“Giving of our Gifts – Multiplication for all!”
17th Sunday – B
Story: “It happened on the River Kwai.”
-by Ernest Gordon of Princeton Univ.
inspired the movie “Bridge over the River Kwai”
Gordon worked on the infamous 250-mile “Railway of Death,” which the Japanese were building to facilitate their drive into Burma and India. Over 12,000 Allied prisoners died of starvation and brutality building this railway. Gordon wrote: “Toiling from dawn to dusk…we worked bareheaded and barefooted in temperatures as high as 120 degrees in the sun. Men staggered to their assignments burning with fever. When they dropped in their tracks, they were left where they fell, to be picked up at the day’s end and carried back to the camp by their comrades. “A prisoner suspected of faking an illness was tied to a tree, beaten, and left exposed to the tropical sun and insects all day.” But, said Gordon: “the worst enemy was not the Japanese. Nor was it the hard life they had to live or even the tropical sun, their worst enemy was themselves.
Their fear of the Japanese made the prisoners paranoid. The law of the jungle took over among them. They stole from one another. They distrusted one another. And to win personal favors from the Japanese, they informed on one another. The guards laughed to see the once-proud soldiers were destroying one another. Morale hit zero. Something had to be done! But what could one man do in a situation like this?
Finally, two enlisted men, whose faith in God had helped them keep their honor and integrity, decided to try.
They gathered together the few Bibles they could find and organized a prayer-discussion group. Meeting at night, the group started with about a dozen men. Before long, the group grew to hundreds.
Through readings and discussions, the men came to know Jesus. Their problems were the same problems Jesus himself had faced.
-He too was often hungry.
-He too was often bone-weary.
-He too was betrayed.
-He too felt the sting of the whip on his back.
Everything about Jesus – what he was, what he said, what he did – began to make sense and come alive for these prisoners.
The prisoners reversed their former behavior. They stopped thinking about themselves as victims of some cruel tragedy. They stopped informing on one another. They stopped destroying one another. Nowhere was their change of heart more evident than in their group prayers together.
They began to pray not so much for themselves but for one another. And when they did pray for themselves, it was not to get something. It was to release some new power that they suddenly found inside themselves.
Gordon tells how one night he was hobbling back to his hut after a late Bible-study meeting. Suddenly, from one of the huts along the way, he heard a group of prisoners singing a hymn. One of the prisoners was beating time on a piece of metal with a stick. The sound of the singing made the difference between those joyful voices and the dreadful silence of months past, it was “the difference between life and death.”
That story of how two enlisted men transformed an entire prisoner-of-war camp bears a striking resemblance to the story of the boy in today’s gospel. Like the two enlisted men in the camp, who did what they could, the boy in the story did what he could. He gave to Jesus what he had and Jesus did the rest.
In the case of the boy, Jesus multiplied his loaves and fishes beyond his greatest expectation. In the case of the two enlisted men, Jesus took their honor and integrity and multiplied it beyond their greatest expectation.
What Jesus did for the hungry crowd, and what Jesus did for the prisoners of war, he also wants to do for us today.
He wants to feed the hungry millions of our world. He wants to transform the angry millions of our world. But Jesus needs a boy to give him a few loaves and fishes to start the process. He needs a couple of lowly enlisted men to give him their honor and integrity to initiate the transformation.
In brief, Jesus needs people like you and me to give him our loaves and fishes and our integrity and honor. Jesus needs us to give him our talents and our daily prayers and crosses. And if we give these things to Jesus, he will take them and bless them and multiply them beyond our greatest expectations to build up the church. If only a few of us give of our Time, Talent and Treasure, then all the financial resources that we need to build programs of Ministry and Lifelong Formation and Education can never be accomplished. It takes all of us, just like it took all the prisoners, just like it took the boy with the loaves and fishes.
It’s the same lesson, the same challenge, and the same invitation that Pope John Paul set before the young people in Denver and around the world at World Youth Day..
After reading today’s gospel, the pope said to the young people:
“The boy gave all he had and Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 people…It is exactly the same with your lives… Place your lives in the hands of Jesus. He will accept and bless you, and he will make use of your lives in a way that exceeds your greatest expectation.” This message is not just for the youth, it is for all of us! Let us begin giving today!!!
2 Kings 4:42-44
Ephesias 4:1-6
John 6:1-15