2 August 2020

Thus says the Lord:
O come to the water all you who are thirsty;
though you have no money, come!
From Isaiah 55: 1-3

On Sundays, the First Reading is chosen to complement the gospel which, today, is the account of Jesus feeding five thousand people with just five loaves and two fishes.

What Isaiah is proclaiming is part of God’s call to abundance of life – the life in all its fulness that Jesus came to offer. A problem for many of us is that we tend to make God in our own likeness. Not in terms of how we look but in how we act. Very few of us have that open-handed generosity that God displays here. We might legitimately worry that, if we offer everything we have without receiving anything in return, we might end up with nothing. This makes us cautious, and suspicious if we meet someone who exhibits extreme generosity.

But God’s resources are never exhausted. No matter how much life is poured into the world, God’s love and generosity can never be used up. And it is God’s delight, like the most generous human host, to share the good things of the earth with his people. Come – see – taste – savour – enjoy!

• • When have you met someone whose generosity seemed to know no bounds?
  • When have you delighted in being able to be generous – to people you love but also to people you maybe do not even know?

Think about what you could do – or where you could go today – to savour God’s love and generosity and to sense God’s delight in sharing it with you.

Find the whole text (NRSV) here