"When I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many full baskets of fragments did you pick up? “They answered him, "Seven." He said to them, "Do you still not understand?" Mk 8:20-21
God is good, all the time.
Friends, today's readings speak of the implications of being human, including the capacity to fail and destroy the good in us, others, and around us. When Jesus cautions the disciples against the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod, he was alerting them of the human bent towards failure and destruction.
However, Jesus also indicated to them that God could make good the failures and destructions we cause. After failing to grasp the meaning of his caution to them, he reminded them of the two incidents of feeding the multitudes with just a couple of loaves and fish, asking them to develop the understanding that God never lacks the capacity to do the good we fail to do or enhance in us the good we struggle to maintain.
Let us, therefore, not stop to ponder the question, why are we like this? For it seems evident that the inclination to fail and destroy is within each of us. “What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them,"(Matt 15:11).We all have a bent towards reducing what God made good in us to sinful or destructive state . Sadly, sometimes, we aim further the destructive tendency at others as we still gossip, hate, threaten, deny, and eliminate others and fail to recognize that we are doing all of these.
The book of Genesis tells us of this ancient human bent to failure and destruction. Right from the beginning the Lord “saw how great man’s wickedness on earth was and how no desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil.” Jesus calls such tendency "leaven" or hypocrisy, which is something we all engage in because we know that we can.
If we are to reduce and even overcome this failing and destructive capacity within us, then we must be willing to stay closer to God who can make good again what we destroy in us and others. It is also the reason he gave us the Eucharist, the Bible, the Church, Sacraments, the Season of Lent, and many more to make use of them to gravitate towards our best versions as God intended.