When Our Hope Is As Small as Five Loaves and Two Fish

Today’s reflection is from Bondings 2.0 Digital Content Coordinator, Jeromiah Taylor.

Today’s liturgical readings for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ can be found by clicking here.

Today we celebrate the Body and Blood of Christ, which is, always has been, and will forever be the substance of our hope. The Church insists the Eucharistic Lord is the “Source and Summit” of our faith and Christ himself insisted that whoever ate and drank the real food and real drink of his body and blood would have eternal life. 

Yet hope is not an easy thing to reach. In fact the Church teaches us that it is a theological virtue: one unachievable through human effort, bestowed as a grace only by God. The Catechism cites Abraham as the exemplar of hope becaus he “hoped beyond hope” to become the father of many nations whose enemies, today’s first liturgical reading tells us, were delivered into his hands by the Lord. 

Abraham’s hope was tested, and so is all Chritian hope. Because hope is not evidence-based, it is revealed by God, and must be clung to, reaffirmed, and patiently waited upon. The triumphalism of our first reading and of the glory of Melchizedek’s line conveys the end of Christian hope: the fulfillment of God’s promises. Yet, as human beings living here and now we are rarely allowed glimpses of victory; all our life seems like Holy Saturday, characterized by a tense, traumatized waiting. 

As LGBTQ+ Catholics, as people of goodwill, as people who — however unrighteous we may be — “thirst for righteousness,” we may feel as if hope eludes us, always just beyond reach. Today’s gospel offers a rebuttal to our despair. Consider the meagerness, the laughable inadequacy of the gospel: the pathetic odds of five loaves and two fish against the hunger of 5,000 people. It sounds rather like the odds we detect now, where goodness is outflanked on every side: in Los Angeles, Gaza, Lebanon, Myanmar, Washington D.C., New York City. In the United States, our Catholic hierarchy is only now beginning to wake from its slumber and condemn the evils of our current president’s xenophobia, and yet they still do not defend the civil rights of LGBTQ+  people. And though we are out of time to mitigate the worst effects of our ecological crises, still the plutocracy innovates evernew threats to human welfare. 

In the gospel reading the disciples tell Christ that there is no way to feed these people and they ought to be sent away. They do not hope beyond hope. Following prudence, they ascertain problems and propose solutions. According to worldly wisdom, this strategy may not be wrong: the resources at hand are inadequate. But they are in the company of the Christ and their options are no longer confined by the worldly. The tools of God have been added to their repertoire, and they must learn to think in a new way. This new way, however, is as old as their ancestor Abraham, who after believing in God’s promise to do the impossible, agrees to sacrifice the very reward for his faith: his son Isaac.

Those tools of God are the theological virtues, which are the “the pledge of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in the faculties of the human being,” which make us  “capable of acting as [God’s] children and of meriting eternal life” (CCC, 1813). 

When what little we have to give (no matter how inadequate) is infused with faith, hope, and love, we dwell  within the body of Christ, and our offerings will  be sufficient to realize his works, to fulfill our hope. He took his body upon himself, he gave us his body, he left us his body, and he joined us to his body. Today we celebrate our membership, our participation, in his body,  and we give thanks for the fact that we do not need to be or have or do enough: because we feed on Him and so live because of Him (cf. Jn 6: 57). 

In Laudato Si’ Pope Francis warned us against letting the polycrises of our time tilt us into despair. His parting gift to us was the current Jubilee Year of Hope, through which he gave us clear marching orders: become Pilgrims of Hope. I used to think that being a Pilgrim of Hope meant that sustained by hope, one kept journeying forward, each step taken thanks to the dim but persistent flicker of hope’s light.  Now, I’m beginning to think that a Pilgrimage of Hope is taken not via hope but towards hope: ad spes. Like Abraham who hoped beyond hope, perhaps it is enough that we start not with hope but with the hope for hope, and with the faith that such a small gift is enough for our God to work with. Enough even for him to feed the whole world. 

—Jeromiah Taylor, New Ways Ministry, June 22, 2025