My heart is moved with pity for the crowd,
for they have been with me now for three days
and have nothing to eat.
The crowd was so transfixed by Jesus, as he healed those who came to him, so busy glorifying the God of Israel, that they stayed three days with him without eating. Jesus did not only address himself to the extreme needs of the blind, the lame, the mute, and the deformed. That this crowd was hungry was not minutia to be overlooked. It was another consequence of sin to be corrected.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground (see Genesis 3:19).
Jesus transformed the place where he was to be a little more like Eden would have been. Rather than making the crowds leave him, as Adam and Even once had to leave the presence of God in Eden to forage with great difficulty in the fallen world, Jesus himself provided a way by which the crowds can remain with him in rest and yet eat and be satisfied.
He ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground.
Jesus did not entirely take away the work. There was still some modest amount that disciples were able to find and distribute. But Jesus made it work when it would not have been enough.
To feed his people was definitely a priority for Jesus, almost surprisingly so. We might think that he would be less interested in matters like food and drink, since the Kingdom does not consist in food and drink (see Romans 14:17), but it was precisely at this point, even after healing the afflicted that his heart was "moved with pity for the crowd". Why? Perhaps because food was always meant to be about communion between people and between them and God. But the consequence of sin, the work associated with the procurement of our needs, the sweat of the individual brow, meant that it was always an isolating affair to one degree or another, since people now had to fend for themselves or risk starving. Jesus wanted to bring food back to the original place it had in God's design.
On this mountain the LORD of hosts
will provide for all peoples
A feast of rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.
When we think about the Eucharist we may often wonder that Jesus chose food and drink as the vehicle of his own presence. But when we see how food had otherwise been a cause of alienation and pain it makes more sense. It is more than the simple pleasure of food or the merely natural desire to be free of the pains of hunger that he addressed by doing so. It was a deeper spiritual hunger for communion, for abiding in his presence, for not needing to leave to secure the needs of the secular world, that his presence in the Eucharist was meant to begin to heal.
It is therefore no accident that the vision of our eternal destiny described in Revelation is called the banquet of the lamb (see Revelation 19:9), nor the close association of this banquet with the removal of the "veil that veils all peoples" and the final destruction of death forever.
You spread the table before me
in the sight of my foes;
All this is to say, let us turn to the Lord who desires to feed us. We need no longer do anything apart from him. We may still need to bring our loaves and fishes. But he himself will feed our hearts in such a way that we can remain together, remain in the restful pastures of the shepherd who loves us.
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