Five minutes Sermons: MAN'S NEED OF GOD.
by VP
Posted on Thursday June 30, 2022 at 12:00AM in Sermons
-"And Jesus said to His disciples: I have compassion on the multitudes, because they have nothing to eat, and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way."-St. Matt. xv. 32.
If our Divine Lord were to reappear in the flesh to-day, walking amongst men, as He did nineteen centuries ago, He would, no doubt, have with Him again the multitudes, attracted by the sweetness of His divine personality. He would see at His feet amongst the miserable millions embodying mankind's collected woe not only the dumb, the blind, the lame and maimed, casting themselves down before Him to be healed, but crowding around Him a multitude of those who have nothing to eat. Compassion would again be dominant and rule supreme in His Sacred Heart, and who can doubt that the Healer of mankind would again, while healing the sick, not send away the others fasting?
I will not dwell here on the fact that in the present as in bygone times there is scarcely much difference as to the vastness in numbers of those who literally, in plain Gospel language, "have nothing to eat." I will only say, that if the percentage of the poor and needy, of those hungering for their daily bread, has remained unchanged, as great as in the past, it is owing to the prevalent, all but universal love of gain. If, then, the wretched become dependent upon others more fortunate than themselves, their relief is a means to make those who help them like Jesus Christ. But though without such help the wretched multitude must go away fasting and fainting, this sorrowful truth is not the whole truth. The real state of things is still worse. For if we consider likewise, as we ought to, the spiritual and moral condition of the greater number of those that have abundancethat is, that are filled with bread and meat and the other good things of this life-we find that in another sense of the divine text they have nothing to eat. If we only were able to read their souls, it would be seen that, in spite of their bodily fulness, they still are spiritually fasting owing to the void in their hearts.
In this world there is no food which can fill the desire of men's souls. There is, then, not only the danger of their fainting by the way, but there are in reality vast numbers of them who have fallen, who at every moment are falling, by the wayside, and away from true life. We then discover this fact, even more deplorable than the first, because having nothing to eat in the spiritual sense, so many fall away from all belief in God. In the truer and deeper, the mystical sense of the text, we see that there are millions to-day who have nothing to eat, who go about fasting, faint, and who even die in the way. The experience of past ages bears me out when I say that God alone can satisfy the necessities of the human heart and the aspirations of man's soul."
In vain has mankind attempted to live without its Creator. "Of old," says the venerable Father Lallemant, "the devil disguised himself as God, presenting himself to the heathen in idols, as the author and the end of everything in the world." Later on, in modern, in our times, men have tried to fill the void within by creatures which they substituted for God. But nobody has succeeded, nobody can succeed without God. The oft-repeated attempt of man to deceive his own heart and soul into the belief that anything but God will still his hunger, has caused only wretchedness and supreme misery.
The truth then is: Today,
as of old, multitudes are without God, without Christ, by their own
fault. They will not follow Him out to the desert, will not listen to
His words, ponder upon them; will not ask for grace to believe and be
filled with truth. No; in pride, in deluded self-satisfaction, in the
bustle of life, in the entanglements of passion or business, they suffer
life to run on in some faint, half-hearted way, desiring the truth but
never, as the Apostle says, coming to the knowledge of it. But we, by
God's mercy, have the truth, we have eaten and been filled; oh! let us
prize it, let us above all be faithful to it—for our Lord says: Blessed are you, not because you know
the truth, not solely because you possess it, but blessed are you if,
knowing it, you live up to it."
The Five minute Sermons by the Paulist Fathers
