Our gospel today (Mk.8:1-10) about a multiplication of loaves shows us our Lord’s merciful loving-kindness in service of establishing his divinity for his disciples to remember. Their faith seems to have been established incrementally through accumulation of experiences of wonders of healings, teachings, and expulsions of demons. Miracles did not cease after our Lord rose from the dead, nor after He ascended into Heaven, nor after He sent another paraclete, our Lord the Holy Spirit. Miracles from our Lord have continued here and there, on and off, down through the ages. St. Peter’s shadow occasioned healings, and in recent decades there was said to be a miraculous multiplication of a meal for visiting bishops somewhere in Italy – a multiplication of the spaghetti.
Today we also commemorate a miracle, that of St. Michael, the Archangel, whose name means,“Who Is Like God?” I think of it as a question but it may be an adjectival phrase. In any case, allow me please to recount the story, borrowed and adapted for our setting.
There lived a man in the city of Laodicia to whom appeared in a dream St. Michael, who revealed
that the man’s mute daughter would receive the gift of speech after drinking from the water of a spring in a place called Chertopos, near the city of Hieropolis in Phrygia. She did drink of it, and she did receive her speech, and so the man and his daughter and all their family went and were baptized. Furthermore, in warm gratitude, the man built the church in honor of St. Michael: a church built over the miraculous spring. Christians began coming to the spring for healing.
Pagans also began coming to the spring for healing, and many of them turned from their idols and
acquired faith in Christ Jesus. Not only that, but a certain pious man, Archippus, served at the custodian of this Church of St. Michael for sixty years. He preached and lived a saintly life, and through those, many pagans came to faith in Christ. Unfortunately this provoked a general malice towards the Christians, and especially against Archippus, and so the pagans worked both to destroy the church and to kill Archippus, making a confluence of the River Kufos and the River Lykokaperos, directing their combined force of waters to flow towards the church.
Now Archippus, being custodian of the church, seeing the danger, prayed, and through his prayer, the great Archangel Michael appeared there at the church and, striking a blow with his staff, opened a wide fissure in the rock, and commanded the rushing water torrents to flow down into the fissure. They did. The church temple remained unharmed. The malicious pagans fled in terror when they saw the awesome miracle. Archippus and the Christians responded to the miracle in another way: they gathered in the church, glorified God, and gave thanks to holy Archangel Michael for the timely help. The place where the waters hand gone plunging down into the fissure was named Plunging, or in their language “Chonae.”
And, sorry, but I don’t now how they are related: Chonae, Chonis, and Colossa, but that is the
account of St. Michal’s miracle there. We have now heard of people plunged into waters of Baptism, and of rivers plunging into a fissure at the command of St. Michael, to rescue his endangered church; of the multiplication of loaves by our Savior Christ Jesus, and of the multiplication of Christians through the conversions of pagans; and we hope soon to receive a sort of multiplication of the Eucharistic Christ into many communions here and now, from the one Christ who comes soon to be present in the one Holy Mystery, distributed without ceasing in His and our Unity.
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