Feeding 5,000: A Reflection

There are many ways in which the Bible, and particularly the Gospels, model what it is to be God’s people. One of my favourites comes in the incident that we normally call the feeding of the five thousand, the only miracle of Jesus reported in all four gospels and with a very similar story, the feeding of the four thousand, which occurs in two. It would seem that this story of Jesus feeding the hungry multitude was so important within the early church that it got told time and time again. Did something like this happen a number of times? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What really happened? I don’t think it matters. I am not really into explaining miracles. What I am into is trying to see what God might want to say to me – and to you. 

Jesus, presumably with the disciples, though Matthew doesn’t say so, had gone off in search of what we might call some retreat time. They went by boat, which is why I think it wasn’t just Jesus. But then he did go off by himself, though the crowds soon caught up. And this incident, this sharing, this feast, ensues. Inevitably, there are lots of things that we could say about the story – I want to, just briefly, mention three.

The first is that Jesus moves very quickly from crowd avoidance to crowd compassion. Verse 14 – he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. One of the great tasks of the church is to care. That needs to happen at all sorts of levels and in all sorts of ways. But it is critical to our demonstrating what it means to be the light and the salt of Christ.

The second thing that I want to take from this passage is something about blind disciples. As so often, the disciples are going off in the wrong direction when Jesus stops them in their tracks and gently sets them in the right direction. Don’t send the people away. Sit them down. And let’s share that bit of food that we’ve got – which proves to be more than enough, with one basket of leftovers per disciple. One of the fantastic things about being the Body of Christ is that God trusts us to do it.

The third thing that I want to mention as significant is the provision of bread in the wilderness. This is nothing new. It has happened before, most notably when the moanings and groanings of the Israelites were answered by God’s wonderful provision of manna. In a sense this is just bread for hungry folk. The provision of bread in this way is sometimes given eucharistic overtones. And I guess why not? But this is actually Jesus meeting human need in all its ordinariness. The disciples have struggled with the idea of feeding the crowd. They just want to get rid of them.

Are there things, bits of God’s call, of which we would prefer to be rid – but God is telling us to get on with the task? Be ready to be challenged by God and, as we think of what it means to be the church at all the levels at which that is the case for us, let’s remember that God chooses us as partners, but let’s remember, too, that God doesn’t just leave us to get on with it.  God is there alongside us, and won’t call us to something that we just can’t do.