I don’t know about you, but I am a careful and conservative person. And believe me, this has its pluses in life. Part of it comes from my careful and conservative German-American father, a wonderfully kind and patient man but who didn’t like risk-taking of any sort, and who saved everything for a rainy day. In fact even when that rainy day came, he was still saving everything for an even rainier one. My guess is that many of you were taught the same way, and you have absorbed some of the same life rules. Choose a safe career that you’ll never go wrong with; before you start a project make sure you have all the pieces in place and know what you’re doing; don’t buy something until you know where the money’s coming from; don’t throw away something that’s working pretty well to go off into the unknown.
As I said, these rules have a lot of pluses, in a lot of ways I still follow them. In fact, in my heart of hearts I’m hoping that when my daughters ultimately bring some potential spouse home for my approval (assuming of course that there will be such a moment when my approval is asked for, which is highly doubtful of course), when they bring that person home, my secret hope is that this person will turn out to follow all these rules as well, someone who’ll make sure that things are always provided for, who’ll take a long-term and sensible approach to trying to manage life.
Today’s gospel suggests that the disciples were also people who were raised by other sensible people, and we can tell that from the way they react to this unexpected situation in the countryside. Thousands of people have followed Jesus out to the middle of nowhere, and no one thought ahead about whether there would be any food there or not. So the disciples think it’s time to end this day, and send everyone home. It seems to them like it’s about to turn into a situation that no one will be able to manage. They can see it getting completely out of hand, a hungry crowd that might do anything. But instead, Jesus decides to put the whole question in the hands of God, not turn it over to God and walk away, the way we do, but turn it over to God and start feeding people. Jesus did not see the problem as a gargantuan challenge with inadequate resources to fix it. He saw it as the situation they had been given and he saw the resources they had, he did the math, and he started anyway.
On this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi, we are asked to realize how close we are to being able to live our lives in that completely unafraid and confident way that Jesus did. That capability is so close to us because this eucharist that we eat is not like other food. Other food gradually gets broken down into various types of nutrients and becomes part of us. We believe that instead, when we eat the body and blood of Christ, that we become them. We become Jesus’s whole person, his flesh and blood become ours. His presence in us enables us to become him. Do we feel that? Very rarely. Do we really believe that it has already happened and will happen? Maybe that happens just as rarely. But it is why we come to this place, to receive this gift that will turn us into people who are the real presence of Christ, turn us into different people, who bring life to others, and are unafraid of the odds and unworried about the consequences.
As you can see from today’s gospel, it takes some of us a long time to get to that point where we realize that God is asking us to step off the shore into a rowboat that doesn’t feel particularly stable, or asking us to start something we are not sure we have the resources to pull off, or to attack a problem that seems too big for the likes of us and people like us or to say something we’re afraid to say to someone who needs to hear it, or to stop worrying about money and resources and ability and do the thing that is in our heart. We step back from those points all the time, but the presence of Christ is here with us, and not just with us, surrounding us in a vague kind of way like an invisible spirit, but here in us, we are that presence. We need that spirit and courage and connection to God so much that God has given us the gift of actually becoming what we need.
No one in this church is unable to make that transformation, you can fight it, but maybe, you can’t stop it. Even my careful, risk-averse father, at age 79, took a great leap and became the oldest person ever to go through his parish’s RCIA program and become a Catholic. If you believe that you have become the real presence of Christ, you won’t be able to hold out forever. Sooner or later, you will stop calculating the odds, and realize that what you need has already been given to you many times over.