Numbers 11:4b-15; Ps 81(80):12-13. 14-15. 16-17; Matthew 14:13-21
The lesson today is one of generosity. God gave the people Manna - a generous gift, without which they would all have starved. But they grumbled! How they grumbled - so much that Moses prayed earnestly to God that he might be freed of the burden of leading them.
Generosity then is not always returned!
In the Gospel, the well known feeding of the 5000, then remember that the people and the apostles probably had sufficient between them to feed each other - they simply had to be taught to give all that they had away. There was enough food in that camp to feed another camp over! The twelve baskets symbolise the twelve tribes - so to feed all the people of God.
The only reason we have taxes is because people are not generous enough to support each other as we should.
St John Vianney
He was the son of a peasant farmer, and a slow and unpromising candidate for the priesthood: he was eventually ordained on account of his devoutness rather than any achievement or promise.
In 1818 he was sent to be the parish priest of Ars-en-Dombes, an isolated village some distance from Lyon, and remained there for the rest of his life because his parishioners would not let him leave. He was a noted preacher, and a celebrated confessor: such was his fame, and his reputation for insight into his penitents’ souls and their futures, that he had to spend up to eighteen hours a day in the confessional, so great was the demand. The tens of thousands of people who came to visit this obscure parish priest turned Ars into a place of pilgrimage.
“The Curé refused to sit for a portrait. When the sculptor Cabuchet surreptitiously tried to capture his features in a ball of wax during the catechism, Vianney sternly bounced him out of the church.” (The Curé d’Ars Today, by G.W.Rutler, 1988).
The French State recognised his eminence by awarding him the medal of the Légion d’Honneur in 1848, and he sold it and gave the money to the poor.