Is it not wondrous that from one seed alone you can get more seeds later? Is it not a miracle that this one seed can grow to become a plant which flowers into fruit that bears even more seeds? We can sort of explain away this biological miracle of multiplication with just three ingredients, one secret sauce, and some stirring.
The three ingredients are earth, air, and water. Or if you want to be chemical about it: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The secret sauce? Sunlight. The stirring comes from the wind and winged creatures that help the miracle.
In today’s Gospel story of the multiplication of loaves, the Lord is telling us to pay attention to what is so plentiful in our lives that there are leftovers.
I suspect we will ask, what plenty? Meron ba? Easier for us to see what is lacking than what is bountiful. Quicker for us to lament over what we do not have than delight in what we already hold. If anything good ever brims over, we turn cautious to say this abundance is just for a moment; surely, before long, we will drain and be running on empty once more.
And yet if the Lord is with us, and if we are with the Lord, we are told there is abundance to be found. If the story of the loaves is more than just a fairy tale, then there are even leftovers to gather.
Where then is this plenty?
The plenty is not money or title or power, however blindly we might work for these passing things all our lives. The plenty may not even be biological bread or bodily years left in our lifetime.
The plenty is not in our love. God knows how destitute we can be in loving. Our love can be so poor and few it can be the equivalent of just five loaves and two fish.
If anything good in us will multiply at all, it cannot be out of our efforts alone. Should something wonderful increase and last, it will not only be due to our guarded plots of earth or shallow wells of water.
No the plenty is not in us. The plenty is in the Lord. The bounty is in his love for us.
The miracle of the loaves is the multiplication of God’s love. And today Christ our Lord urges us to behold how plentiful his love is for us. Plentiful because God is love and we are God’s very own and his love is, well, infinite. Plentiful because love multiplies when love is shared. Love just keeps growing when it is offered and given away.
This multiplier effect is unlike that found in POGOs and Ponzi schemes. How can these scams multiply wealth when all they do is just rearrange the money? When someone leaves a casino or a pyramid with more than what they put in, a lot more people leave with less. In such a zero-sum world where the sharing of profits with the poor is just a token, the multiplication is just an illusion.
The miracle of the loaves is the miracle of God choosing to grow his love upon our love. It is the graciousness of God sharing his very life with us and letting it multiply to five thousand to infinity.
Imagine getting a slice of infinity. Even a bit of infinity is itself infinity. And yet this is what we receive every time we gather for Eucharist. We celebrate this infinite-sum of love every time we come together to share bread that is our Lord’s own body.
In the miracle of the loaves, the Lord challenges us to believe that we are never without the plenitude of his love. We need to be honest to ourselves and ask why such a love we easily take for granted, why God’s love is sometimes hard for us to believe, why love is not always enough for us.
When we rise to receive the bread that is his body, the Lord invites us to take the risk of sharing the plenty we have received. In the miracle of multiplication, the Lord dares us: share and keep loving and you will never run empty. Give life and there will be leftovers.
Around this altar of sacrifice and table of our Lord, let us gather then to pray: Bless us O Lord and these your gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, the bounty of your love through Christ our Lord, Amen.