Of all the many miracles Jesus performed during his earthly ministry (that is, before his passion, death, and Resurrection), there is one that stands out: the feeding of the five thousands.
Unlike any other miracle from his ministry, this one is recorded in all four gospels is the feeding of the five thousand.
You would think that people would have a handle on the fact that this was a miracle--an unmistakable supernatural intervention in the order of nature.
Yet every year we are subjected to homilies that try to explain it away as a natural event, suggesting that all Jesus really did was motivate people to share the food that they had with them, so it was really a "miracle of sharing" rather than a miraculous multiplication of loaves.
I've written about the subject before, but let's see what Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II have to say about the matter . . .
Pope Benedict on the Miracle
Recently I was delighted to discover that Pope Benedict has been discussing the miracle in his Sunday Angeluses . . . er, Angeli . . . er, Angelus messages. Here's what he had to say earlier this summer:
This Sunday we began by reading Chapter six of John’s Gospel. The chapter opens with the scene of the multiplication of the loaves, which Jesus later comments on in the Synagogue of Capernaum, pointing to himself as the “bread” which gives life. . . .
A boy’s presence is also mentioned in the scene of the multiplication. On perceiving the problem of feeding so many hungry people, he shared the little he had brought with him: five loaves and two fish (cf. Jn 6:9).
The miracle was not worked from nothing, but from a first modest sharing of what a simple lad had brought with him. Jesus does not ask us for what we do not have.
Rather, he makes us see that if each person offers the little he has the miracle can always be repeated: God is capable of multiplying our small acts of love and making us share in his gift.
The crowd was impressed by the miracle: it sees in Jesus the new Moses, worthy of power, and in the new manna, the future guaranteed.
However the people stopped at the material element, which they had eaten, and the Lord “perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king,... withdrew again to the hills by himself” (Jn 6:15).
Jesus is not an earthly king who exercises dominion but a king who serves, who stoops down to human beings not only to satisfy their physical hunger, but above all their deeper hunger, the hunger for guidance, meaning and truth, the hunger for God [Angelus, July 29, 2012].
So Pope Benedict sees the miracle in the traditional (and obvious) way, as a multiplication of loaves.
He stressed the same thing the next week:
The Reading of the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel continues in the Liturgy of the Word of this Sunday. We are in the synagogue of Capharnaum where Jesus was giving his well-known discourse after the multiplication of the loaves. . . .
The crowd does not understand, it believes that Jesus is asking for the observance of precepts in order to obtain the continuation of that miracle, and asks: “what must we do, to be dong the works of God?” (v. 28). . . .
“What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” (v. 28), the crowd asks, ready to act in order to perpetuate the miracle of the loaves.
But Jesus, the true bread of life that satisfies our hunger for meaning and for truth, cannot be “earned” with human work; he comes to us only as a gift of God’s love, as a work of God to be asked for and received [Angelus, August 5, 2012].
And he stressed it the week after that, this time adding that it was Jesus himself who satisfied the hunger of the five thousand though a miracle he worked that miraculously satisfied their physical hunger. They didn't satisfy their own hunger by passing around the food they had with them.
The Reading of the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel in the Liturgy of these Sundays has led us to reflect on the multiplication of the loaves, with which the Lord satisfied the hunger of a crowd of five thousand, and on the invitation Jesus addresses to all those whom he had feed to busy themselves seeking a food that endures to eternal life.
Jesus wants to help them understand the profound meaning of the miracle he had worked: in miraculously satisfying their physical hunger; he prepares them to receive the news that he is the Bread which has come down from heaven (cf. Jn 6:41), which will satisfy hunger for ever [Angelus, August 12, 2012].
And most recently he spoke specifically of Jesus satisfying their hunger with fives loaves and two fish:
On the past few Sundays we have meditated on the “Bread of Life” discourse, which Jesus gave in the Synagogue of Capernaum after satisfying the hunger of thousands of people with five loaves and two fish [Angelus, August 26, 2012].
John Paul II on the Miracle
I don't want to have an unnecessary multiplication of quotations, but I would like to add a couple from John Paul II that show this isn't just a "Benedict thing." Back in 1982, he told the youth of Scotland:
There is an episode in the life of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, which can serve as an example for what I wish to tell you. Jesus had been teaching a crowd of five thousand people about the Kingdom of God.
They had listened carefully all day, and as evening approached he did not want to send them away hungry, so he told his disciples to give them something to eat.
He said this really to test them, because he knew exactly what he was going to do.
One of the disciples - it was Saint Andrew - said: “There is a small boy here with five barley loaves and two fishes; but what is that between so many?”
Jesus took the loaves, blessed them, and gave them out to all who were sitting waiting; he then did the same with the fish, giving out as much as was wanted. Later the disciples collected twelve baskets of the fragments that were left over.
Now the point I wish to make is this: Saint Andrew gave Jesus all there was available, and Jesus miraculously fed those five thousand people and still had something left over [Address to the Young People of Scotland, May 31, 1982].
Note that John Paul II doesn't just say that Jesus used the five loaves and two fish, he specifies that they were "all there was available." So people didn't bring out the food they were had stashed under their cloaks and start passing it around. What the boy had was what was available. Of course, some people might have had food with them, but it wasn't available for what Jesus was doing, which was a real, physical miracle.
And it's a miracle with spiritual implications. Pope Benedict mentioned that it points to Jesus as the Bread of Life, and that it shows what God can do with our little when we turn to him. John Paul II dwells on the latter point in a particularly moving way:
It is exactly the same with your lives. Left alone to face the difficult challenges of life today, you feel conscious of your inadequacy and afraid of what the future may hold for you.
But what I say to you is this: place your lives in the hands of Jesus. He will accept you, and bless you, and he will make such use of your lives as will be beyond your greatest expectations!
In other words: surrender yourselves, like so many loaves and fishes, into the all-powerful, sustaining hands of God and you will find yourselves transformed with “newness of life”, with fullness of life. “Unload your burden on the Lord, and he will support you”.
Now can we please not have any more of the "miracle of sharing" homilies?
Please?
By the Way . . .
If you're interested in fascinating things that the pope has to say, you should join my Secret Information Club.
It's is a free service that I operate by email.
I send out information on a variety of fascinating topics connected with the Catholic faith.
The very first thing you’ll get if you sign up is an “interview” I did with Pope Benedict on the book of Revelation. What I did was compose questions about the book of Revelation and take the answers from his writings.
He has a lot of interesting things to say!
If you’d like to find out what they are, just sign up at www.SecretInfoClub.com or use this handy sign-up form:
Just email me at jimmy@secretinfoclub.com if you have any difficulty.
In the meantime, what do you think?
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Well done, but Cardinal Dolan in one of his homilies points out the power in numbers. Seven fish represented seven sacraments. 12 baskets back represented 12 apostles. Although a real miracle, it taught a powerful lesson Jesus taught every day He was on earth. Give me what you have and I will give you more than you ever thought possible. The mustard seed will grow, jugs of water will turn into wine, you will be fed until you are fully satisfied and in the end you will receive eternal life.
Yes, it was a real miracle.
And, yes, the numbers are symbolic.
People seem not to get this detail: God writes History in much the same way that an Author writes a great novel or epic.
And of course the best authors are rich and you can look both at their works and alongside their works and through their works to levels of meaning. Devices like foreshadowing and symbolism—sometimes very subtle—are found in the work of the best artist.
So of course God uses symbols in real historical events to point towards, and remind us of, the sacraments, the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 apostles, and so on. What, did you think the Author of History was inferior to the better human authors?
When human authors write that way, they tell a fiction; they invent a fantasy world. Their symbols are invented symbols in invented scenes involving invented characters.
When the Author of all Creation, the Author and Finisher of our Faith does it, He does it with tangible symbols in real-world events involving normal human beings. He turns real life into epic, into poetry, into myth, into beauty.
What else would He do? It’s not as if He were copying the tricks of the human authors, after all. It’s they who got the idea for such techniques from Him.
So, yes, it was a real miracle.
And, yes, it was symbolic.
A God who had to imagine fictional events to convey Himself would be no better than the human authors He created. He would not, in fact, be God.
I opened my homily on the loaves and fishes this year by asking a show of hands of those who had heard this sharing version in a homily. Hands shot up. I then debunked that version. Being the most reported of Jesus miracles, 5 times in 4 gospels, if it were not a miracle there would have been thousands of counter witnesses to the gospels. There weren’t.
“The concluding part of the secret uses images which Lucia may have seen in devotional books…” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Theological Commentary on Fatima, June 2000
Two thousand years of Church tradition support Our Lord’s Eucharistic miracle of the five loaves and two fishes. More recent miracles like Fatima also need support from the Hierarchy. The consequences for the salvation of souls are just as great. The apocalyptic message of Fatima deserved just as much support, but a coordinated campaign against it soon developed and has continued for ninety-five years.
My college Theology teacher explained the miracle of sharing for the miracle of the multiplication of loaves. I hated it! He also explained away the Ten Commandments…etc. His theology class really messed me up and rattled so much of what I held dear to in my faith. To make it worse, it was my first collegiate theology course!
Fortunately, my last Theology prof was the best! She was a consecrated Carmellite. We studied Timothy Radcliffe’s “What the Point of Being Christian.”
What’s the Point of Being Christian*
What’s the Point of Being Christian (Catholic)?
God interacts with individuals exclusively through the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments.
Hard to believe the people would have been immediately swept up with a frenzy to make Jesus their King and follow him everywhere in search of their next mouthful if they themselves had produced the loaves and fishes from their own portable larder. Truly a miracle.
Did Jesus do the multiplication of the loaves once or twice?
It’s interesting to note in the first quote that Jimmy gives us from Pope Benedict that the Holy Father doesn’t dismiss the idea of sharing from this parable altogether, but rather puts it in its proper place. To wit:
“The miracle was not worked from nothing, but from a first modest sharing of what a simple lad had brought with him. Jesus does not ask us for what we do not have.”
What is shared is shared with Our Lord, and then He does the miraculous with it.
As much as I hate to say it, whether we take the miracle in a literal sense or an allegorical one, the point is still the miracle of sharing. The miracle was possible thanks to the people’s will to share.
With all due respect frsh I believe you could not be more wrong when you observe:
“...whether we take the miracle in a literal sense or an allegorical one, the point is still the miracle of sharing. The miracle was possible thanks to the people’s will to share.”
First, if the miracle was allegorical, notwithstanding the apostles and Church have ever since represented the multiplication of the loaves and fishes as literal, then an ecclesiastical fraud has been perpetrated on the faithful for millennia.
Second, God does not ever need the people’s ‘will to share’ as the prerequisite for Him to perform a miracle. Faith, surely in most instances, but a disposition to share on the part of the people is not necessary. In any event, the only ‘sharing’ related in the Gospel was that done one small boy who offered up the barley loaves and fishes.
To believe that it was just ‘sharing’ then you have to also believe that: many of the people went out to hear a morning sermon with enough food for an afternoon and evening meal; none of them ate periodically during the day so they were hungry; they all just happened to bring the same meal - bread and fish; they sat all day in the sun with that food; they weren’t just asked to share in the first place.
Well, Liam, that’s your opinion. But before the miracle took place there were people willing to share the fish and the bread. That’s the way it was written, for a reason. Miracles are done thanks to people’s faith in Jesus, through and thanks to Jesus of course. But people have to be open to let God act through them before God acts. The Lord is a gentleman like that, you know?
Thanks frsh. I realized it was my opinion as I was typing it.(just teasing).
You say now:
“...people have to be open to let God act through them before God acts.”
Pass that one along to Saul of Tarsus, frsh.
The sharing miracle explantion reduces the Son of God into a human version of Barney the purple dinosaur. It has always driven me nuts. If we’re going to accept Christ as Christ, why would we begrudge the reality of the miraculous. I need a miraculous God. I need a God who loves me unreasonably, because I am an unreasonable creature. Christ is love and love is always exponential in nature rather than additional, and so the five loaves and 2 fishes become enough to feed the 5000.
Never heard a a miracle of sharing homily….and I’m quite sure if I did I would report the priest/deacon to their superior. Wow!
Posted by Lisa on Sunday, Sep 23, 2012 11:32 PM (EST):Never heard a a miracle of sharing homily….and I’m quite sure if I did I would report the priest/deacon to their superior. Wow!”
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We heard that explanation over 2 decades ago at Mass.After that we decided to attend another parish.
We later heard the priest who gave that homily had been removed for various reasons including substance abuse.I guess if you don’t believe in an eternal & miracle working Lord, you fill that emptiness with substitutes.I hope he figured it out & found the real Jesus again.
Christ is God on earth at that time in history. There are 5000 people before Him; He had been preaching to them all day long; and they are “sure” of what He is teaching. There is no better audience/time for Christ to show them/us who He really is. Literally, metaphoricaly or otherwise I believe the point is that when one’s heart is open to God (sure) then everything that you see, hear, and feel is a new reality. For that moment in time/space those 5000 were taken to the Absolute Reality of God where their hunger was satisfied. In God hunger is always satisfied and abundance rules in all ways. On earth, this can never be so. To feed 5000 people with little to nothing must be accomplished within God and it MUST BE SEEN this way. Nothing on earth can do this EXCEPT the Bread of Life, Christ. He IS the true and only necessary food there is, that of the Absolute Spirit of God. The “Miracle of the Loaves and Fish” I believe, is the miracle of spiritual knowing; the final leap from head knowledge into heart knowing; from a worldly sense of view to God’s view; the kind of knowing that can ONLY be seen by those who have “eyes to see it”.
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I had no idea there was a miracle of sharing “explanation” postulated. Thanks for this post. I will tuck it away in my brain, so that if I encounter someone who believes in the miracle of sharing idea, I will have the information available to back up the reality of the true miracle which occurred in the feeding of the 5000.
It was a “miracle of sharing”. It depended entirely on the boy’s free will to share the barley loaves (food of the poor) and the fishes; just as the mystery (transcending any miracle) of the Incarnation was entirely dependent on a young woman’s free will accepting that it be done to her according to the word of God’s messenger.
I have never come across the ridiculous “explaining away” theory being held by any priest, deacon, or any one else, not even an atheist. Where can it be seen in writing? What did the relevant bishop, or the Vatican, do about it?
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