God, in Christ, becomes poor and shares Himself

In the Gospels we find Jesus amidst the poor, the rejected, the lowest at the social scale. He moves with ease among them and they feel at home with him. They perceive that he genuinely cares about them, that he is on their side.

There is that privileged moment narrated by Luke, when he spontaneously prays to God, the Father: I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the educated and have revealed them to the little ones; yes, Father, for such was your merciful will. Jesus finds the wisdom of God among those little ones. He dedicates so much time to them, to sharing his own self with them and giving them his message of redemption.

Tomorrow’s Gospel reading at the Eucharistic Liturgy (December 6) gives us further signs of God’s loving and liberating presence. It is the well known text of the healing of many sick and the feeding of the four thousand plus (in Matthew 15). Great crowds come to him bringing all kinds of seriously sick friends and relatives. The mute speak, the maimed are made whole, the lame walk, the blind see. Then Jesus becomes quite concerned that they have been with him for three days and have not had much to eat. He just can’t send them away hungry! What is God revealing to us about himself in all of this?

It is important to recognize that those sick people suffered beyond their physical condition. They were also ostracised from society and the Temple (the “house” of God, the organizational center of society). [See, for example, the crippled beggar in Acts 3, who cannot enter the Temple.] However, they surround Jesus and come to him like to a friend and begin to discover that God loves them in a special way. Walls break down and they are brought together into a new way of being a people around Jesus. They are not only taken in but are recognized as precious before God and men. They not only discover that their needs are satisfied but also that in this new way of being a people of the God of Jesus there will be enough to go around and then some, in sharing the way God shares!

These are also fundamental aspects of Eucharist.