Is 55:1-3; Rom 8:35, 37-39;
Mt 14:13-21
When Jesus heard about
the assassination of John the Baptist, He withdrew to a lonely place. He
must have been emotionally disturbed and wanted to be alone. But when he
arrived a crowd had already been waiting for Him. He was moved
with compassion to the depths of his being. Jesus had come to
find peace, quiet and loneliness; instead he found a vast crowd waiting to
be comforted. Jesus showed
his compassion by healing their sick.
Elton Lehman, a Country
Doctor who still makes House Calls, has tended to the needs of Ohio's Amish.
Winding his way through the rolling hills near 'Mount Eaton, Ohio, Dr.
Elton Lehman reaches every house. For nearly 35
years, the Amish of Holmes County, who for the most part shun such modern
conveniences as cars and electricity, have relied on Lehman, for his sound
advice and sympathetic bedside manner. In a culture where virtually no one has
more than an eighth-grade education, Lehman is the rare trusted outsider. So
beloved is he in the area that Mount Eaton, a town with Amish and non-Amish residents,
recently re-elected him mayor for a third consecutive term.
Lehman took a
3:00 a.m. phone call from a former Amish patient with a relative who had
suffered a massive stroke. Without a second thought, Lehman drove 60 miles to
answer the call. Lehman expressed his compassion by being available at any
time.
Jesus
showed his compassion with love in action. When Jesus passed two blind men who
cried out for mercy, he touched their eyes and their sight was restored
(Matthew, 20). When a leper came to Jesus and asked to be clean again, Jesus
touched him, and the man’s leprosy was cured. Jesus was moved with compassion
(Mark 1:4).
Our society has more sick people than any other age. Wellness
Industry reached an annual
turnover of 1 TRILLION dollars by the year 2010. The turnover of Indian
pharmaceutical industry is $4.5 billion, growing about 8 to 9 percent annually.
It is expected to reach $55 billion in 2020. From these figures we can get a
glimpse of the need of our contemporaries to get comfort from physical illness.
Jesus’ action of healing the sick places great demands on us, too, to
continue the healing ministry of Jesus. St Peter admonishes the followers
of Christ to have compassion for one another, and to love others as brothers (1
Peter 3:8).
Secondly, it’s a compassion that is willing to confront. In
the story of the feeding of the five thousand the disciples tell Jesus
to send them away, but Jesus challenges them, “YOU give them something to
eat.”
Out of 10,000 nominations from more than 100
countries, Narayan Krishnan from Madurai was selected as one of the Top 10 in
“CNN heroes 2010″. Many
people walk through life visually registering the objects, landscape and living
creatures around them visually without actually seeing them. There are rare
people who feel that to hear or see in suffering or imbalance in the world
is a message from a Higher Power that they are in that place and in that time
to alleviate it. Narayanan Krishnan is such a person. In 2002, he was a cook
for the prestigious Taj Hotel in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. He was headed for
stellar achievements in Switzerland in his chosen profession as a hotel chef.
He described as follows the moment of awakening that changed the course of his
life.
“I saw a very old man, literally eating his
own human waste out of hunger. I went to the nearby hotel and asked them what
was available. They had idli, which I bought and gave to the old man. Believe
me, I had never seen a person eating so fast, ever. As he ate the food, his
eyes were filled with tears. Those were the tears of happiness.”
Right away, Krishnan quit his job, defying
religious, caste and social conventions by pouring his time and effort into
feeding, bathing and grooming the destitute, mentally ill and elderly left
uncared for and languishing in the streets. By founding the Akshaya Trust in
2003, he made thousands of people partners and facilitators of his acts of
kindness. His day of devotion to the poor of his city is described as follows.
Every day, he wakes up at 4 a.m., cooks a
simple hot meal and then, along with his team, loads it in a van and travels
about 125 miles (201 km) feeding the homeless and mentally-disabled in Madurai,
Tamil Nadu. He serves breakfast, lunch and dinner to 400 indigent and elderly
people in Madurai.
The account of Jesus
feeding the Five Thousand with five loaves and two fish may be the best-known
of Jesus' miracles. It is the only miracle recounted in all four of the
Gospels, and it has a way of capturing the imagination. But this is not
primarily a miracle but a lesson, more for the disciples' benefit than the
crowds who were fed. Jesus makes us aware that our resources are woefully
inadequate to meet the need, but we are to bring what resources we have to
Jesus. We place them in his hands to do what he wishes with them, and in the
process, release control to him. He in turn blesses them and places them back
in our hands, multiplied, more powerful than we could have imagined.
We must release our resources to him in
trust. Their smallness in our eyes must not be an obstacle. He is teaching us a
trust journey, and it must be accompanied by our learning to trust him by doing
what he asks, even if we have no idea where he is going with it. It is the
lesson of Abraham offering Isaac, his only son. It is the lesson of
Gideon seeing his small but inadequate army whittled down to a pitiful 300. It
is the lesson that you and I face more often than we would like to admit. It is
an essential lesson in the school of discipleship.
Thirdly,
it shows the generosity of Jesus. At the end of the miracle there is that
strange little touch that the fragments were gathered up. Even when a
miracle could feed men sumptuously there was no waste.
Modern man is
guilty of wastage of food, while one third of the world goes hungry. According
to statistics we throw away 8.3 million
tons of food and drink a year. I am sure at one point
or another you may have witnessed huge wastage of good food at either someone's
weddings or a social gathering. We can see there is food wastage
everyday at messes, hotels, restaurants, trains, and even in homes. God gives to men with munificence, but a wasteful
extravagance is never right. God’s generous giving and our wise using must go
hand in hand. “Live simply, so that others may
simply live.”(Mother Teresa)
Satish