Jesus (38 page)

One of the more common experiences of those who work in spiritual ministries is hearing a grateful person tell you how something you barely remember doing changed his or her life. How something you believed to be small became something big for someone else. Sometimes in a homily I make a brief aside about, say, suffering, and afterward a parishioner will say through tears, “That was so helpful, Father. It's just what I needed to hear today.” It may have been the right time for that person to hear—a
kairos
moment—so she is naturally more open to the message. But those experiences are also examples of God's multiplying what few loaves and fishes we can offer, whether on the grass at Tabgha or inside a church in New York City.

We are invited to trust that the few loaves and fishes we bring will provide nourishment, even if we cannot see the results. After working for two years in Kenya with refugees, helping them start small businesses with modest financial grants, I could see many successes in the refugees' lives: flourishing businesses, families lifted out of poverty, men and women given new hope. Many times, though, the refugees would gradually lose touch with our office, and I had to trust that whatever help we had furnished—spiritual or financial—was somehow bearing fruit.

We also may feel that our efforts are inadequate. We try to help our friends and family, but nothing seems to work. We try to fix our children's lives, but it doesn't seem to help. We try to seek forgiveness, but others are still resentful. We try to encourage our friends, but they still seem disconsolate. We try to love, but it doesn't seem enough.

But Jesus accepts what we give, blesses it, breaks it open, and magnifies it. Often in ways that we don't see or cannot see. Or will not be able to see in this lifetime. Who knows what a kind word does? Who knows what a single act of charity will do? Sometimes the smallest word or gesture can change a life. A few years ago I told a Jesuit priest how what he had said to me on retreat helped me through a tough time. When I repeated what he had told me—word for word—he laughed and said he didn't even remember saying it. Yet his loaves and fishes had been multiplied.

Other times we are privileged to witness this abundance. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and spiritual writer, recently told me a story. He had received a letter from a man he had met only once, decades before, and who wanted to visit him at his home in New Mexico. “What you said changed my life,” he wrote, “and I'd like to say thank you.” Richard wondered what he had said all those years ago. The man drove a great distance, and when he arrived, Richard escorted this now-middle-aged man into the parlor.

“When I was in my twenties,” the man explained, “I was in a crisis and didn't know what I wanted to do in life, and do you remember what you said to me?”

Richard did not.

“You said, ‘You do not need to know.' Every time I get confused, I remind myself of that.” He told Richard how that phrase had become his life's mantra in all business situations and relationships and in marriage. It had made him a happy man, he said.

Richard laughed when he told me that story. “And I don't even remember saying that!”

God can take any small offering that we make—a kind word, a brief visit to a hospital, a quick apology, a short thank-you note or e-mail, a smile—and multiply it.

G
OD DOES THE SAME
in our spiritual lives as well, providing enormous nourishment from what seems like a fleeting event, a passing comment from a friend, a brief sentence in a book, or a few words in Scripture.

Often I've read a word or phrase in the Bible that offers consolation entirely out of proportion to what might be expected. During one retreat, I read the story of the Rich Young Man, in the Gospel of Mark, and something caught my eye.
²⁵
In the story Jesus meets a wealthy man who asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus reminds the man of his obligation to follow the Law and then lists the Commandments. The man, portrayed by Mark as a good person, tells Jesus that he has kept these commandments “since my youth.”

I had heard this story dozens of times. In fact it was one of the Gospel passages that prompted me to enter a religious order. But when I read the next line, it was as if I had never seen it before. Jesus, I knew, was about to tell the man to give up all his possessions in order to be able to follow Jesus.

It is a difficult story for many Christians, because it is often interpreted as meaning that they must divest themselves of all they own—at least the
best
disciples must. But even in Jesus's time, not all of his followers were called to do this. Martha and Mary, after all, entertain Jesus in their house. As I see it, Jesus is asking the man to let go of whatever prevents him from hearing God's voice. It is an invitation to simplicity, but an even greater one to freedom.

So I knew this story and was ready for Jesus to utter his famous next line: “You lack one thing; go sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

But before Jesus opens his mouth, Mark writes, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said . . .”

Jesus “loved him”? Where did that come from? I had heard this Gospel story dozens of times. How had I missed that line? I scoured the retreat house library for a Greek New Testament, opened up to the Gospel of Mark, located the passage and was shocked to read:
Iēsous emblepsas autō ēgapēsen auton:
“Jesus, looking at him, loved him.”

Those three words—Jesus loved him—led to several hours of meditation. They altered the familiar story and thus altered how I saw Jesus. No longer was it the exacting Jesus demanding perfection; it was the loving Jesus offering freedom. Now I could hear him utter those words with infinite compassion for the man. Those three words changed the way I saw Jesus and his commands. I didn't even think of them as commands any longer, but rather as loving invitations. For Jesus always acts out of love. I couldn't believe how something so small—three little words—had provided such abundance in prayer.

Later in the story of the Rich Young Man, Jesus explicitly offers a promise of abundance: for everyone who leaves behind something, as the rich young man was called to do, he or she will receive “a hundredfold.” More abundance.

This may be one reason so many of Jesus's parables are about things growing. The tiny mustard seed, so minuscule that it is hard to see with the naked eye, grows into a bush so large—sometimes as high as six feet on the shores of the Sea of Galilee—that birds can build their nests in it. A sower scatters seed, and when some of it falls onto fertile ground its crop yield is a hundredfold.
²⁶
And the real work of multiplication is done quietly and mysteriously by God. How amazing it must have been for the farmers at the time, without our understanding of biology, to see the seed germinate, push forth its green shoots from the earth, grow leaves, and finally produce its yield, all under God's providential care.

Lohfink also suggests that the small seed, almost hidden from view, shows “not only the unstoppable growth of the reign of God but also the shockingly minute and hidden character of its beginning.” The seed grows even as we cannot see God's work upon it. And the only response to this marvelous phenomenon is trust.
²⁷
Overall, the reign of God
grows.

A
LL WE NEED TO
do is bring what little we have, generously and unashamedly. At Tabgha, the disciples seemed embarrassed that there was not enough for the crowd and were about to send everyone away hungry. But Jesus knew that whatever there is, God can make more of it. But first we are asked to offer our loaves and fishes, no matter how inadequate they may seem. Only then can God accomplish the kind of true miracle that occurred at Tabgha.

T
HE
M
ULTIPLICATION OF THE
L
OAVES AND
F
ISHES

Mark 6:35–44

(See also Matthew 14:13–21; Luke 9:12–17; John 6:1–15)

When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” When they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled; and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.

C
HAPTER
16

Bethesda

“There is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes.”

R
ELIGIOUS LEGENDS SOMETIMES HAVE
a strange way of turning out to be true. The best-known example may be the discovery of what is now almost universally accepted as the tomb of St. Peter. It was reputed to lie directly underneath the great dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, though many scholars had judged this location doubtful and most likely inauthentic.

It was believed that the Galilean fisherman ended his earthly life in the great city in
AD
64 after being martyred by the Roman authorities. St. Peter is said to have asked to be crucified upside down, considering himself unworthy of ending his life as Jesus had. The basilica in his honor was also known to have been built atop a site—the Vatican Hill—occupied by a church since the time of Constantine in the fourth century. But whether the actual remains of Peter lay there was an open question.

In the 1930s and 1940s, however, a series of archaeological finds under St. Peter's Basilica led to the discovery of the tomb of a man in his late sixties, near graffiti that included the word
Petrus
. Over time, the Vatican examined sufficient evidence to conclude that the bones of St. Peter had been located. The collection of the man's bones was largely intact, except for the feet, which were missing—not surprising given that the easiest way to remove a body crucified upside down would have been to chop off the feet first.
¹

Locations reputed to be only “legendary” or based on “popular piety” often turn out to have a basis in fact.

Why is this? Well, it's human nature to remember important places and to pass these memories along to descendants. This is particularly the case in the Holy Land. In Jesus's day, people didn't move around much; a family may have stayed in the same town for generations. Thus, if Christians in those early centuries visited Nazareth or Bethlehem and asked about important sites in Jesus's life, it's not unreasonable to think that his extended family (or their children or grandchildren) would not only have been in the area, but would also have remembered, say, the location of his carpentry shop. To take another example, Peter's descendants would have surely known the location of his house in Capernaum. These locations would have been treasured by pilgrims and knowledge of them passed down to later generations. That doesn't mean that every site in the Holy Land is the precise spot at which a Gospel story occurred, but often these locations may be more accurate than we imagine.

The Pool of Bethesda is one such place. According to the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John, while visiting Jerusalem, Jesus heals a paralyzed man beside a pool “which has five porticoes.” It is one of my favorite stories in the Gospels, primarily because of the reversal of the man's extreme situation: he has been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. Moreover, as the man tells Jesus in a heartbreaking line, he has “no one” to help him. But Jesus, friend to the friendless, heals him.

Until the nineteenth century, however, many scholars believed that the pool did not exist. Either it was, as some believed, an “allegorical” pool, or the entire story was fabricated and added to the Gospel later. Some believed that the idea of the “five porticoes” was an allegorical representation of the five books of Moses or was simply a “construct of the imagination.”
²

But at the turn of the twentieth century, excavations in Jerusalem revealed not simply a pool but, as the archaeologists gradually cut into the rock, the foundations for colonnaded walkways or porticoes—exactly as John had described it. In another confirmation of the ancient tradition, Bethesda was said to be the birthplace of Mary. And what did the excavators see just a few yards away from the newly unearthed Pool of Bethesda? The Crusader-era Church of St. Anne, dedicated to Mary's mother.

G
EORGE AND
I
STUMBLED
upon the Pool of Bethesda by accident. Rushing headlong through Jerusalem on our second day, anxious to see all that we could, we were headed to the Garden of Gethsemane, threading our way through the Old City. In my haste, I spotted a sign pointing to an archway that said, “Church of St. Anne.” That sounded dull—certainly nothing related directly to Jesus's public ministry. But on our little map I saw a minuscule notation, “Pool of Bethesda.”

I stopped so fast I almost tripped over my feet. “The Pool of Bethesda!” I said to George. Earlier that month I had read the story of the rediscovery of this place and knew I wanted to see this, a physical confirmation of a Gospel story.

George trailed me as we walked under a limestone archway and stopped at a ticket booth. The quiet courtyard was paved with broad white stones and dotted with tall pine trees. A handful of pilgrims ambled around. I breezed past the Church of St. Anne, a simple but imposing structure in Jerusalem stone, with clean lines and little ornamentation, and made a beeline for the Pool of Bethesda.