Today’s readings: 2 Kings 4,42-44; Ephesians 4,1-6; John 6,1-15

The soul needs its nourishment. You need not be a religious or devout person to understand that. Today we speak of the soul of the world or of politics or even of religion. Whatever lacks soul is dead. Without soul there is no real substance or value in our life and in what we do.

In today’s gospel from John, Jesus feeds the crowd and he is acclaimed as prophet worthy to be made king. But his main concern was the well-being of people and he had no intention of being in the limelight. So he escaped. What he was doing was not about himself but about the people.

The instinct of powerfulness today dominates us all from the very early stages of childhood. We instil in ourselves the dream of being super-human, inflating our egos at times beyond comprehension. This un­doubtedly affects our personality and our way of perceiving things and life itself. A direct result of this is the culture of immediacy, the inability to wait and the fact that whatever we want, we want it all and now.

This was the same instinct that drove the crowd in the gospel to make the miracle-worker king. It suited them squarely to have a miracle-worker in politics. But Jesus escapes. Not in the Pilate sense of washing his hands of any responsibility, but because politics, noble and necessary as much as it can be, does not exhaust all our hunger.

The gospel is not politics, though it is not apolitical. Jesus provides a depth of vision that concerns our well-being and that goes further than mere political, social, cultural and religious concerns. This is most probably a major problem today in our societies when we are becoming myopic and fail to have the whole picture about the human person.

Nourishing the soul goes beyond practising religion. Today’s gospel text is part of the Johannine imagery of what makes people whole. It is about crowds following trends and public opinion, but nonetheless hungry and in need of spiritual nourishment.

The gospel provides ample testimony of Jesus capable of looking deep inside the hearts of people and beyond the surface needs. What he provides is not simply ‘fast food’, but the real food that can nourish the soul. This is about the drama of living daily and the drama of politics which, lacking soul, fails to cater for the whole person and stops at the surface.

We’ve been witnessing these last months and weeks the Greek drama of what an entire population can be made to suffer and go through in this day and age. The media mainly portrayed to us the political and economic side of the drama, in part blamed on bad politics and governance. That, of course, can be all true. But underneath that, there is the real suffering of those who live on the periphery and the majorities who form part of the lower strata of society.

These are the real victims of bad politics and they are those who have to shoulder the greater share of the burden. In spite of all the good will of those who are struggling hard to administer the best therapies as remedy, at the end of the day what counts most is whether people themselves will have the stamina to cope and to endure all the suffering and consequences brought about on them.

Pope Francis’s call ‘On Care for our Common Home’ is more than welcome in this context and goes much further than simply pinning the environment issue. The Pope is right when he speaks on ‘integral ecology’, meaning that “today’s problems call for a vision capable of taking into account every aspect of the global crisis”. “We urgently need”, the Pope writes, “a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge, including economics, in the service of a more integral and integrating vision”.

There is a deficit of soul in the way we manage our lives. It is no co-incidence that John in his gospel speaks of the Eucharist in the context of the feeding of the wandering crowd rather than, like the other three gospels, in the strictly liturgical context of the last supper. John’s Eucharist stands for that nourishment.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.