Come and eat without money: Is 55, Rom 8, and the multiplication of the loaves in Mt 14

By Prof. Dr. Daniel C. Afonso · Updated 20 October 2026

Quis nos separabit a caritate Christi?
Rom 8:35

“Come and eat without money”: the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A, brings together three texts centered on God’s gratuitousness and the certainty of His love. Is 55:1-3 invites the poor and the thirsty to come and eat without money and without price: God’s bread cannot be bought. Rom 8:35, 37-39 proclaims that nothing can separate the believer from the love of Christ: neither death, nor life, nor any power.

Mt 14:13-21 narrates the multiplication of the loaves: Jesus feeds five thousand men with five loaves and two fish, in a gesture that anticipates the Eucharist. The three texts describe the same gift: God feeds freely, definitively, and nothing can stop Him.

I. The first reading: Is 55:1-3

“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters. And you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without any payment” (Is 55:1). Isaiah’s oracle inverts the logic of the market: what God offers has no price because it is not a commodity. It is the covenant. “Why do you spend your money on what is not bread and your wages on what does not satisfy?” (v. 2).

The prophet diagnoses the human problem: people spend on things that do not nourish and lose themselves in pursuits that do not satisfy. The solution is simple: “Listen to me attentively and you will eat what is good, your soul will delight in abundance” (v. 2). The condition is not payment: it is listening. Whoever listens, eats. Whoever eats, lives. The Davidic covenant that God offers freely (v. 3) is the foundation of all this gratuitousness: God gave Himself in covenant before any human merit.

II. The second reading: Rom 8:35, 37-39

Paul poses a rhetorical challenge: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword?” (Rom 8:35). The list includes the worst human experiences: not the absence of comfort, but real hunger, real danger, the real threat of the sword. And the answer is categorical: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (v. 37).

Victory is not the absence of suffering: it is the presence of the love that transforms it. And the final guarantee is absolute: “Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor present things nor future things, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord” (vv. 38-39). “Any other creature” closes the list by taking in everything possible: there is no exception.

III. The Gospel: Mt 14:13-21

Jesus withdraws to a deserted place on hearing of the death of the Baptist. The crowds follow Him on foot. As evening falls, the disciples ask Jesus to dismiss the crowd so they can buy food in the neighboring villages. Jesus replies: “They need not go away. You give them something to eat” (Mt 14:16). The disciples object: they have only five loaves and two fish. Jesus says: “Bring them here to me.” He orders the crowds to sit down on the grass. “He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples to the crowds” (v. 19).

They all ate and were satisfied: twelve baskets full of fragments were left over. The number of men was about five thousand, not counting women and children. The sequence “took, looked up to heaven, blessed, broke, gave” echoes the institution of the Eucharist (Mt 26:26): the multiplication of the loaves is the anticipation of the gift that Easter will make permanent. It is Is 55 in action: God freely feeds those who follow Him far away, those who have left the villages where food is bought.

IV. Mary and the freely given bread

Is 55 invites us to come and eat without money. God’s greatest free gift to humanity was precisely the one Mary received before everyone else: the Word made flesh in her womb, without any merit of hers, beyond any possible price, pure divine initiative. Mary is the one who lived Is 55 from within: she who received the Bread of Heaven before the world knew there was a Bread of Heaven. When Jesus fed the five thousand, Mary, whom the Gospel does not mention in that scene, had already lived the silent multiplication: for nine months, the bread that fed humanity grew in her womb.

The guarantee of Rom 8:39, “nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus,” found its most radical verification in Mary: neither the anguish of the flight into Egypt, nor the loss in the Temple, nor the incomprehension of relatives, nor the agony of Calvary separated Mary from the love of her Son. In each of these moments, Mary lived the certainty that Paul articulates: whoever abides in the love of Christ is more than a conqueror, even when all seems lost.

For the full texts of the readings: Isaiah 55, Romans 8, and Matthew 14, in the Ave-Maria Bible.