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This is a deserted place and it is already late;
dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages
and buy food for themselves.
Jesus looked upon the crowd with pity and he cured them. This same motive made him refuse to send them back at once to the world from which they came to him as wounded refugees. He desired to be the center around which they gathered and the source from which they drew their life.
Jesus' disciples did not immediately understand. Lacking world resources they thought to send the crowds back into the world to fend for themselves. They were especially motivated to do this because then they themselves would be off the hook, exonerated of the responsibility for the hunger of the crowds. Had the crowds already begun to grumble, a bit like those Moses led, missing "the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic"? Or where the disciples trying to preempt such a situation by wishing to send them away? Yet Jesus knew of what the power of God was capable, the miraculous providence he had already demonstrated through Moses. There was now no need to return to Egypt, nor even the surrounding cities.
He said to them, "There is no need for them to go away;
give them some food yourselves."
His instructions to his disciples seemed to throw them back on their own limited resources, their own insufficiency. But this was so they could learn the key lesson:
Then he said, "Bring them here to me,"
When we surrender our insufficiency to Jesus he himself transforms it into not just sufficiency, but excess. The point is not that we will always receive an obvious miracle as did the disciples and the crowds. The point is to let nothing prevent us from centering our lives around Jesus himself and ordering all that we have and all that we are, however limited, to him. In the fact of our shortcomings, our flaws, and our weaknesses, we hear him say, "Bring them here to me". And we do not then experience judgment, but the merciful love of the good shepherd.
and he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass.
He will make us to lie down and green pastures. He will set a table before us. Or, as today's psalm has it, he will feed us "with the best of wheat, and with honey from the rock" he will fill us. And sometimes the results will be every bit as supernatural as this miraculous multiplication of loaves. This is because he is God, the one who makes a way where there is no way, for whom nothing is impossible.
Taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven,
he said the blessing, broke the loaves,
and gave them to the disciples,
who in turn gave them to the crowds.
We might be afraid to bring concerns about food to Jesus because we believe they 'aren't spiritual enough'. But when such concerns risk separating us from Jesus he does want us to rely on him. We aren't meant to use or manipulate Jesus to achieve our purely natural goals. However, there is nothing in our lives that is not meant to be given order and direction by the central presence of Our Lord. This is how we begin to live a life of abundance.
They all ate and were satisfied,
and they picked up the fragments left over–
twelve wicker baskets full.
This, after all, was why he came: "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (see John 10:10).
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