A year ago I started a new role, running a small international development charity.

Part of our work is supporting the Ugandan health system in its response to continuing HIV/AIDS infections. In the 1980s the fight against HIV/AIDS seemed unwinnable. It was a frightening situation, similar to Covid in 2020. A novel disease had passed from animals to humans. An epidemic threatened to become a pandemic. The disease was killing many of its victims.

One might have felt then like the disciples Philip and Andrew felt that day with Jesus, when they found themselves far from home, confronted with a crowd of five thousand families. Their reactions to the situation are very human.

Philip is bluntly realistic. Six months wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little! Andrew has the solution, but doesn’t realise it. A boy here has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they among so many people?

These reactions identify one part of the human condition. We are limited creatures with finite physical resources. So we are surrounded by huge need: in healthcare, in social care for children and older people, in education, in food supply.

Our physical limitedness is not an illusion. But there is another part of the human condition. That is the overflowing abundance of God’s grace, which is unlimited: not finite, but infinite. And God’s grace is always there, ready to perfect our limited nature, ready to overflow into the world.

When Jesus takes the loaves and gives thanks that day, he distributes them and the fish. Everyone who is hungry is able to eat and have all they want, and even the leftovers fill the baskets. When the people see this sign which Jesus has done, they begin to realise who he is: that in him God’s abundant grace is shown. St Paul famously prays for the Ephesians that they may have the power to comprehend and know this - the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ - and so be filled with all the abundance of God. That is something we can pray for ourselves. And we can have faith in God’s love, even when the work seems too vast, or the hungry crowd too big, or the resources too small. What we do have, broken and offered, as were the loaves, and as was Jesus himself was, will be by grace sufficient.

Looking back in the battle against HIV/AIDS, over 40 years the situation has been transformed. The disease is treatable and need no longer be passed on from mother to baby. The grace of God continues to be seen in partnership across sectors and countries, in generous giving, in dedicated scientific research and in the removal of stigma. Christians are playing their part, alongside many other people of good will around the world.

So now to him, who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.