Send them away!

Send them away! This is what Christ’s disciples said that He should do to the multitudes that had been following Him, in today’s Gospel lesson- send them away. Let someone else feed them, see to their needs. And, on the surface, this seems to be a reasonable request, given their situation, their apparent inability to care for all of them. Send them away! But even if this request was made because the disciples thought it would be in the people’s best interest, it was still, as we learn, the wrong attitude, the wrong response to that situation. Yet, knowing this, what we must ask ourselves, brothers and sisters, is how often do we say this very thing?