“When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself.“
The Gospels tell us that Jesus had a habit of prayer that involved going off by Himself, seeking to be alone, in solitude. At the moment that He heard about the death of John the Baptist, He tried to pull away. Why did He try to go to a deserted place? Perhaps it was simply to grieve. Sadness at the loss of loved ones is a universal experience. There are no rules for grieving. Each of us does this in our own way. Jesus, sharing our human nature, needed to grieve the loss of John, whose baptismal ministry had opened His journey to being publicly known as “the Lamb of God.”
We know by faith that Jesus has the full reality of our common human nature. Perhaps hearing the news of the death of the Baptist gave the Lord a touch of the fear He would face more intensely in the Garden of Gethsemane. The fact that John was beheaded meant that Jesus’ own fate was soon to be set as well. He needed to express this to His Father.
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What do we fear? We fear that we do not have enough time to do all we are trying to do. We fear that others who accompany us will not be able to grasp what we are sharing with them. Could the Lord have needed some time to build up His stamina to face what lay ahead? With the death of John, He knew that His own sacrifice as the Lamb of God was imminent.
Whatever His need for the solitude, Jesus did not manage to get His time away. The folks who were following Him figured out where He was headed in the boat. When He saw them, His Heart responded with compassion: “When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, and he cured their sick.” This was followed by the sign that points to the greatest gift Jesus has given His Church.
Human limitations are not limitations for God. The feeding of the multitude was a sign, as well as the healing of the sick, that God has supplied the means to experience salvation in a practical way. Jesus took a small amount, and it proved to be enough: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds. They all ate and were satisfied, and they picked up the fragments left over—twelve wicker baskets full.”
The Paschal Mystery is Jesus’ Gift of Himself through our human nature that leads us to the Kingdom. Suffering and death are the path to Resurrection. Our cooperation with Christ by sharing whatever we have serves to meet the hungers of the human heart. There is enough and more than enough.
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Paul expresses the confidence that flows from Faith in Jesus: “Brothers and sisters: What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
When we become convinced that “the hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs,” we are more ready to be generous with what we have received.
