Friday in Second Week of Easter, April 20,2007

Scripture: Acts 5:34-42. Psalm 27. John 6:1-15: Lectionary #271:

All of us appreciate and need others as mediators and friends who help us
through difficult times and through some of the tragedies of life that
affect us. Today, we see that in the early Church described in the Acts
of the Apostles, Gamaliel, a Pharisee is a mediator between the Christian
Jewish community of the apostles and friends of Jesus with the religious
authorities who are mostly Sadducees with some Pharisees and scribes.
Gamaliel tells the Sanhedrin to be patient and judge the new sect by its
perfomance and its works and not to condemn them. Using such religious
persuasion and reasonableness he prevents them from being thrown into
prison again. They then go to the Temple and pray and teach there that
Jesus is the Messiah. They tell everyone that it is better to obey God
than human authority whenever they see that it is not seeing their
pariticular religious convictions which do no harm. Then in the Gospel, we
see that Jesus has some help from Philip and Andrew in getting the crowd
settled on the slopes of the hills of Galilee. Jesus will do the rest as
he multiplies the loaves and the fish. In reflecting on this incident
which is mentioned on six occasions in the Gospels and in all four of them,
we see that on a second level it is a Eucharistic teaching to the Christian
community. The same words that are used in the Eucharist are recorded in
the narrative given by John... Jesus took the bread, thanked God
(Eucharistein in Greek) and distributed it through the apostles to the
people who were seated in an orderly fashion. The Evangelist tells us
this was Passover time. This makes us think of the event in the light of
our own celebration of the Easter season which as we have seen is bound up
with the sacrament of Baptism and now with the Eucharist. May we see the
mediation of the sacraments and the help of our friends as signs of God's
ever abundant love for us in times of need and in good times as well.
Finally, the thought that helped me today and yesterday came from a passage
in St. Paul's letter to the Romans which shows us the superabundant love of
God in our lives: "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
your faith, so that in the power of the Holy Spirit you may be rich in
hope." (Romans 15:13). Amen.