Five loaves and two fishes..
35 By this time it was late in the day, so his disciples came to him. “This is a remote place,” they said, “and it’s already very late. 36 Send the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.”
37 But he answered, “You give them something to eat.”
They said to him, “That would take more than half a year’s wages[a]! Are we to go and spend that much on bread and give it to them to eat?”
38 “How many loaves do you have?” he asked. “Go and see.”
When they found out, they said, “Five—and two fish.”
39 Then Jesus directed them to have all the people sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties. 41 Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people. He also divided the two fish among them all. 42 They all ate and were satisfied, 43 and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish. 44 The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand.
Horsham: 1st August 2024
With the exception of the resurrection itself, the feeding of the five thousand is arguably the most dramatic and mysterious miracle associated with the life of Jesus. It appears in all four gospels in remarkably similar form, and that fact of itself speaks to the importance of this event. We need to give special attention to this one! We are told specifically that these people have no food. It is late, and they are hungry. This miracle involves Jesus taking five small flatbread loaves and two small fishes, provided (John tells us) by a boy in the crowd, and creating a sufficient quantity of bread and fish to fully satisfy 5,000 hungry men (Matthew speaks of women and children whose presence will have significantly increased that number), with twelve baskets of food left over.
Our familiarity with this story can easily breed contempt, and it’s really important that we don’t under estimate this size of this miracle. For this story to be true, we need to make the step of faith and accept that Jesus, in the power and authority of Almighty God, actually created food which did not pre-exist. Bread that had never been baked by human hands. Fish which had never been in the water. Five loaves and two fishes feed 5000 people? For men, this is impossible. But of course for God, all things are possible!
I want to take a moment to focus on the extraordinary contrast building at this point in the Gospel between the very understandable world view of the disciples and the eternal perspective of Jesus.
‘The wonderful thing about this story is that all through it runs an implicit contrast between the attitude of Jesus and the attitude of the disciples.’(i)
If we take this story out of its context we can overlook the fact that only a few days earlier, the disciples had seen and experienced the extraordinary power of God flowing through them as, sent out in pairs by Jesus, they visited the villages and towns of Galilee, healing the sick and casting out demons. Their teaching had been effective and miracles had been happening at their hands. They must have been buzzing! Yet now, a few hours after their return to Jesus, faced with a much larger challenge, their default is to look for the ‘human’ solution. Mark has already shown us several times the lack of faith amongst these young men contrasted with the confidence, power and authority of Jesus. Yet hot on the heels of their roller coaster experiences, they struggle to apply what they have learned to this new challenge.
There’s something really important here for us. I’ve come to believe that there are many people in our congregations (perhaps you are one of them) who have, in some way, experienced God and the power of His Holy Spirit, yet living life as if they have forgotten that buzz of excitement. When faced with temptation or with the challenges of life they completely overlook His grace and set off in search of the human solution.
I’m interested that it is the disciples who see the problem. These people are hungry and need food. Without food, many will grow faint on their journey home. Yet it is Jesus, filled with compassion for the crowd, who sees the moment. He sees the potential of the situation and the people, and he seizes the opportunity for the Kingdom of God to break through.
‘To them, the crowds were a problem, perhaps even a nuisance. But to Jesus, they were as sheep without a shepherd.’ (ii)
The disciples offer the human solution in this moment of crisis – send them away (it’s not a problem which we can solve – let them feed themselves). Jesus offers the divine solution – you give them something to eat. The human response – Do you seriously want us to spend a year’s wages buying food to feed this many people? The divine response – ‘Show me what resource you have.’ The human perspective – this isn’t going to feed one adult, let alone 5,000. The divine perspective – the breaking and blessing and then the sharing of the bread and the fish.
It’s difficult to grasp the enormity of what happens on that hillside close to Lake Galilee, but let’s grab the simple lesson. Like the disciples, we might feel overwhelmed with the enormity of the task God has given us. We may feel that we have so little to offer in terms of our resources and abilities. That can push us to look for our own solutions to the problems we’re facing. In the hands of Jesus, those gifts and resources are multiplied exponentially. In the hands of Jesus, that which to us seems so little, can have eternal consequences.
The first step is not to measure our resources, but to determine God’s will and trust him to meet the need.’ (iii)
No matter our experience of Jesus, if we practice His presence and walk in his ways, he is able to take the little we might think we have to offer and to use it, to use us, to do so much more than we expect or deserve.
(i) Tom Wright, Gospel of Mark, Kindle Edition (Loc 5298)
(ii) Warren Wiersbe, ‘Be Diligent’ p80
(iii) Wiersbe, ibid, p80