The 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sunday, August 2, 2026
St. James Cathedral

Watch this homily! (begins at 35:40)

 
My friends, in today’s scriptures God’s healing and nourishing love is front and center. The Prophet Isaiah assures those whose exile is about to end that God’s love is present and active. Their infidelity to the covenant landed them in Babylon, but God wants to renew the everlasting covenant he made with David. They have lived through the consequences of their sin and now God wants, once again, to be the center of their nourishment - physically and spiritually.
 
They have spent their spiritual money as it were on useless things, superficial things, idolatrous things. But now God encourages them to return to the land he gave to them and their ancestors. And that return to the land, that return from exile is a return to him and his covenant love.
 
As we prayed in our Responsorial Psalm, God wants his people to recognize that “The hand of the Lord feeds us, and answers all our needs.”
 
God’s care and his faithfulness to the covenant has been steadfast throughout the relationship with Israel. God has always been there to feed them in their need. But, they turned away time and again. And time and again, after facing the consequences of their infidelity, God encourages them to come back and find in this relationship all that they need.
 
This gives us hope that the same God who entered into covenant with his people long ago, seeks to be our nourishment in the renewed and everlasting covenant, sealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
 
Perhaps there are times in our lives when we have not placed God at the center and have allowed other idols to crowd out the presence of God. And perhaps we have felt the consequences of that in an unsettled heart, in anxiety and in fear. And just as he did long ago as he looked upon that vast crowd, Jesus is moved by our needs, by our desire for healing and wholeness of life. And he acts on our behalf, to heal us and to nourish us.
 
In that healing, in that nourishment, he feeds us in abundance. He doesn’t give us just enough healing, or just enough spiritual nourishment. No, he gives us way more than we need. Like those twelve wicker baskets full of leftovers, he pours his healing love upon us beyond our wildest dreams.

But, we may say, what about my husband or wife who just died, or the victims from last Sunday’s shooting at the Seattle Center, or the countless unhoused and underfed people we see all around us, or the 9 million people worldwide who die every year from hunger related causes? Where is the healing and the nourishment in abundance for them?
 
Like the people who found themselves in Exile some 2700 years ago, as we navigate these hardships, some of them simply a result of the fragility of human life and others a result of our own brokenness as a human family, we turn to God and find in that relationship the source of healing and nourishment and strength.
 
As we hear from St. Paul in today’s reading from the Letter to the Romans, “What will separate us from the love of Christ?” Even as we experience anguish, or distress, or any kind of peril, none of this “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
 
We, as followers of Christ, are not immune from all the pain and suffering that is part and parcel of life in the world. But what we are assured of is that none of this will ultimately separate us from God’s love that comes to us in Jesus. None of these hardships, none of this pain will have the final say.
 
The final say comes from Jesus who looks on us with compassion and love. The sign of that compassion and love rests here, in front of us, in this crucifix. Here we see our God’s response to our pain, whether self-inflicted or imposed upon us. Here is our God who suffers with us and whose covenant of love is everlasting.
 
As we approach this sacred altar today, we will hear familiar words from the Gospel. Here we will take bread, say the blessing, break it and distribute it. Here and now, today, God feeds us in abundance with his healing and life giving presence. God indeed desires to feed us and answer all our needs.
 
May we find in our communion with him and with each other the reassurance that nothing - absolutely nothing - can ever separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Father Gary F. Lazzeroni