(For the audio version of this blog, please visit https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mass-Blog-for-the-18th-Sunday-in-Ordinary-Time-2026-2.mp3)
There’s something gratuitously beautiful about how God feeds us. Gratuitous is also how science describes nature’s indescribable beauty. The colors and patterns in a butterfly’s wings serve no practical purpose other than to fill us with awe. Scientists are quick to explain the math behind why we’re here, but they have trouble interpreting God’s poetry. Our own existence suggests an extravagant Creator who so loved us that he gave Himself to ensure the beauty of that sacrifice would continue to evolve out of its ugliness.
We are called to feed on and share God’s gratuitous beauty heedfully, as Isaiah suggests in our first reading (Isaiah 55:1-3). Heedfully is an archaic word, but in this context, it’s a beautiful reminder of our timeless appetite for the extravagant deliciousness of God’s truth.
“Heed me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare. Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life.”
Paul tells the Romans and us that the ugliest things in our human nature—anguish, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, and war’s weapons—can’t separate us from the gratuitous beauty of God’s love as served by Jesus Christ. (Romans 8:35, 37-39)
Matthew’s gospel proves it as we experience the eternal empathy he feels for the vast crowds willing to travel long distances on foot to consume God’s truth (Matthew 14:13-21). Christ’s parables are gratuitously beautiful manifestations of that truth. Throughout his earthly ministry, the digestible and delicious morality plays he fashioned from our daily lives kept those masses coming back to keep their spirits nourished with a reality so bountiful they couldn’t help but go home with leftover fragments to feed others in their own lives. Such is the spiritual food Jesus empowered his disciples to share with the entire world.
That makes all of us continuous manifestations of the supernatural beauty God created out of the all-too-natural ugliness of Christ’s death.
–Tom Andel