INSIDE america Always a New Beginning The mission of the Church is to be the way through which Christ educates our freedom to make real His redemptive victory over sin and death in all the circumstances of our lives At the beginning of the sixth chapter in John’s Gospel, Jesus makes the Apostles aware of the crowd’s need for nourishment. “Where can we buy some bread for these people to eat?” He asks Philip. The evangelist says Jesus wanted to “test” him, to see if Philip believed that Jesus was aware of the people’s material needs and was able to satisfy them. Philip and later Andrew acknowledge that their resources are insufficient to respond to the crowd’s need. Then Jesus performs the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves of bread and the fishes, and the crowd is amazed. They think He must be “the prophet who is to come into the world.” The crowd is aware of the exceptional nature of Jesus’ presence, but tries to fit Him within the categories of their expectations and their particular immediate needs. They wanted to make Him king. Jesus hides from them. The Apostles take a boat to cross to the other side of the Sea of Galilee when a storm broke out. Suddenly, they saw Jesus walking on the sea toward them, saying, “It is me. Do not be afraid.” The next day, the crowd catches up with Jesus, who tells them that the reason they looked for Him was because they had eaten all the bread they had wanted to eat. They had failed to see the sign of the miracle. Its purpose was to reveal Jesus to be the source of another kind of bread, another kind of food, an “imperishable” food. There follows then the discourse on the “bread of life,” a communion in the life of Jesus Himself as the true bread that came down from heaven. In our own case, an experience of correspondence between the presence of Jesus and our immediate needs and desires moves us to want to be where He is, to belong to the community of His followers. Like Philip and Andrew, we can recognize our incapacity to respond to these needs. Philip and Andrew put their scant resources in His hands and followed His instructions. The result was a miracle that surprised everyone and elicited the question: Who is this man that can do this? Philip, Andrew, and the other Apostles could no more begin to imagine the answer to this question than did the crowd. Still, they stayed with Jesus. They continued to be moved by their wonder at this man, whom “even the winds and the sea” of the storm obeyed. The crowd, however, did not “follow the amazement” to a deeper knowledge of this man. Instead, they imprisoned Him in categories determined by their immediate needs. They misunderstood the purpose of the miracle they had experienced. Jesus had not come to solve their immediate problems. The miracle was intended as a sign of the true purpose of His mission, to lead them to the recognition of His true identity and thus to the confidence that He could satisfy the needs of their hearts in a way that surpassed all their expectations. Jesus Christ is the Redeemer of each human person. Redemption is the restoration of our ability to act as human persons and reach the destiny for which we were created. A true personal act is always a free act, a commitment that betokens the risk of self-commitment, of self-giving. That is the way we are made. Sin has wounded the structure of our personhood. The victory of Christ over sin has restored our capacity to act freely to bring Christ’s victory to bear upon all the circumstances of our lives. Since freedom is an absolutely essential component of this “redeeming act,” the fruits of Christ’s victory cannot be simply enjoyed without the engagement of our freedom. The mission of the Church is to be the way through which Christ educates our freedom to make real His redemptive victory over sin and death in all the circumstances of our lives. This is the purpose of the “miracles” we experience in our encounter with Him through the companionship that makes the Church present. They are signs, educating us to enter more deeply into the mystery of Christ’s identity and mission, to experience it more fully, to live it more faithfully. It is this that makes of each moment a new beginning, until all is brought to its completion. To be free means never to abandon this path, never to refuse to move forward by always beginning again and again.