The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament contains a somewhat cryptic prophecy foretelling the timeframe of the coming of the Messiah. When the prophecy was deciphered, the timeframe pointed to the first century AD, exactly the time when Christ came among humanity. Thus, at the time of Jesus, there was a great deal of expectation that the Messiah would soon arrive.
The Jewish expectation was that a great leader anointed by God would come forward to lead the people out from under the oppression of the Romans. He would then establish the Reign of God, forging a great kingdom, greater than that of Solomon, which would be filled with abundant blessings. The people living at the time of Jesus eagerly looked for the signs indicating the arrival of the Messiah.
Two of those signs were the abundance of food and the abundance of wine. Wine, we should remark, was not a drink necessarily associated mostly with entertainment in the ancient world. Clean drinking water was often hard to find and the fermentation process helped to sanitize the water. Jesus provided an abundance of wine at the wedding at Cana, his first public miracle. With the multiplication of the loaves, he fulfilled the sign relating to food. The message was not lost on the crowds, who wanted to crown him king at once. But the time had not yet come for Christ to assume his kingship, so he slipped away from them for the time being.
The feeding of the multitudes also connects Jesus with the feeding of the Israelites with Manna. While the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years, God fed them with Manna, a special bread from Heaven. Now Christ shows his divinity, that he is God Incarnate, by feeding the people miraculously himself.
Significantly, the feeding of the multitudes occurs close to the time of Passover, which is the celebration of the liberation of the Israelites from their bondage in Israel. In the Passover ritual, a lamb is sacrificed. When the Israelites were captives in Egypt, God performed ten signs through Moses to get Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. The last of these signs was that the Angel of Death would go through Egypt and would strike down the first-born male in every household. But the Israelites could avoid this punishment by killing and eating a lamb and smearing its blood on the doorframe of their homes. After they escaped from Egypt, the Israelites were to sacrifice and eat a lamb each year to remember their liberation.
At the Last Supper, Jesus reinterprets the Passover. He himself becomes the sacrificial lamb, who dies on the cross for us. His blood is shed for us to wash us clean of our sins and liberate us from the spiritual bondage that holds us captive. The Messianic sign of the multiplication of the loaves so close to Passover points to the kind of Messiah Jesus will be. Rather than freeing the Israelites from political oppression through military strength, Jesus offers freedom from the bondage of our sins through his self-sacrifice on the cross.
Moreover, the miraculous feeding also points toward the miracle of how Jesus feeds us in the Mass. We believe that when the bread and wine are consecrated by the prayers of the priest, they become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. As Jesus says in the next sequence in the Gospel of John, eating his flesh and drinking his blood gives us true, eternal life. Without the intimate communion he offers us in the Eucharist, we have no life within us.
The account of the multiplication of he loaves is found in all four Gospels, and twice in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Jesus performed this miracle twice, once in a Jewish area and once in a pagan region. The implication is that the blessings foreshadowed by the miraculous feeding were not just for the people of Israel but for all of humanity.
In reflecting on this passage, we should also consider one interpretation that gained some popularity in recent years, but which poses some serious problems. According to this interpretation, Jesus didn't physically multiply the loaves but he was able to prevail on everyone to share with others the food they already had. Thus, from this perspective, the miracle was not of multiplication but of sharing.
The problem with the sharing interpretation is that it denies the intervention of God's grace in the situation. The problem is solved by humans working together, not through Christ's miracle. At the same time, the sharing interpretation does contain an element of truth. God does want us to do our best to solve problems, rather than just sitting back and waiting for him to fix everything. But we must do so while at the same time inviting his grace into each situation. Human effort and God's grace are not mutually exclusive. They go hand in hand. As it's been said, God does not expect us to provide loaves enough for the five thousand. He wants us to provide the little we have and he will make it more than sufficient through his grace.
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The readings for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B are:
2 Kgs 4:42-44
Ps 145:10-11, 15-16, 17-18
Eph 4:1-6
Jn 6:1-15
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: The rock upon which Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes, now inside the Church of the Multiplication in Tabgha (c) 2016 by Zoltan Abraham.