. The story is connected with certain miracles and certain commandments. When God gives the manna to the people, he explains to Moses what this is all about. He said they’re to gather as much of it as they need for their family—for today. Just enough for today. But you must eat everything as you gather. Very good rule, by the way, for raising kids: It’s on your plate, you eat it! You take what you want, but you eat everything that you take. I don’t have that in my notes, but that’s a very, very good little rule. The first place where we learn discipline in this world is at the table. I think I wrote something in Touchstone on that, that table discipline is the first step toward wisdom.

Today’s bread is today’s bread; it’s not tomorrow’s. Now notice the Israelites, according to form, because they’re always disobeying the Lord. According to form, some of them [didn’t] think that God was going to give them the bread the next day, so what did they do? “Let’s take a little extra and put it aside.” They were out in the desert, however, and the refrigerators didn’t work all that well out in the desert. [Laughter] Matter of fact, all the refrigerators were worth out in the desert was to put up the kids’ drawings with magnets; that’s the only thing you could do with refrigerators in the desert: put up kids’ drawings with little magnets. And that’s the first function of the refrigerator. Later on, they figured out it was also used for putting food in and keeping it cold.

Today’s bread is today’s bread; it’s not tomorrow’s. The Israelites take up too much bread because they don’t trust God to give them bread tomorrow. Now what does Jesus say about this? It’s as clear as day! Take no thought for the morrow! Do you find anything obscure about that? Do you need to go into a lot of study to understand that? No thought for tomorrow! Don’t think about it!

We rely on God for today, and he compares us with sparrows and tells us the heavenly Father feeds these sparrows. He says, “You’re worth a great deal more than sparrows.” But instead of acting like sparrows, we start to act like squirrels. [Laughter] I see these squirrels running around my yard, and they’re constantly digging and putting stuff away. Of course, they’re supposed to do that; God put that inside them so that things would actually grow because they’d been planted by [squirrels]. I don’t know how many years we’ve had tomato plants growing in our yard—we’ve never planted a tomato plant; never have. Somebody’s planting those tomato plants. I’m presuming it’s [squirrels]. They got a tomato someplace, probably on one of our vines, and they bury the thing, and then it comes up again the next year.

See, we’re supposed to be sparrows who eat what the Father gives each day, and that’s why Psalm 95 is so important and why the Church has traditionally prayed this psalm each day. It says, “Today—today if you hear his voice”—semeron. “Today if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

See, our relationship to our Father, beloved in the Lord, is always now. It’s always now. And since I hear your confessions, I know that many of you suffer from the temptation of anxiety, fear, but it’s almost always fear about tomorrow, almost always. And when you mention that to me, what have I pretty much habitually done? I’ve given you another way to say the Jesus Prayer, haven’t I? I won’t ask for a show of hands; you don’t have to give away what you’ve said in the confessional. But another way to say the Jesus Prayer is simply this: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, I put my trust in thee.” How often should you say that prayer? How many times? Oh, about a million times! You keep saying it until you do put your trust in him. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, I put my trust in thee.”

I’m going to give you a line from the psalm, and I want you to give me the second half of that line. Are you ready for this? “Our help is in the name of the Lord…”

Congregation: “...who made heaven and earth!”

Fr. Pat: Excellent! You all knew it. “Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth!” Look around out there! He made it all! It isn’t like he has a little bit of help; he might be able to come help with. I’ve been following these pictures fro Pluto. Have you seen these pictures!? This is incredible that I should live so long as to see these photographs of the surface of the planet that’s furthest out in our solar system. He made it all! Those stars that are out there that we haven’t seen yet because light returns to the earth so slowly. It returns so slowly it returns at 184,000 miles per second, doesn’t it? We haven’t seen some of those stars yet, and every day we’re seeing stars we never saw before because it takes the light such a slow, long time to get back here, only 184,000 miles per second! We don’t even know how big the universe is, but he made it all. He made every creature in the sea. He made all of the birds. He made everything! Our help is in the Lord who made heaven and earth! That means we can trust him; he’s vast in resources.

Now let’s come to point three. Why the experience of the manna? First thing to notice about the word “manna” is that it is a question. Mah in Hebrew means “what,” as in lamah, for what or why, lamah sabachthani. Remember that, the words of Jesus? Manhu means “what is this?” It’s saying we’re dealing here with a mystery that we don’t understand. Why does God feed the people with manna in the desert? It’s to teach them a far more important lesson. And what is that? According to the book of Deuteronomy: “I fed you for 40 years with manna in the desert, in order that you may know that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Man is more than an eater. He’s more than a consumer. Once you leave this building today, virtually everywhere you go, man is regarded as a consumer, as an eater, as an economic block. This is certainly the principle on which all of American education is founded. At least, that’s the education theory of the board of education, which I guess isn’t the same thing.

Your economic system presumes that man can be explained in economic terms. If you turn on your television and you want to get some cultural news, say about music, what do they tell you? What records are best selling this week. Say I want to get some news about sports. What do I hear? How much so-and-so got for his contract. Notice everything is quantified, because this world regards man as an economic being.

Man is more than an economic being! Man is an eater only in order to be a seeker. That’s why he must keep asking that question. I suppose the world would say, “Stop asking that question and just eat it.” God encourages us to say, “What is it? What is this?” God gives us our daily bread, beloved, so that we may seek him. Man is an eater in order to be a seeker. Man is an eater in order to be a friend of God. And who is God? God is our Father in heaven, who feeds us, takes care of us. We put our personal trust in him because we are worth more than many sparrows. Amen.