Jesus (37 page)

Jesus's response may be a rebuke to their uncaring attitude: “You give them something to eat,” he says. The Greek is an imperative:
Dote autois hymeis phagein!
“You yourselves give them something to eat!” The disciples counter that this is impossible. It would take two hundred denarii—a denarius was a day's wages—to feed such an immense crowd. Jesus asks them to find out how many loaves of bread and fishes they have. After checking, they report back: “Five, and two fish.” These are probably preserved or dried fish. It is this meager supply that is depicted in the ancient mosaic in the church in Tabgha.

Then Jesus invites everyone to recline, as if for a banquet. The English doesn't capture the Greek phrase
symposia symposia
, indicating a formal dinner party (and perhaps reminding readers of the
symposia
of the Greek philosophers, an occasion for teaching). The repetition of the word means something like “group by group.” Mark notes that they sat down in groups of fifties and hundreds, which underscores the vastness of the crowd. The disciples must have been—as they often are—flummoxed. Where is Jesus going with this?

Two charming comments color the scene. Jesus asks everyone to recline on the
chlōrō chortō
, the “green grass.” It is probably close to Passover, and the grass is lush after the winter rains. The Gospel paints a verdant picture of sheep without a shepherd, ready to be fed in fertile fields. Mark also says that Jesus has them sit
prasiai prasiai
, again a repetition, here of a marvelous word meaning “flower beds.”
¹³
They are arranged together like flower beds, in an orderly manner; some scholars suggest that the image of flower beds derives from the varied colored robes in the crowd. The description underscores the gentle, pastoral setting, as in a painting by Constable or Poussin.

What Jesus does next is something we frequently discussed in our graduate classes in liturgy. “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all.” These actions—take, look to heaven, bless, break, and give—most of which will reappear in the Last Supper, will later be incorporated into early eucharistic celebrations, and later still, the Mass. The blessing would have been the traditional Jewish blessing, praising God; the breaking of the loaves was reserved for the head of a Jewish family.
¹⁴

Here we find another possible reason why all four Gospels include the story—other than its miraculous character. Even as early as Mark (around
AD
70) readers would have drawn parallels to the church's eucharistic meals. One commentator notes that the eucharistic celebrations would have made the story of the loaves and fishes “common property in all the Christian communities.”
¹⁵
In other words, each of the evangelists wanted to include the event in his retelling, because for each of the audiences the story carried special meaning as an antecedent to the communal worship they knew so well. As Meier notes, “In any of the Synoptic Gospels, the only occasion outside the feeding miracles when Jesus acts as the host of the meal, takes bread, gives thanks or pronounces a blessing, breaks the bread, and gives it to his followers is the Last Supper.”
¹⁶

Mark offers an understated description of the miracle itself. In a terse sentence and with no description of the astonishment the disciples normally feel, he writes: “They ate and were filled.” Literally, everyone was satisfied, with the Greek suggesting a superabundance of food that enabled everyone to eat as much as they might have wanted. To hammer home the point, Mark tells us that twelve baskets of food were left, and that those who had eaten “numbered five thousand men.” Matthew adds, more inclusively, “besides women and children.”
¹⁷
Overall, though, the Synoptics mainly agree on the retelling of this dramatic miracle.

John's version is slightly different, highlighting the crowd's astonishment and offering more detail. Briefly put, John tells us that it happened near the time of Passover, names the disciples present, and even describes what kind of bread was used.
¹⁸
Jesus asks Philip how all the people are going to be fed. “He said this to test him,” says John, “for he himself knew what he was going to do.” Another detail: Andrew, Peter's brother, says to Jesus, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?”

Such touching details help us picture the disciples stumbling upon an unsuspecting boy carrying a basket of food, perhaps for his family. Or, as I imagined it on a retreat, Andrew spots the boy and pulls him out of the crowd. The boy tries valiantly to keep hold of the basket, so as not to spill the precious contents as he is guided toward Jesus. Andrew was a practiced fisherman, and I imagine him steering through the crowd as easily as he navigated the Sea of Galilee. Finally brought into Jesus's presence, the boy looks into the carpenter's eyes, and wonders.

John too paints a bucolic picture, with “a great deal of grass in the place.” In John the connection to the Eucharist is even clearer because Jesus
eucharistēsas
, he “gives thanks.” As in the Synoptics, all five thousand eat and have their fill.

The main difference, though, is the response to the miracle. As in the Synoptics, a “large crowd” has followed Jesus, but in John because of healing he has done. John often stresses Jesus's performing “signs” (
sēmeia
) that point not only to his own divinity, but reveal other meanings: here, for example, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet to which all are invited and which Jesus used in his preaching as a symbol of the reign of God.
¹⁹
Especially in John the miracles have an educative purpose. In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus's mighty works tend to depend on the faith of the people; in John's Gospel, Jesus's signs prompt faith.

And so, “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!'” The Messianic Secret, that is, Jesus's asking his disciples not to disclose his identity, is not secret here at all. They get it.

Mostly. For after his great sign Jesus intuits that the crowd is eager to “make him king.” The crowd understands that they have seen something extraordinary, but they don't understand that the miracle is a sign of Jesus's love, not an invitation to shower him with honors or set up a political system with him as its head.

So Jesus withdraws from them to the mountain. The Greek is haunting:
eis to oros autos monos
. To the mountain himself alone.

E
VEN NEWCOMERS TO THE
New Testament will easily appreciate the rich theology of this passage. Old Testament parallels abound, which the Jewish people in Jesus's time surely appreciated more readily than do current-day audiences. Just as the Israelites, for example, were fed “in the wilderness” with water from the rock and with manna, Jesus feeds his followers in “a deserted place.”
²⁰
The feeding also parallels the nourishment that Jesus gives to his disciples in the form of his teaching. It prefigures the distribution of the bread and wine at the Last Supper. The bread symbolizes Jesus himself: nourishing, satisfying, available to all. “I am the bread of life,” as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.”
²¹
In his series
Jesus of Nazareth
, Pope Benedict XVI offers an extended meditation on the “bread motif” in the Gospels, linking Moses and manna to Jesus and the loaves and fishes and paralleling the giving of the Torah with Jesus's total gift of himself.
²²

Food betokens a host of other spiritual meanings. It is satisfying, as is God's love. The sharing of food is a communal event, underlining the community aspect of faith. “Table fellowship” was an important aspect of Jesus's ministry. Some of our happiest hours and most intimate moments are spent at the table with family and friends. Moreover, for many Jews, one major image of the world to come is of a magnificent banquet, where a meal is shared with the patriarchs.
²³
Food is also about giving, sacrificing, and sharing; someone must labor to grow it and expend time and effort to prepare it. Food requires work and sacrifice. Someone also needs to do the feeding, in this case Christ. Overall, it is a gift.

Bread and fish, like the bread and wine at the Last Supper, are also simple elements. In his parables Jesus takes everyday images to teach verbally. At the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes he takes everyday foodstuffs to teach physically. Once again, God comes to us in ways that we can understand. Jesus uses physical objects—bread, fish, wine, water—in ways that do not go against nature, but rather perfect nature, taking what is already here and creating something new. He uses food to show us how the world should be: everyone filled and satisfied.

Despite Jesus's desire to help his friends understand the reign of God, it must have been close to impossible for the disciples to make sense of things—even if they recalled the Old Testament passages and grasped the link between being fed and being taught. Witnessing the seemingly bottomless baskets of bread and fish would have been astounding. Seeing how he had fed so many with so little would have been confusing. The miracles reveal the identity of Jesus, they teach us something, but they cannot be fully “understood.” In the Synoptics, the miracles are often referred to as
dynameis
, “acts of power” that so astonish onlookers that they frequently exclaim, “We have never seen anything like this.”

In the Gospel of John they are signs that point to something greater, beyond the crowd's—or our—comprehension. These symbolic actions inaugurate new meaning, something never before experienced. Lohfink phrases it elegantly when he says that the signs “create space for the reign of God and allow it to come.”
²⁴

G
OD TAKES SMALL THINGS
and makes them great. That was clear at Tabgha. It's also evident in our daily lives and in our prayer. This was illustrated for me just a few years ago in, of all places, a hotel conference room.

A group of Catholic school principals and teachers had invited me to direct a day-long retreat for their group, just outside of Boston. In the afternoon I led them through a “guided meditation” using some techniques of Ignatian contemplation, which encourage us to imagine ourselves in a Scripture scene.

For our meditation I used John's account of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, since it was the Gospel reading for the coming Sunday. First I read the passage aloud, so that people were familiar with it, and then I asked a few questions based on the five senses as a way of sparking people's imaginations.
Sight:
What does the crowd look like? What does Jesus look like?
Hearing:
Is the crowd grumbling about hunger? Can you hear the waves breaking on the shore?
Feeling:
How does it feel to sit on the green grass? Are you hungry?
Taste:
What does the bread taste like? The fish?
And smell:
Can you smell the fresh air coming off the sea?

Simple questions like these can help a person picture the scene. Then I read the passage again and invited them to envision themselves on the shore of the sea as participants, as part of the crowd. Ignatian contemplation doesn't require you to do anything bizarre, merely that you imagine and trust that God can work through that imagining.

After thirty minutes of silence I asked the group to open their eyes and invited them to share what they experienced in their prayer. Many were drawn to parts of the story they had never noticed before. One young teacher noticed that the miracle was a communal event, taking place in the midst of the group, and she linked that to the communal aspect of faith, which she could sometimes overlook. Experiences of God come not just in quiet moments of solitary prayer, but together with others.

The crowd in Tabgha may be the largest group with whom Jesus spends time, which underlines the communal aspect of his ministry and serves as a reminder that religion is not simply a solitary affair. A solipsistic God-and-me approach can lead to a skewed spirituality, closed off from the nourishment that a group can provide.

One woman's comments remained with me. “I never knew that there was a little boy there!” Frankly, until I had read the passage aloud that day, neither had I. But there it is in John: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.”

“I've been a Catholic my whole life, and I must have heard that passage dozens of times during Mass,” she said. “But I never noticed him.” Her attention was drawn to the boy with the loaves and fishes, and she saw for the first time that a child provided the basis for Jesus's miracle. So we discussed what she thought God might be asking her to notice. Perhaps it was an invitation to notice, in a new way, the children with whom she worked. Or to see how God can make something great from something small. Or to pay attention to blessings she had overlooked in her life, as she had previously overlooked the boy.

Who knows where this boy came from or why he brought Jesus his food. It seems improbable that he would have brought all that food for himself to eat. Perhaps his mother and father, standing in the crowd, overheard Philip complaining about the lack of food and said to the boy, “Give our food to the Master, son.” Perhaps the parents were members of Jesus's larger group of followers. (Scholars posit a series of expanding groups: the Twelve, the disciples, and then the followers.) Perhaps among these were a couple and their son.

It was probably easy to overlook the young boy in the middle of the throng on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The disciples apparently didn't bother to ask his name; or, if they asked, they didn't bother to pass it along to the evangelists; and if they did pass it along, the evangelists didn't bother to record it. After the boy steps on the world stage and offers his bread and fish to Jesus, he recedes into obscurity, leaving behind only a miracle.