There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
Homily for Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time – 2 August 2026
One of my spiritual heroes is the Vietnamese Cardinal Francis-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận. In 1975, shortly after his consecration as the Archbishop of Saigon, he was arrested by Vietnam's communist government and would spend the next thirteen years in prison, nine of them in solitary confinement. The day after his arrest, his captors allowed him to write home for necessities. Among the ordinary requests for clothes and toiletries, he added one line: “Please send me a little wine, as medicine for my stomach-ache.” His family understood the code. The wine arrived hidden in a bottle labelled Medicine for Stomach-aches; hosts came concealed inside a flashlight.
Each afternoon at three o'clock — the hour of Christ’s death, he would place three drops of wine and one drop of water in the palm of his hand, together with a few crumbs of a host, and say Mass from memory. “My hand became an altar,” he would later say. “My cell became a cathedral. These were the most beautiful Masses of my life.” Years later, when he was moved to a crowded camp with fifty other prisoners, he would wait for the lights to go out and celebrate Mass bowed over his bed. He wrapped tiny fragments of the host in cigarette foil to keep them safe, then passed them to the other Catholics under their mosquito nets, so that even there, Christ could be adored through the night.
Văn Thuận had lost his diocese, his freedom, his congregation, almost everything a bishop has. What he could not bear to lose was the Eucharist itself. That is a hunger sharper than hunger for bread: not simply the wish to be fed, but the refusal to be separated from the one who feeds us. “If you have lost everything but still have the Blessed Sacrament,” he later wrote, “you actually still have everything, because you have the Lord of heaven present here on earth.”
We are a people made for the heart of God
Much of our religion can be summed up in who God is for us, and who we are for him — we are a people made for the heart of God. Our true purpose is a heart relationship with God. Distractions and the wounds of sin confuse us about who we really are, but our purpose is found in making God the centre of our lives. This relationship is summed up in the Bible's language of hunger and thirst, and in God's language of feeding us and nourishing us. The most perfect expression of both our hunger for God and his nourishing of us is the Eucharist. St Francis of Assisi put it so powerfully, when he wrote, “Let the whole world tremble; let heaven exult when Christ, the Son of the Living God, is on the altar in the hands of the priest.” He went on to marvel that, “the Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that for our salvation He hides Himself under a morsel of bread.”
The first reading has God inviting all who are thirsty and hungry, though they have no money, to come to the waters, to drink wine and milk and eat rich food. God's giving here is lavish, poured out on those who cannot pay for it. Most of us here would probably admit that we have never known real hunger. We might easily say something like, “I am so hungry; I didn’t have lunch today,” but mostly we realise that there are people in our world who are really hungry and thirsty — perhaps through poverty, or war, or drought. Talk to anyone in that position and, more often than we might expect, they will speak in the language of the providence of God, and of gratitude for all they receive through the hands of others. In the name of God, we who are able, need to keep feeding those who are hungry.
But this reading also calls to mind our spiritual thirst. Mother Teresa said that loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. She said, “There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love … There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
Invited back to the bread which truly satisfies
The original context of the Isaiah text is the end of the Babylonian exile. The people had been crushed by conquest, but now God calls them home with extravagant hope. His offering holds nothing back: rich food, water, grain, wine and milk. There might well be parallel ways in which we have experienced exile, from God or from our true selves. Like Israel, we are invited back to the bread which truly satisfies — to spend our resources, at last, on what truly nourishes.
St Paul, in our second reading, tells us that neither hardship, nor hunger, nor any power can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Cardinal Văn Thuận’s nine years in solitary confinement were themselves a living commentary on those words: his captors could take his diocese, his freedom, his contact with every living soul, but they could not take the three drops of wine in his palm, and so could not take him from Christ.
In the Gospel we have the multiplication of the loaves and fish, a portrait of Jesus reaching out in compassion to heal and nourish his people. The whole account echoes the feeding of the Israelites with manna in the desert. The few loaves and fish at the disciples’ disposal are handed to Jesus, who — using the very language of the Eucharist — looks up to heaven, blesses and breaks them, and gives them to the crowd through his disciples. Notice that he does not hand the bread straight to the people, but gives it to the disciples, who give it to the people — a detail that carries the shape of the ministerial priesthood of the New Covenant, receiving from Christ what is his alone to give, then giving it away. Everyone eats and is satisfied, and twelve baskets of scraps are left over. God's giving is scandalously generous.
You give them something to eat
Jesus tells the disciples, “You give them something to eat” — that same pattern, receiving from Christ then giving to others, is asked of us all. Is it literally hunger and thirst, or other needs we are called to satisfy? Our meagre resources can be multiplied in the hands of Jesus to bring about tremendous good.
Cardinal Văn Thuận lived that pattern under lock and key. Deprived of altar, cathedral and congregation, he could not be deprived of the priesthood he had received. Each night he broke the host into fragments and passed them, wrapped in cigarette foil, to the other prisoners under their mosquito nets — receiving Christ from no human hand, then giving him away with his own, exactly as the disciples had done on the hillside. He understood the same call beyond the Eucharist. Feeling useless, cut off from his people, he began writing a line or two each day on scraps of old calendar paper — words of hope and faith — and passing them to a boy who slipped past his cell, whose parents copied them into a notebook. Those fragments smuggled out “five loaves and two fish” at a time, became a book read across Vietnam in its darkest years, a book titled, The Road of Hope – A Gospel from Prison. A man stripped of everything still found ways to give people something to eat.
That is what the Eucharist forms us to become
That is what the Eucharist forms us to become — a people fed by God's own generosity, called to be generous in turn — giving people something to eat, literally, and in the love that spares them the greater poverty of loneliness and the absence of God. That is the food Văn Thuận offered from the palm of his hand, and from scraps of paper passed hand to hand in the dark. It is the food we are asked, today, to become for others.
