Friday in the Second Week of Easter, April 16, 2021

John 6:1-15

Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee. A large crowd followed him, because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick. Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples. The Jewish feast of Passover was near. When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, he said to Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” He said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people recline.” Now there was a great deal of grass in that place. So the men reclined, about five thousand in number. Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were reclining, and also as much of the fish as they wanted. When they had had their fill, he said to his disciples, “Gather the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted.” So they collected them, and filled twelve wicker baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves that had been more than they could eat. When the people saw the sign he had done, they said, “This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world.” Since Jesus knew that they were going to come and carry him off to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain alone.

The feeding of the five thousand poignantly reveals to us the superabundance of God’s love and care for us, and it so impressed the Evangelists that all four of them provide an account of it.  

The feeding itself looms so large in these accounts that we often miss what preceded it.  Here, St. John tells us very specifically that the Lord Jesus first approached his Apostle Philip: “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?”  Now, the Lord asks him this upon seeing the crowd “coming to him”.  Philip does not protest and ask the Lord why he was asking him; nor does he ask why they should buy bread for the people at all; nor does he criticize the question.  He simply puts forward the quite rational observation that, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.”  He makes the observation with the obvious intent of working to a logical conclusion.  John states that “[Jesus] said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do.”  The Lord wanted the Apostles to think this problem through.  But it was a problem only because the Lord made it so, for he chose to present the coming of the people to him as of guests coming to a banquet, meaning that he, the Master of the Banquet, had the responsibility for feeding them.  Now, Philip had seen the Lord provide wine at the Wedding at Cana and he might have proposed that the Lord do something along those lines.  At this point in time, though, Philip and the other Apostles were still looking at the situation with earthly eyes, not heavenly ones.  They still had much growing to do.

Andrew points the way out, though unwittingly: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?”  The Lord proceeds to use what-there-is to make an overabundance of food for the people to eat.  He need not have done that.  He could have caused food to float down from heaven, much like the old manna of which he will speak in the coming verses.  Or, he could have made food to appear, ready to eat, in an adjacent field.  The fact that he took the food that was available and increased it signifies how he works in those who believe in him.  Philip, for instance, believed in the Lord enough to try and answer his question without throwing up his hands and saying that he was asking the impossible.  The Lord employed Philip, just so, in the settling of the crowd and the feeding of the people.  The Lord made him a participant in the miracle.  He played the part of one of the servers at the Wedding at Cana.  The bread and the fish multiplied in his hands just as the water had become wine under the hands of the servants at the wedding.  Philip, then, was quite aware of the insufficiency of what he had and so could not doubt that the Lord was working through him to feed these people.  

The Lord works in the same way in accomplishing his will in us and in answering our prayers.  He answers our prayers in his time and in his way so as to draw us nearer to him, to refine our faith, as it were.  He makes us excruciatingly aware of our insufficiency to help ourselves or others, and then provides his help so that we know that it could only be his help.  He teaches us not to rely on ourselves and on our false estimates of what we are capable of accomplishing, and to rely on him.  This is particularly true of our salvation.  On our own we can no more reach heaven and eternal happiness than we can stretch a few fish and loaves to feed five thousand people.  The Lord will make this possible if we rely on him.  First, we must look our insufficiency squarely and then turn humbly to our God.