Truly the Prophet

How many of you sat through a homily today about sharing? C'mon, raise you hands. I can't understand why some people consider the "miracle" of the loaves and fishes to be about sharing. As I understand it, those folks claimed that the miracle that Jesus performed was to get everyone to share the food that they had brought with them. There are some problems with this.

First off, Jesus sets up the whole shebang by having the Apostles verify that there is no way the people can be fed. If the people had brought food with them, why then would they have to spend 200 days' wags to feed them? In fact, if they had brought food with them, all they had to do was sit and eat it; Jesus and the Apostles need do nothing. End of story. Nothing to see here, go home people.

But perhaps only a few people brought food, but they brought it in great quantities, and they needed Jesus to say a blessing in order to make them share it. Huh? Are we to expect that this was some sermon that Jesus uttered that made food vendors give away their stock? Where is the sermon? It is not mentioned here. We don't here "Jesus spoke the word and their hearts were opened." Instead we here "Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them."

Well, perhaps that's figurative speech? Sorry, but that doesn't work either. We are told "When the people saw the sign he had done, they said, 'This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world.'" Are we to expect that the people wanted to make Jesus king, and called him Prophet, Messiah, because he convinced some food vendors to give away their wares?

And so my questions to the "sharing" theorists are these. Do you think Jesus God or a liar? Because He claimed to be God, so if He isn't, He's a liar. And if He is God, and God created the entire universe from nothing, why is it so hard to believe that He could make some bread and fish, that you have to invent ridiculous stories that don't fit the account in order to try to explain it away?

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Eureka

I confess, one of the shows I follow on TV is the SyFy channel original series Eureka. Yes, it is often hokey, and the science is bogus, and the alternate universe stuff gets annoying, but for whatever reason, I find it enjoyable. So there. Besides, it's in its final season. Warning, here come spoilers.

If you've been watching recent episodes, you know there was an experimental FTL (faster than light) spaceship that disappeared with the crew on board. It turned out that the ship never left the Earth, but the crew was kidnapped and put into a virtual reality machine (ala The Matrix). They discover they are in a virtual reality when there are glitches. In one case a bird flies through a rock. In another, the NPC (non-player character) becomes pixelated or flickers. When the characters see this they realize that this is not "reality" but a virtual reality inside the real world.

In the movie "The Matrix" the "proof" that there was a deeper reality than what was seen is even more subtle. Things like seeing the same cat cross a room twice. Experiencing deja vu is also "proof" of a reality deeper than what can be seen.

It strikes me that despite the banishment of all thing religious from both story lines, there is something very Christian about these stories. We see things that defy the laws of nature (aka miracles) and point to them as evidence of a deeper spiritual reality than just the physical one we experience with our senses normally.

As Catholics, we believe, as the Disciples and Church Fathers did, that Christ meant what he said in John 6, and in the synoptic Gospels, where He said [emphasis mine] "this is my body" "this is my blood". And so we believe that each mass is itself a miracle, in that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ, but the appearances do not change.

But sometimes they do. The image at the top of this post is of the Miracle of Lanciano, which took place around the year 700 in what is now Italy. What you are looking at is a consecrated host, which contains a perfect cross section of a human heart, complete with all the expected structures. My atheist friends say that miracles are just low probability random events that we impose our superstitious meanings on, but how does one explain this?

This is not just a "low probability event", it defies anything plausible. Even assuming an evil priest who wanted to trick everybody into his wrong-headed ideas, who had the technology to merge bread and human heart 1,300 years ago? Or even to produce a perfect, undisturbed slice? And how does one explain that, of all the miracles involving Christ's blood over thousands of years, every one has turned out to be blood type AB. Blood type AB occurs in only 5% to 10% of the population, so the probability of choosing someone with that blood type so many times in a row itself is highly unlikely. And since blood types were only discovered in the last century, there is no way our ancient priest could have tested for it.

Certainly miracles are neither necessary for nor sole proof of our faith, but they do present a dilemma for those who will not believe. As G.K. Chesterton, wrote in Orthodoxy, "The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them."

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