Our Father by Pope Francis

Author:Pope Francis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Feed the Hungry

In the Bible, one of the Psalms says that God is the one who “gives food to all flesh” (136:25). The experience of hunger is harsh. Those who have gone through periods of war or famine know it. Yet this experience is repeated every day and lives side by side with abundance and waste. The words of the apostle James are always timely: “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead,” because it is incapable of doing works, of doing charity, of loving. Always someone is hungry and thirsty and needs me. I cannot delegate this to anyone else. This poor person needs me, my help, my words, my efforts. We are all in this together.

This is also the teaching of the Gospel in which Jesus, seeing the many people who have been following him for hours, asks his disciples, “How are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” (Jn 6:5). And the disciples respond, “It is impossible, it would be better for you to send them away….” Instead, Jesus says, “You give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37). Jesus has them give him the few loaves and fish that they have with them, blesses them, breaks them, and has them distributed to all. This is a very important lesson for us. It tells us that the little we have, if we entrust it to the hands of Jesus and share it with faith, becomes an overflowing treasure.

Pope Benedict XVI, in the encyclical Caritas in Veritate, affirms, “Feed the hungry is an ethical imperative for the universal Church….The right to food, like the right to water, has an important place within the pursuit of other rights….It is therefore necessary to cultivate a public conscience that considers food and access to water as universal rights of all human beings, without distinction or discrimination” (no. 27). Let us not forget the words of Jesus: “I am the bread of life” (Jn 6:35) and “If any one thirst let him come to me and drink” (Jn 7:37). These words are a challenge for all of us believers, a challenge to recognize that feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty are a conduit of our relationship with God, a God who has revealed in Jesus his face of mercy.

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