Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

Speaker 1: All you who are thirsty, come to the water. You have no money. Come, receive grain and eat. Come without paying, without cost.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to Scripture for your inner outcasts. Today is August 2nd, 2026, the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today is a special Sunday edition in which doctor Jerry Crete and Doctor Peter Malinowski jointly reflect on today's mass readings.

Speaker 3: Doctor Jerry. Here we are together, 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time. We've got some readings here, doctor Jerry. And we've got some readings here. To all you audience. I'm just really curious about how we are all reacting to what the church offers us in the lectionary today.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, my first thought about this is that there is a hunger within us and especially and I'm speaking to exiles here. Outcasts, inner outcasts. There's a hunger that food doesn't quite touch. Right, right. You know what I'm talking about. There's a hunger that, you know, still there, even after a full meal or a successful day. Right? This is we're talking even though there's loaves and fishes and different talks about talking about food there. He's talked in these passages all together. There's something way deeper. It's an ache that our hearts often carry. It's an ache for worth or belonging, or someone to finally see us or not look away. And so we need to bring our hunger to God, right? You know, we may have a part, an exile part saying, is there enough? Am I worthy? A lot of times when I work with people and and we work with our exiles. The exiles just often, not always, but often look emaciated. They're starving, they're battered or whatnot. And that really just represents the sort of sometimes physical hurt, but also emotional deprivation where we're deep down, it's like, am I worth feeding? Am I worth patience? Am I too broken up? And am I? Have I just fallen so short that you know I can't be loved? Right? So I feel like the readings spoke to that this, this, this opposite message, right? You know, literally Isaiah says, all you who are thirsty come to the water. You have no money. Come receive grain and eat. Come without paying, without cost. I love that. This is a gift that God wants to give us. It doesn't cost anything other than because it's love.

Speaker 3: Mhm.

Speaker 1: We see that in the gospel passages. Right. And, you know, um, Jesus just learned, I think in this passage that John the Baptist was killed, right? His cousin. Mhm. So he withdraws to grieve, and yet people still come to him, right? And, and what is it? What happens? Like, oh, this blows my mind. Jesus is moved with pity despite his own grief. Everything else right. He. And he's probably tired and yet. And he is moved with pity because he sees them and he feeds them.

Speaker 3: And I'm looking at this, and like those that came to him in the gospel, are following what we hear in Isaiah 55, because in Isaiah 55 you have basically two, two commands. He says, four times come. And then he says twice, listen or heed. Right? And that's what that's what the 5000 men. And then plus all the women and children did in the gospel, they came. And then there's this moment of, of, of maybe doubt or question. Like I can imagine so many exiles struggle with like this idea of scarcity, right? Yeah. There are 5000 men plus women and children, and there are five loaves and there are two fish. And I'm not going to get any. I'm not going to get any. But it says, look, they ate. They all ate and were satisfied, and they picked up the fragments left over. And I love that this detail was in there. It doesn't just say there was enough for everybody. They said 12 wicker baskets full of like the leftovers. Like there was an abundance. Everybody ate any. And God didn't just calculate it out to the exact calorie of what everybody was going to was going to consume. There was an abundance that was more than could be eaten. And I gotta believe that there were a lot of people that were pocketing some fish and some, some, some bread for the way home. Like, I don't believe that they just ate it all. Like I believe that there was a stashing going on here, you know, so that, you know, the, the trip home because some of them came a long distance, right? This was a distant and remote place. God was providing for that as well.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No, that's powerful. I, I what struck me a little bit is that, you know, the, the loaves and fishes that were brought forward, it was just a small meager amount. It wasn't definitely not enough, but that was important. It was important that this small little bit came, was offered no matter how little. Just like our exiles, it doesn't matter. Our exiles do need to take that little step of showing themselves, no matter how small they think they are or worthless they think they are. No, no, no. He uses that little bit that they offer. Grace flows abundantly, like you're saying from that.

Speaker 3: It's in one of the other gospels to kind of to to riff off of that. It's not in Matthew, but it's in either Luke or Mark, where it was a little boy that had the loaves and fishes.

Speaker 1: That's what I remember.

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. It was a little boy that had the loaves and fishes. It wasn't, you know, somebody who was a prepper that came out and came out fully equipped with like all the gear he would need, you know, like it wasn't somebody who was a survival expert, you know, and brought in, you know, Mrs. or whatever. It was a little boy that brought what was needed to be like the, the center of the miracle. You know, our Lord could have created this ex nihilo out of nothing. But he chose to work with what we had and and to and to bring a multiplicity and a fruitfulness out of that. That is just mind blowing.

Speaker 1: So I think so many I know my own. I have exiles that believe that there isn't enough for me. I, I should want less. I shouldn't want so much. Um, I should need less than I. My needs are actually a problem. You know, then we have Paul in Romans eight saying the opposite. He's saying nothing can separate you. Nothing can separate you from my, uh, essentially abundant grace, right? Or not pulse, but God's abundant grace. You know, not not anguish or distress, famine, peril, anything like that. None of it. None of it separates you from this over abundant love of God. Right? Seeing so vividly in the in the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Not even your worst suffering. Not your deepest wound. Not even if you're depleted or desperate or feel unlovable. Nothing. And it's not just the sentiment. It's. It's a declaration of abundance that the love available to you in Christ does not run out. Right? Right. It does not get depleted by your need. Right. It doesn't grow impatient with how long you've been sitting at the table, right. You know, and, and, you know, come like in Isaiah, come to me. Come and eat. Well. He's calling us to goodness.

Speaker 3: Right? And this is not like, um, some cheap wine. You know, this isn't like Boone Farm or three buck Chuck. When our Lord makes wine, it's of the highest quality. And we know this from the wedding of Cana, right in gospel. Right. That the steward was surprised at the how excellent the wine was, right. These. This is going to be excellent, excellent food. Not just sort of like, you know, all right, this is, you know, enough calories to help you to survive. Right.

Speaker 1: So right, right, right. No astronaut like little pellet or something.

Speaker 4: That's right.

Speaker 3: Nutrition pellets or something. You know, but but I I'm wondering, you know, I'm, I'm going back to the tragic side of things. And that is, you know, the flip side of what Saint Paul is saying is that we can separate ourselves from the love of God. We can do that. We can choose to do it. And most of the time when we do that, doctor Jerry, I don't think it's so much out of malice. I think it's out of fear or out of shame or out of anger or disappointment. So we can be separated from the love of God. But it's never God that does that. It's often because we are not, uh, we're not, we're not being open. We're not, we're not trusting enough in him. We're not taking advantage of the graces. We we refuse to eat. We refuse to come. We refuse to listen, you know. And I think that can start with our hearts and our innermost selves can go with that or not go with that. You know, there's some there's some guidance here that the innermost self has to have. And if parts can feel that they are seen, heard, known and understood by the innermost self, what a wonderful bridge then to believing that maybe God loves them, or if they can be open to somebody else's innermost self loving them, then that can open the imagination to. Maybe God could love me.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. We mistakenly think that our achievements or getting approval will give us this abundance. And then when we don't feel it from those things, we turn to distractions or numbing anything. And those wells always leave us coming back thirsty.

Speaker 4: Mhm.

Speaker 1: But instead, we are offered this amazing grace that we don't even have to pay for.

Speaker 4: It's it's it's wild free.

Speaker 1: It's free.

Speaker 4: Wow. Well, let's draw this.

Speaker 3: One to.

Speaker 4: A.

Speaker 3: Close by invoking our patroness and our patrons as well. These are these are the saints that we entrust souls and hearts to, because they had a lot to do with the, um, with the preparations for Jesus ministry, obviously, Our Lady and Saint Joseph all about our Lord's formation, including his human formation and his human nature. And then Saint John the Baptist, you know, preparing the way for him. And so these are really special saints for us because in the work we do and in souls and hearts, it's all about preparing the way for the Lord through shoring up our human formation and natural foundation for our relationship with with God and the three persons of the Trinity. So we invoke them in a special way. Our lady, our mother, Untier of knots.

Speaker 1: Pray for.

Speaker 3: Us, Saint Joseph.

Speaker 1: Pray for us.

Speaker 3: Saint John the Baptist.

Speaker 1: Pray for us.