Jesus summoned the disciples and said,
“My heart is moved with pity for the crowd,
because they have been with me now for three days
and have nothing to eat.
The heart of Jesus was one of mercy, moved with pity for the crowds who were hungry for his true teaching. Yet this mercy did not ignore the physicality and full humanity of those who had been with him for three days without eating. To say they were now hungry strikes of understatement. The mercy of Jesus was broad and wide enough to embrace the crowd at every level of their being. The spiritual nourishment came first and was the priority. But it did not end there. Practical concerns were also valid.
If I send them away hungry to their homes,
they will collapse on the way,
and some of them have come a great distance.
They needed both spiritual and physical food in order to avoid both a moral and a literal collapse apart from Jesus. They had come to him and gathered around him for that which he could uniquely give, that for which they hungered but for which they could not satisfy their own hunger. Jesus delighted especially to feed this hunger. These were individuals who, staying and listening for three days, were seeking first the Kingdom. Jesus desired to ensure that received all else, the things his heavenly Father knew they required.
His disciples answered him, “Where can anyone get enough bread
to satisfy them here in this deserted place?”
One might wonder, after Jesus had fed the five-thousand, why could the disciples not at least guess at the solution? But that incident was in Jewish territory, and the disciples themselves had been the ones to suggest to Jesus that he address the hunger of the crowds. Here in Gentile territory Jesus himself was the one to propose it. This suggests that the disciples might have imagined a more limited set of possibilities for the this particular crowd compared to the one in Galilee. Their faith may still have had a blind spot. They may not have seen or wished to see that Jesus desired to feed not only the twelve tribes but also the seven Gentile nations of the land of Canaan, which the seven baskets represented, and which was symbolically all Gentile nations.
In multiplying bread a second time Jesus not only showed his desire to feed all the nations of the earth, none excluded, but also began to train his disciples that their own outreach would need to be toward every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation. One might say that this was, among other things, an early form of diversity training.
Then, taking the seven loaves he gave thanks, broke them,
and gave them to his disciples to distribute,
and they distributed them to the crowd.
The disciples were being prepared for their mission. That mission would call them to make the bread of God's word and the bread of the most holy Eucharist available to all nations, making no distinction. As always, the disciples were being called to embrace the very heart that Jesus had for his people. And we, no less than they, are called to have that same compassion. We too are called to guard against blind spots in our mercy to others.
Even having seen Jesus do miraculous things in the past, as we have, we must be careful to not slide into complacency that forgets his power, the unlimited possibilities of faith that each and every moment contains. We might imagine it easy to believe that Jesus would feed a second group if he fed a first. But in reality we focus on those times in between when the meals were provided by normal means. When this is our focus the supernatural stories of his gracious intervention seem to us more like legends than reality. This limits our ability to believe in what Jesus might want to do next, when compassion again stirs his heart. If the disciples had such a hard time learning the lesson of the multiplication of the loves we should realize that the multiplication of the Eucharistic bread contains a lesson which is just as easy to lose if we fail to treasure it.
Jeroboam established a feast in the eighth month
on the fifteenth day of the month
to duplicate in Bethel the pilgrimage feast of Judah,
with sacrifices to the calves he had made;
If we recognize the compassion we receive from Jesus in the Eucharist we will refuse to accept substitutes, idols such as those which Jeroboam setup for Israel. Those idols divided the tribes whereas Jesus desired to unite the nations around himself. Jeroboam created fake feasts to distract his people from the one place where they were meant to be fed. Jesus invites us to partake instead of a heavenly feast, of which earthly images are the barest of shadows.
May we so treasure the great blessings we have from our Lord that even the most compelling idols, that our world present to us for worship, will lose persuasive power.
They made a calf in Horeb
and adored a molten image;
They exchanged their glory
for the image of a grass-eating bullock.
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