The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost 2024
The feeding of the five thousand
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s Gospel recounts the miraculous feeding of the five thousand. This miracle has the unique distinction of being the only one to appear in all four Gospels. With one voice, all four Evangelists are saying to us today, ‘Pay close attention! This miracle matters.’
Two plot lines converge on the miracle. In the first, Jesus’s message of repentance has been rejected by his fellow Nazarenes. Relying on covenant membership alone, in self-satisfied self-righteousness they have chosen to cover over their inner corruption. They had cleaned only the outside of the cup; inside, their hearts were filthy. And so Jesus was without honour, as he puts it, in his own hometown. In the second plot line, St John the Baptist has just been beheaded by Herod Antipas, the villainous ruler of Jesus’s homeland, Galilee. These two plotlines reflect a pattern repeated throughout Israel’s history: the covenant broken; the prophet rejected, even killed; and the wicked king following the passionate desires of his idolatrous heart.
That’s where we are in the story when the miracle happens. So, before we contemplate the miracle, ask yourself: do you rest on your laurels, believing it’s enough just to be a member of the Church? Is repentance only for others, for those outside, and not for you? Despite being a member of Christ’s body physically, is your soul far away from Christ’s spirit? Do you confess him with your mouth, but in your heart, are you following your own passionate desires?
These are important questions. Because Christ did not come to heal the well, he came to heal the sick. And the miracle that is about to take place is a miracle for the sick. We know this because when Christ withdraws to a solitary place after hearing the devastating news of St John’s murder, great crowds follow him, it says, and moved with compassion, Christ heals them of their sicknesses. You see? Christ’s followers are sick.
The Fathers tell us that bodily illness in the Gospel symbolises sinning in action. They had bodily diseases, we have bodily sins. We sin with our bodies, that is our sickness. And so, the movement of the sick toward Christ symbolises our taking stock, reckoning with ourselves, and honestly confessing the sins we have committed in action, repenting of them, and, fortified by faith in Christ, resolving to put an end to them. No sins of the flesh. No telling lies. No dishonouring our parents. No mistreating our spouses—whether by being hot (angry and nasty) or cold (withholding and mean). No sinning.
Yes, having acknowledged your sickness, you must follow Christ—on foot, it says, meaning walking his Way, the Way of the Cross; following him to a deserted place, it says, to a place of repentance, of fasting and self-denial.
And don’t forget prayer! Because look, you’re following Christ while he is in a boat, it says. He’s not on land, he’s at sea. Not far away, he’s just off shore, so he’s close by. But he’s on water, he’s in the soul. Water is the soul, the place of prayer, where the mind turns inward and finds Christ all by himself, it says, meaning he is to be your sole focus, the One toward whom you, the spiritually sick, turn in fervent prayer.
That’s the first goal, the first stage of repentance: through prayer and fasting, being granted moral healing.
But we don’t stop there. The twelve disciples come to Christ and say, ‘The people are hungry.’ Having been healed, the crowd are hungry. Hungry for what? For food. However, after we’ve been healed, after we’ve begun to follow the commandments with our body, then we grow hungry for righteousness—true righteousness, not just outer virtue but inner virtue as well: humility, faith, love. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after true righteousness. They shall be filled.
‘The people are hungry,’ the disciples say, ‘and the hour is late.’ The hour is late. The end is near. The Judgement approaches.
‘The hour is late,’ they say, ‘but this place is deserted.’ The word ‘deserted’ there is the same word that the Old Testament uses to describe the wilderness of Sinai, where the Old Covenant was consecrated. And indeed, in this new Sinai, through this miracle, Christ will reveal, in signs, the New Covenant that will replace the Old and which he will establish with all peoples.
‘This place is deserted,’ they say. ‘Send the crowd into the villages to buy food for themselves.’ Buy food for themselves. Ha! How often did the Apostles fail to understand the mystery? As if, hungry for righteousness, we’re supposed to return to the world and turn to worldly philosophies and ideologies for inner nourishment.
‘You give them something to eat!’ Christ replies. And for sure, to be truly satisfied we must stay in the wilderness with Christ, stay in the Church, where the Apostles and their successors, the bishops, will feed us—feed us with prayer and fasting and right worship.
The disciples still don’t get it. ‘But we’ve only got five loaves of bread and two fish!’ they complain.
Five loaves. Two fish. Now, let us contemplate the miracle. The Fathers explain the symbolism.
First, bread. Bread comes from the earth. It symbolises the body. There are five loaves because the body has five senses, and also because there are five Books of Moses, the Law, which correspond to the five senses because the Law contains the commandments that you carry out with your body. But the people of God, we’re told, are also one body, so the five loaves symbolising the Law also symbolise Israel, the people of God under the Old Covenant. And, as it stands, the five loaves are not enough. The Law, by itself, without Christ, is not enough. The Old Covenant was restricted to Israel, but God wants to feed everyone. St John specifies that the five loaves are barley loaves, like the unleavened bread at Passover, which gestures at the Old Covenant that Christ is about to renew and expand, multiplying its power by the death of his body on the Cross. And therefore, the bread also symbolises the Eucharist. ‘This is my body,’ Christ said of bread.
Now, fish. Fish live in the water. They symbolise the life of the soul. Christ is the fish. His symbol is the fish. He is our soul’s true life. But water is also death. In water, the body drowns and dies. So, fish symbolise life in death and death in life; the death of the body that is the life of the spirit; and therefore Christ, whose death gives life; and also Baptism, through which we die with Christ, and are raised with him. There are two fish because Christ has two natures, human and divine. There are two fish because Christ is a two-edged sword dividing soul from spirit. There are two fish because Christ unites two peoples, Jews and Gentiles, by his death. There are two fish because Christ reveals two senses of Scripture, the literal and the spiritual, the first of which kills, the second of which gives life.
The miracle is saying, in the Church, Christ will feed you, body and soul. He will feed everyone, Jew and Gentile. He will be our food, our spiritual food, food that fortifies our bodies in virtue and fills our minds with understanding—understanding that comes when, having penetrated the letter of the Law, we live the eternal life of the Spirit, in Christ.
But how? Look at what happens next.
Christ tells the crowd to sit down on the grass—and St John adds, ‘There was plenty of grass in that place.’ Plenty of grass? In that deserted place? In that wilderness? What kind of grassy wilderness is this? Not just any wilderness.
The Fathers say the grass symbolises our mortality. ‘Like the grass, we pass away,’ says the Apostle, echoing Christ who says: ‘The grass, alive today and tomorrow thrown on the fire.’ Tomorrow thrown on the fire. The spectre of the Last Judgement again! And of course Christ also said that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a field full of grass, some of which is wheat, some of which is weeds, and that, at the end of the age, the angels will come and gather the grass, saving the wheat, burning the weeds. ‘Sit down upon the grass,’ he says. Sit down. The verb literally means ‘recline’, as in to recline at table, as they did in the ancient world, and as the Apostles reclined with Christ at the Last Supper. ‘Many from outside,’ he says, ‘will come and recline with Abraham in the Kingdom of Heaven, while the children of the Kingdom will be thrown into utter darkness.’
Mortality, death, the Judgement and the coming Kingdom. All of this is what sitting down on the grass symbolises. And so, this is how Christ purifies and illumines us. He commands us to sit down on the grass, to enter the Kingdom by dying to the world, crucifying the flesh, emptying ourselves, losing our lives for his sake—all the while judging ourselves, not others, so that, at the Judgement, we might be saved.
And saved you will be if, having seated yourself on the grass, Christ works the miracle in you, raising the bread to heaven for you, blessing it and breaking it for you, his broken body, feeding it to you, satisfying you. ‘They ate and they were all satisfied,’ it says, with so much leftover, it says, that the broken pieces, it says, were enough to fill twelve baskets. Twelve baskets. Twelve Apostles. Twelve pillars of the Church. The Church, the New Covenant, full of bread. The Body of Christ, broken for us, multiplied endlessly, enough for everyone, filling everyone, satisfying everyone—including you when, healed of sickness and sitting on the grass, you take up your cross and follow Christ along the narrow road of self-denial, loving God and, in a miracle of abundant, overflowing love, emptying yourself so that you love your neighbour as yourself.
Amen.