FEEDING THE MULTITUDES
One of the readings for Mass in the coming week – on Friday — is St John’s account of the miracle of the loaves and fish. This is the only miracle that is related in all four gospels – Matthew 14, Mark 6, Luke 9, and John 6; Matthew 15 and Mark 8 have a second occurrence of the miracle.
The story is familiar, perhaps almost too familiar. Like all stories in the gospels, it’s a story with a point, or perhaps several points. One point is that the story echoes similar accounts in the Hebrew scriptures of abundant food appearing in scarcity through God’s goodness. Examples are the manna in the desert, or when Elisha fed a hundred men with twenty loaves, among other such feats. More generally, the Hebrew scriptures emphasise again and again that through God’s goodness the earth provides for all our needs. (Incidentally, the Gospels record several miracles involving large catches of fish; as a recreational fisher I sometimes find myself wishing for another one.)
In John’s account, Jesus makes a distinction between ordinary food and the bread of life. Then, too, from the early nineteenth century some scripture scholars suggested that if the feeding of the multitude ‘really happened’ then it was a matter of Jesus persuading an anxious, fearful crowd to look into their own backpacks and share what they had. In sharing, then, there’s plenty for everyone. Some modern writers still prefer a ‘literal’ miracle. Rosemary Radford Ruether, however, reflecting on Matthew’s version, which tells us that the crowd was 5000 men ‘to say nothing of women and children’ wrote that of course the men didn’t know where they’d get food – it was the women who’d thought of that.
I think there’s room for all these ways of understanding the story, and more. My own thought is that we certainly need to hear a story about the importance of sharing (and of not wasting food!). The importance of sharing is also stressed in today’s second reading from Acts.
Shortly after these events, John has the people coming back to find Jesus again. He tells them that they should not concentrate on perishable food but on the bread of life, and on doing God’s work – that is, to quote the New Zealand scripture scholar Sr Kath Rushton, ‘to complete the works of God by hearing both the cry of the earth and the cry of the marginalised’.
Jim McAloon
