Offering Our Meager Offerings ~ reflex on Mk 8:1-10
The Lord provides. In every instance and circumstance, the abundance of God is not exhausted or strained. He is able to address, fill, and even overfill, our meager need. Because nothing is difficult for Him. He doesn’t run out of resources or energy or desire.
Several times in the Gospel, Jesus demonstrates this mysterious abundance and generosity of God, and the absolute ease and freedom with which He provides for those who hold up their need to him with faith and trust – lepers receive healing, cripples are given strength, the blind receive sight, the dead are given life and the mourning receive their loved ones anew, the hungry receive food.
All of these miraculous gifts of God, which fill and overfill our needs, are intended to point to our deeper needs: our spiritual leprosy, our spiritual blindness, our spiritual hunger. God alone can meet those needs, and we are unsatisfied until they are filled! But this filling is dependent on our willingness to lift up our need to him with faith and trust. Even just our little faith and trust, offered to Him for his purposes, allows God to reach down and pour out His goodness. What we see as pitifully inadequate becomes more than enough when offered wholly to Him, acknowledging that He is the Giver of every good thing.
In today’s Gospel, we see what God can do with our meager offerings. The disciples offer the little food that they have (not even enough to satisfy their own hunger!), and Jesus gives thanks, blesses it, and gives it to the disciples to distribute. He invites them into his work of mysteriously, miraculously, and easily feeding over 4000 people to satisfaction with only those seven loaves and few fish - with enough left over to fill seven baskets!
And Jesus invites us into his work of filling others’ needs as well. He fills our deep spiritual need, and invites us to participate with him in feeding others. Because as the Gospel Antiphon for today reminds us, “One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.”
Today, let us ask the Lord to help us hear this invitation in our daily lives, and to offer our meager resources and abilities to Him, so that we can help with His work of healing and bringing God’s Word of salvation to those around us.