Signs of hope

“You seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves” (Jn 6:26). The Word of God that is always “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword”, truly “piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow” (Heb 4:12) and places us at a crossroads, signs on the one hand, bread on the other, or better yet: blindness to the signs on the one hand, and hunger for material things on the other. During Sunday’s Angelus, Pope Francis observed that the people spoken of in the day’s Gospel passage, even having witnessed the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, “had not grasped the meaning of that gesture: they stopped at the external miracle, they stopped at the material bread: only there, without going further, to the meaning of this”. This faith is superficial, subject to an “idolatrous ...