AHA!

Wednesday after Epiphany

Mk 6:45-52

The gospel today is evidently a continuation of yesterday’s. And it whispers something important as it ends: “they (the disciples) did not understand what the miracle of the loaves meant, for their minds were closed.” Aha! After all that earth-shaking dinner, the disciples still did not get it? Now we know why. Their minds were closed. So the miraculous, free meal was not meant to fill their stomachs only. It was not to be digested by their intestines alone. It was meant to satisfy the heart more than anything else. For it is the heart that opens the mind.

Whatever we love, we accept. Whoever we love, we open our minds to. It is the heart that opens the mind. It is not the mind that opens the heart. For if it is the mind that opens the heart, the beloved can easily be forgotten when the mind loses its faculty. But if it is the heart that opens the mind, love endures beyond what the mind can bear. It is the heart that opens the mind.

The minds of the disciples were closed because the food satisfied their physical hunger but the feeding failed to touch their hearts. The satisfaction, after all, is not in the eating but in the feeding. And because their hearts were not ignited, as it were, their minds remained in darkness where fear reigns.

“Courage! It is I! Do not be afraid,” the Lord Jesus called out to them who shudder at the thought that he whom they saw walking on the lake was a ghost. Did they eat too much that they thought they were seeing things? I remember how elders used to caution us when we were children: don’t eat much at night lest you have nightmares. Ghosts can visit us when we are awake as much as when we are asleep. It is not much food that we need then. Much courage instead.

Christ Jesus, who is the Light of the world, eventually got into the boat were the disciples were. The disciples did not reach for the light; the Light reached out to them. As the wind dropped, the gospel-writer said, the disciples were utterly and completely dumbfounded. They could not believe what they have just witnessed: Jesus walking on the lake and the nature bowing to Him. But did they not just witnessed earlier that evening how the same Jesus fed five thousand men with only five loaves of bread and two fish? Indeed, the disciples did not learn the lesson yet: with love all things are possible.

As the Christmas season is about to close in a matter of three days, I wonder if we really learn its lesson. Are we leaving the season with a better view on things in the light of God’s earth-shaking love for us? Are we truly convinced by the incarnation of God’s Son that with love all things are possible? Are we more courageous now to face the wind that smashes against the boat we are in? Did we really get the whole point of Christmas or did we only get our gifts from under the Christmas tree? Did we open our wrapped gifts but not our closed minds? Are our stomachs full but our hearts empty?

If Christmas did not open our minds, then our hearts failed to see the miracle of the Baby God in the manger. If so what was there in all our merry-making, tell me?

Aha!