Reflection
Today’s gospel recounts one of the most memorable of Jesus’ miracles: the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. In John’s version of the miracle story, three things stand out. First, Jesus’ foremost concern is that the crowd is fed. This gospel story says nothing about Jesus teaching or preaching to the crowd; rather, he is entirely focused on feeding them, which suggests that their physical well-being matters to Jesus. When people are hungry, teaching can wait.
Second, we know this miracle story so well that we can easily overlook that after he multiplied the “five barley loaves and two fish,” rather than asking his disciples to distribute the food to the crowd, Jesus feeds them himself, going to each person, one after another, offering them “as much of the fish as they wanted.” For Jesus, the miracle would have been incomplete, stalled and unfinished, if he had stopped with the act of multiplication.
The miracle is fulfilled only when he goes deep into the crowd to feed every man, woman, and child himself, giving each of them, even if only for a moment, not only something to eat, but his absolute attention.
Not one of them was passed over, not one of them was overlooked. That’s the world the way God wants it to be, a world where no human being is bypassed or overlooked; a world where no one is left wanting because, like the people on the mountainside in Galilee that day, everyone “had had their fill.”
How do we bring that kind of world into being, a world that Jesus called “the reign of God”? This brings us to the third point. Jesus could multiply the loaves and the fishes only because a young boy shared what he had. He gave Jesus something to work with and, as a result, thousands of people had “more than they could eat.” It’s no different for us. Like the young boy, Jesus works with whatever we have to offer—an act of generosity, a word of encouragement, a kind gesture—making more of whatever we give him than we can possibly imagine.
Miracles? Who says they can’t happen all the time?
Thank you Paul for this thoughtful and affirming reflection.