The Feeding Of The 5,000

[willguy]

Feeding of the 5,000(Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:10-17 John 6:1-15)

The first interesting fact related to this miracle is that it is the only one that all four of the gospels included, except the Resurrection. Even Jesus walking on water is not in all four books (Luke left it out). The number 5,000 is reported by all four gospels, but may be misleading. They report 5,000 [i]men [/i]being there, but Matthew points out that the 5,000 was “not counting women and children.” (Mt. 14:21) If there were an approximately equal number of men, women, and children, this brings the total up to around [i]15,000 [/i]people!

In the gospel, this miracle immediately follows Jesus learning of John the Baptist’s death. According to Luke, John and Jesus were blood relatives, though how is not clear (Luke 1:36). Tradition usually has them as cousins. John is the one who baptizes Jesus, as all four gospels confirm, and it appears that he was friends with Jesus. John was one of the first people to recognize Jesus as the Son of God. He was also the first person to die for his testimony of Jesus, and all because some cute girl with good dance moves impressed a king who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. Jesus is understandably upset when He find out, and calls His disciples to go away with Him, and they withdraw to a deserted place. It is interesting to note how human Jesus acts at this point. He displays a very human reaction to death, the desire to withdraw oneself from others and to only be around those who are very close. The pain seems doubled in the gospels of Matthew and Mark by the fact that this also directly follows Jesus’ rejections in Nazareth. By all accounts, this in not a happy period in the life of Christ.

So Jesus is depressed and His disciples and He sail away. However, the people follow Him. All 15,000 of them (if that’s the number you want to go with)! They walk and walk along the shore following Jesus to the middle-of-nowhere. Now Jesus gets off the boat and he sees this crowd of people all waiting to see Him. If I was in His shoes, I’d have probably gotten back on the boat, went out to sea and wallowed some more in self-pity and depression. But Jesus does something completely different. He becomes “moved with pity” (Mt. 14:14, Mk. 6:34) and begins to heal them. He puts aside His suffering to heal theirs! Here, even before the miracle, we get a glimpse of the divinity of Christ. In His sorrow we saw His humanity, and now in His amazing compassion we see His divinity. According to Mark and Luke, Jesus spends the rest of the day teaching. The other two do not state how the day passed, leaving one to imagine that perhaps they played the world’s largest ultimate Frisbee competition or maybe just sat and stared at each other all day. Unfortunately, we have no idea what He said because no one wrote it down, indicating that they were so transfixed with what He said remember to record it, or that it was the same teaching that they had previously recorded or would record later. Perhaps they were too hungry to pay attention. Either way, we’ll skip ahead to dinnertime.

The sun’s going down and you’ve got a mob of people in the middle of nowhere. They’ve walked quite a distance to get here and have been sitting out in the sun all afternoon. And no one thought to bring food (these are obviously not my relatives, who always bring way too much food). So the disciples (except in John’s gospel) come up to Jesus say, “Uh, Jesus, we’ve got a problem. You see all those people out there, yeah well, they aren’t going anywhere to eat until you let them. So maybe you might want to call a supper break or something because we could really go for some food.” To which Jesus replies, “You feed them.” So the disciples go out and talk with the crowd and they come back and go, “Yo Jesus, we’ve asked everybody and all we’ve got here is five barley loaves and two dead fish.” Apparently, out of 15,000 people, no one brought snacks.


Let me now jump to John for a second and give you his version. In John, Jesus walks up to Philip and says, “It’s about time for you guys to run into town and get some food. Where you gonna go?” Now Philip goes “You’re crazy. Two hundred day’s wages wouldn’t feed these people.” (Mark also mentions that it would take 200 day’s wages to feed everyone.) Andrew has been listening to the conversation and he buts in. “Um, you guys. I’ve checked and this little boy here is the only one who has food, and all he’s got is five barley loaves and two fish, but I don’t think that will help us much.” Again, 15,000 people, and the only one with food is some little kid, and my bet is that his mom packed his lunch because I don’t know any kid who would bring bread and fish for dinner. The kid also has way too much food to eat by himself, another sure sign that mom packed the lunch.

If we pull the four gospels together, the conversation probably evolved as such. The disciples tell Jesus that they need food. Jesus tells them to feed the people. While Philip starts talking about minimum wage and what not, the rest of the disciples check the crowd, and Andrew comes back with Junior and his less-than-appealing sack lunch.

Here the gospels pull back together and stay basically the same for the rest of the story. Now, the disciples are upset. I’m no mathematician, and neither were they for that matter (with the exception of Matthew who probably had some math skills, being a tax collector), but it’s easy to see that those five loaves and two fish wouldn’t feed the twelve of them and Jesus, and they’ve got company for dinner. Never the less, Jesus has everyone sit down and relax. He says grace, and passes the food around. So everyone eats, and Jesus, not one to waste food, tells His disciples to gather what’s left. So they go around, and come back with [i]twelve wicker baskets full of food[/i]!

This miracle has obvious connections to the Last Supper and the Eucharist. True this was bread and fish and the Last Supper was bread and wine (He could have had bread, wine, and fish and had a nice Italian meal, but I digress), but the parallel is there. A very interesting word is used to describe the crowd in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Instead of saying that they “had had their fill” and that the food “had been more than they could eat” as John does (Jn 6:12, 13), they say that the crowd had been satisfied. Upon examining the meal, it wouldn’t seem very satisfying. The bread was barley loaves, the food of the poor. The fish were probably raw, unless the people brought stuff to make a fire, and given the fact that none of them brought food, I doubt they brought lighter fluid. I don’t know about anyone else, but if the crowd had been like me, those twelve baskets would have been full of raw fish that had been taken out of the basket before I knew what I was getting and then discarded because there is no way I’m going to eat that (unless Jesus had some rice and a sushi chef in another basket). But the people were satisfied. To me, this word probably represents a spiritual feeling as well as a physical one. The crowd had been given little, but it had been more than enough. They received a small glimpse of the majesty and power of Christ, and it had been more than they could comprehend. It represents the spiritual satisfaction that happens when we receive the Eucharist. The Eucharist does not appear to be much, yet it is the summit of Christian life, when heaven descends and becomes so real that we can taste it (quite literally). The crowd felt the satisfaction we get when we share all we have with others. No one had much, yet when it was offered freely, everyone had enough. And that is the message of the miraculous feeding of (1)5,000.

[phatcatholic]

did u write this willguy?

[J.R.D]

Yea did u? its pretty Good if u did.....

Edited August 16, 2004 by J.R.D

[willguy]

yeah, I wrote it.

[J.R.D]

wow thats good

[StColette]

awesome job Willguy

[Colleen]

I really liked that. Great job, willguy!

[willguy]

glad ya'll like it. I wasn't sure where to post it. It probably doesn't belong under apologetics, but whatever.

[StColette]

Willguy I think it fits great in here

[kateri05]

[quote name='willguy' date='Aug 16 2004, 03:12 PM'] yeah, I wrote it. [/quote]
that is absolutely BEAUTIFUL!! great job, i plan to share it with my friends

[Guest JeffCR07]

lol, kateri wasn't lying...she emailed it to us, lol. Thats very well done, your style is simultaneously humorous and comprehensive, and you have some very good insight!

- Your Brother In Christ, Jeff

[Soldier4Him]

Nicely done. That would be a great explanation to share with jr high kids in youth group or religion classes. I applaud you.

[kateri05]

[quote name='JeffCR07' date='Aug 18 2004, 12:22 AM'] lol, kateri wasn't lying...she emailed it to us, lol. Thats very well done, your style is simultaneously humorous and comprehensive, and you have some very good insight!

- Your Brother In Christ, Jeff [/quote]
oh please, Jeff, you're just jealous you didn't get to email it first