Friday April 28
John divides his narrative into seven parts that harmonize with the seven signs that Jesus performed successively. They are extraordinary events that reveal the intimate and mysterious face of Christ. The multiplication of the loaves prepared the revelation of Jesus in the Bread of Life discourse. In fact, the gestures that accompany this miracle, which evokes positive sentiments, are a veiled allusion to the Eucharistic supper: he took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them. The crowd simply looks for the external and sensational and sees Jesus as a royal messiah whose political success is assured.
Sitting on the ground is a symbol of poverty and powerlessness; it means we have no illusions of grandeur. We don’t often sit on the ground nowadays, and almost never at Mass. But when we are at Mass we are spiritually those disciples in today’s reading, sitting on the ground in humility and simplicity, sharing our poverty and (because of it) sharing the Lord’s gift. Miracles seem to happen in situations of scarcity rather than plenty. Where there is plenty there is no need of miracles! Where there is plenty you don’t have to struggle, you don’t have to come up against realities too painfully, you just ease your way through with a check book. But in the story those people had almost nothing. There were only five loaves to feed thousands. John says they were barley loaves. This was the cheapest kind of bread; in fact barley was really considered animal-feed. It is only the very poor who would eat barley loaves.
The miracle is that some kind of abundance came from that poverty. This is not the crude “Gospel: of prosperity” that you sometimes hear from radio and television preachers. No, John would be sickened by such an interpretation. He is not talking about business, but about the Eucharist. Whatever divides us from one another (greed, self-sufficiency, illusions of grandeur) divides us also from God and God’s gift.
Alternative
In this story everything is on a huge scale. Even the setting for the story is immense: it is the first mention of Jesus crossing the sea of Galilee. At the far side is a wide space where “a huge crowd” can gather. Jesus goes up a mountain (this is also the first mention in John’s Gospel: of Jesus climbing a mountain). He feeds the thousands; they not only have plenty, they have twelve baskets of bread left over. It all speaks to us about immensity, about abundance: not the kind of abundance that comes from careful gathering and accounting (the people had come with no food); still less the kind that comes from defrauding one’s neighbors; but the abundance of God’s providence. “Lifting up his eyes, he saw the crowd...” (verse 5). It seems he wants us too to lift up our eyes, and not to live our lives by addition and subtraction when he is able to multiply goodness towards us. God’s abundant providence is a theme of every Mass.