Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Why spend your wages on what fails to satisfy? Isaiah's question is worth letting land. Across a long life there have probably been many answers to it - many places you spent yourself expecting to be filled and weren't. The career, the project, the relationship, the thing you pursued for years that turned out to hold less than you thought when you finally got there. Not all of them were wrong to pursue. But the ones that disappointed have probably clarified something.

Paul writes from prison that nothing - neither death nor life, neither present things nor future things, neither any height nor any depth nor any creature - can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. He has tested this claim personally. The list is not hypothetical. He has been through anguish and distress and persecution and peril and still writes this. What he is describing is not a feeling but a fact about the structure of reality, arrived at through the kind of testing that only comes with time.

Jesus was grieving when he fed the five thousand. He had tried to find a quiet place after hearing about John's death, and the crowds were already there when he arrived. He was moved with pity and healed the sick and fed everyone and had twelve baskets left over. The abundance came through the grief, not after it passed.

You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing. That is what the psalm says about God. Not some desires - every. At the end of a long life, with the failed satisfactions behind you and whatever time remains ahead, that verse has a particular weight. The desire that was never fully met anywhere else is still there. The hand is still open.