A large crowd followed him,
because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick.
They sought him because they were like sheep without a shepherd and sensed that he at last was the shepherd they desired, although unconsciously. They didn't realize the degree to which they felt troubled and abandoned, lost and alone. They did know something of an unmet need and a desire not yet fulfilled. But they didn't fully understand just what was the missing piece they sought. But Jesus looked upon them all with compassion because he saw all of this in their hearts and because he himself desired to be the fulfillment of all of these latent desires within them. They subconsciously sought a shepherd to lead them. And he had come precisely to be the Good Shepherd who would guide them to everlasting life.
The Jewish feast of Passover was near.
The Evangelist establishes the context as the Passover so that this meal which Jesus provided would never be too far in our minds from the Seder meal in which the sacrificial lamb was eaten. Jesus did not ultimately want to give the crowd merely external things to satisfy their needs. Rather, he wanted to give them himself. In providing this feast he meant to teach the crowd and especially the disciples how to rely on him so that they could accept this gift.
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?"
The world cannot ultimately supply enough for the crowd. The time and resources required to satisfy it ensure that preparations become a huge distraction from the central purpose of life and that any satisfaction is ultimately short lived, leaving the crowd hungry again. Even the best that Moses could offer was still such that it would leave those who ate to hunger again. It was ultimately no better than the water which the Samaritan woman drew from the well, after drinking which she would again soon experience thirst. And yet, for all of the insufficiency of worldly resources to address this problem, Jesus does still ask us to participate and to bring what little we have to him. This will often be challenging because it will seem, as it did to Andrew, to be an exercise in futility.
"There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish;
but what good are these for so many?"
Five barely loaves and two fish weren't much in the face of a crowd so vast. But in the hands of Jesus they became more than enough. To Andrew, this would have felt futile, even to the point of handing them to Jesus, even as he saw Jesus begin to pass them around, until they should have run out but were somehow not exhausted.
Jesus said, "Have the people recline."
Now there was a great deal of grass in that place.
Jesus was the shepherd described in the twenty-third psalm, the one about whom the author wrote, "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures" (see Psalm 23:2). The ancient Israelites had asked, "Can God spread a table in the wilderness?" (see Psalm 78:19). Here we can see the answer was definitively a yes. Perhaps when she was singing her Magnificat this was part of what Mary prophetically envisioned when she sang, "he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty" (see Luke 1:53). Not, of course, that he refused anyone who came to him. The rich were simply those who were too preoccupied with other things to be present, like those in the Parable of the Wedding Feast (see Matthew 22:1-14).
Since Jesus knew that they were going to come and carry him off
to make him king,
he withdrew again to the mountain alone.
Much has been made of the fact that the people would have gratefully welcomed a bread king, one who met their physical needs and desires, rather than the king Jesus desired to be, who would meet the needs of the people at the deeper levels of salvation and eternal life. But perhaps there is a spiritual application to these verses that we sometimes ignore when, in our feigned piety, we distance ourselves from the obviously inappropriate attitude of the crowds. We suggest this because whenever Jesus does something for us that we want it is chiefly then that we celebrate him and praise him. And so it may sometimes be the case that this is why Jesus briefly withdraws from us, in order to teach us that he is meant to be more than a dispenser of our merely human desires. It seems that nearly as soon as we can elevate our hearts to desiring him for his sake, or to praising him for who he is even more than what he has done, he quickly returns. In short, when he feels distant or absent, if we learn to desire him and not only his gifts, we will again quickly experience his presence. Only in this way could a disciple ever be as fortified against persecution as were the early disciples described in Acts:
So they left the presence of the Sanhedrin,
rejoicing that they had been found worthy
to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name.
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