Solemnity of Corpus Christi
By Fr. Victor Feltes
All four Gospels recount the miracle of Jesus multiplying the loaves and the fishes. He receives five loaves and two fish and successfully feeds (in the words of St. Matthew) “about five thousand men, not counting women and children,” with twelve wicker baskets full of fragments leftover. Now this event cannot be reduced to a so-called “miracle of sharing.” That would be a deed less impressive than what Elijah the great miracle-working prophet did in 2nd Kings: feeding one hundred people with twenty barley loaves and having some leftover. Merely persuading people to share food for one meal would not cause a crowd to declare somebody “the prophet who is to come into the world” and make them want to carry him off to make him king, as St. John records. This miracle was a true miracle, and it foreshadows the Last Supper and the miracle of the Eucharist.
St. John mentions ‘the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand.’ This Passover was at least one year before the Passover of Holy Week, yet John mentions it all the same. And then there is the way the Gospel writers describe what Jesus does with the food for the meal: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he said the blessing…, broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd.” These phrases should sound familiar. They closely resemble what Jesus does at the Last Supper and what his priests celebrate at every Holy Mass.
Without Jesus, the apostles felt powerless to provide for such a great number of people. But Jesus commanded his apostles to “have them sit down in groups of about fifty,” in more than one hundred clusters on the green grass. The flock obeys the apostles as they are obeying Christ, and Jesus proceeds to feed them all through his ministers. The miracle at every Mass is greater than the one Jesus performed with the loaves and fishes. There, he made the food he was offered far greater in quantity. Now, he transforms the food we give him into something far greater, not in number but kind.
At Mass, we are figuratively fed by the Inspired Word, by both the Old Testament and the New Testament, drawn like two fish from the stream of salvation history. And at Mass we behold the Incarnate Word, the Body and Blood of Christ, which suffered the five famous wounds of his Passion. But greatest of all, at Mass we can be invited to truly partake of the Eternal Word, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, receiving his living Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Eucharist. In the Gospel we heard “They all ate and were satisfied. And when the leftover fragments were picked up, they filled twelve wicker baskets.” So rejoice in these holy gifts as your precious treasure. Tell others about them and invite them to join us here, for Jesus Christ desires this great feast to nourish everyone.
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