The Lord provides the increase



We read in the Gospel of the Mass that Jesus withdrew to a solitary place with his disciples, on the other side of Lake Tiberias. But as we know from other Gospel accounts, when the crowds noticed him, they followed him. The Lord welcomed these people who were seeking him: he spoke to them of the Kingdom of God, and gave health to those who lacked it. Jesus had compassion for their pain and ignorance.

The day was beginning to draw to a close. The Lord has paused for a long time, unveiling the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, giving peace and consolation. The Apostles, uneasy because of the late hour and the remoteness of the place, find it necessary to warn the Master: Send the crowd away, so that they may go to the surrounding towns and villages, to seek shelter and to provide themselves with food; for here we are in a desert place.

The Lord surprises them with his question: Wherewith shall we buy loaves of bread, that these may eat? Philip replied, "Two hundred denarii of bread are not enough to give everyone a piece. But the Apostles do what they can: they find five loaves and two fish. They have no other means. And there were about five thousand men. Too many people for what they had obtained.

At times, Jesus also makes us see that the problems are beyond us, that we can do little or nothing in the face of the situation before us. And he asks us not to focus too much on human resources, because that would lead us to pessimism, but to rely more on supernatural means. He asks us to be supernaturally realistic; that is, to count on Jesus, on his power.

The Lord wants us to flee both from thinking of human effort as the only help, and from passivity, which, under the pretext of total abandonment into God's hands, turns hope into disguised spiritual laziness.

The Lord uses what is available: a few loaves and a few fish, the only thing the Apostles had been able to gather. He provided the rest. But he did not want to do without human means, even if they were few. This is what the Lord does in our lives: he does not want us to do nothing because the instruments we have are insufficient or scarce. Jesus asks us faith, obedience, audacity and to always do what is in our hands; not to fail to put any human means within our reach and, at the same time, to count on Him, aware that our possibilities are always very small. "Even the farmer, when he walks through the field with the plow or scatters the seed, suffers the cold, endures the discomfort of the rain, looks at the sky and sees it sad, and yet he continues to sow. What he fears is to stop considering the sorrows of the present life and then time passes and he finds nothing to reap. Do not put it off until later, but sow now "6 , even if it seems that the field will not bear fruit. Let us not wait until we have all the human means, let us not wait for all the difficulties to disappear. In the supernatural, there is always fruit: the Lord takes care of it, the Lord blesses our efforts and multiplies them.