It’s the start of August and today’s gospel is about the feeding of the five thousand. In October last year, my TV show, Straight from the Sky went to Israel courtesy of Del Mar Travel and Tours to do a video documentary of the sites that we read in the Old and New Testaments in the Bible and yes, one of these traditional sites we visited is called Tabgha in Galilee near Capernaum, where a Byzantine Church stands.
Tabgha is one of the places where pilgrims during the Byzantine period believed was the site where the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand happened. Yes, there is another possible site a little further away, but this lies along the Sea of Galilee.
What is significant about this miracle is that it is the only miracle that is found in all the four gospels in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Indeed, there are many stories in the New Testament that you may find only mentioned in one of the evangelists, but the fact that all the four gospel writers mentioned this miracle gives you an idea of how important this miracle is for Christianity. This scripture reading comes from Matt.14: 13-21.
“13 When Jesus heard of [the death of John the Baptist), he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. The crowds heard of this and followed him on foot from their towns. 14 When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd, he was moved with pity for them, and he cured their sick.
15 When it was evening, the disciples approached him and said, “This is a deserted place and it is already late; dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves. 16 [Jesus] said to them, “There is no need for them to go away; give them some food yourselves. 17 But they said to him, “Five loaves and two fish are all we have here. 18 Then he said, “Bring them here to me, “19 and he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass.
Taking the few loaves and two fish, and looking up to heaven, he said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds. 20 They all ate and were satisfied, and they picked up the fragments left over—twelve wicker baskets full. 21 Those who ate were about five thousand men, not counting women and children.”
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If you’re a Bible reading person and focused on the New Testament, by now you would have already noticed that the first miracle that our Lord Jesus Christ made happened in the wedding in Cana, where in John 2:1-11 his Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary told him, “They have ran out of wine.” Our Lord Jesus replied to his Mother, “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.” The Blessed Virgin Mary then told the servers, “Do whatever he tells you” and he turned water into wine!
Today’s gospel reading signals the end of our Lord’s two-year Galilean Ministry and ends with another miracle in the feeding of the five thousand. And as we read at the end of this scripture reading, the five thousand that today’s gospel mentions are all men as the women and children were not counted. So if you considered that half of the men who went there were married, they must have brought their wives and children with them. So this miracle must have fed more than the five thousand as told in scripture.
This miracle is in all truth a “foreshadowing” of things to come… that today a billion Catholics are fed daily when they take the Holy Communion from a simple white bread. As today’s scripture said, “They all ate and were satisfied.”
If you’re wondering, why did our Lord do this miracle? Certainly he wasn’t trying to impress the multitude with them. But being the second Person in the Holy Trinity, our Lord Jesus Christ wanted to show to the people that if they are with God… God will take care of their needs and our most basic need is food. But this miracle happened after the Bread of Life discourse of our Lord, where many disciples left him disgusted when he said “Amen, Amen, I say to you, he who eats the body and drinks the blood of the Son of Man shall have eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day.”
But our Lord Jesus Christ satisfies not only man’s hunger for food; he satisfies our spiritual hunger as well. If you recalled the story on John 4 about the Samaritan woman in Jacob’s well, you would learn that our Lord Jesus said to her, “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
So our Lord’s Galilean Ministry starts with turning water into wine and ends with the feeding of more than five thousand people with a few loaves and fish. This is a very clear albeit divine message of God’s love for his creation that if he can feed five thousand from a few loaves, he can feed the billions who inhabit the earth that God also created.