by James Martin
Mostly. For after his great sign Jesus intuits that the crowd is eager to “make him king.” The crowd understands that they have seen something extraordinary, but they don’t understand that the miracle is a sign of Jesus’s love, not an invitation to shower him with honors or set up a political system with him as its head.
So Jesus withdraws from them to the mountain. The Greek is haunting: eis to oros autos monos. To the mountain himself alone.
EVEN NEWCOMERS TO THE New Testament will easily appreciate the rich theology of this passage. Old Testament parallels abound, which the Jewish people in Jesus’s time surely appreciated more readily than do current-day audiences. Just as the Israelites, for example, were fed “in the wilderness” with water from the rock and with manna, Jesus feeds his followers in “a deserted place.”20 The feeding also parallels the nourishment that Jesus gives to his disciples in the form of his teaching. It prefigures the distribution of the bread and wine at the Last Supper. The bread symbolizes Jesus himself: nourishing, satisfying, available to all. “I am the bread of life,” as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.”21 In his series Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI offers an extended meditation on the “bread motif” in the Gospels, linking Moses and manna to Jesus and the loaves and fishes and paralleling the giving of the Torah with Jesus’s total gift of himself.22
Food betokens a host of other spiritual meanings. It is satisfying, as is God’s love. The sharing of food is a communal event, underlining the community aspect of faith. “Table fellowship” was an important aspect of Jesus’s ministry. Some of our happiest hours and most intimate moments are spent at the table with family and friends. Moreover, for many Jews, one major image of the world to come is of a magnificent banquet, where a meal is shared with the patriarchs.23 Food is also about giving, sacrificing, and sharing; someone must labor to grow it and expend time and effort to prepare it. Food requires work and sacrifice. Someone also needs to do the feeding, in this case Christ. Overall, it is a gift.
Bread and fish, like the bread and wine at the Last Supper, are also simple elements. In his parables Jesus takes everyday images to teach verbally. At the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes he takes everyday foodstuffs to teach physically. Once again, God comes to us in ways that we can understand. Jesus uses physical objects—bread, fish, wine, water—in ways that do not go against nature, but rather perfect nature, taking what is already here and creating something new. He uses food to show us how the world should be: everyone filled and satisfied.
Despite Jesus’s desire to help his friends understand the reign of God, it must have been close to impossible for the disciples to make sense of things—even if they recalled the Old Testament passages and grasped the link between being fed and being taught. Witnessing the seemingly bottomless baskets of bread and fish would have been astounding. Seeing how he had fed so many with so little would have been confusing. The miracles reveal the identity of Jesus, they teach us something, but they cannot be fully “understood.” In the Synoptics, the miracles are often referred to as dynameis, “acts of power” that so astonish onlookers that they frequently exclaim, “We have never seen anything like this.”
In the Gospel of John they are signs that point to something greater, beyond the crowd’s—or our—comprehension. These symbolic actions inaugurate new meaning, something never before experienced. Lohfink phrases it elegantly when he says that the signs “create space for the reign of God and allow it to come.”24
GOD TAKES SMALL THINGS and makes them great. That was clear at Tabgha. It’s also evident in our daily lives and in our prayer. This was illustrated for me just a few years ago in, of all places, a hotel conference room.
A group of Catholic school principals and teachers had invited me to direct a day-long retreat for their group, just outside of Boston. In the afternoon I led them through a “guided meditation” using some techniques of Ignatian contemplation, which encourage us to imagine ourselves in a Scripture scene.
For our meditation I used John’s account of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, since it was the Gospel reading for the coming Sunday. First I read the passage aloud, so that people were familiar with it, and then I asked a few questions based on the five senses as a way of sparking people’s imaginations. Sight: What does the crowd look like? What does Jesus look like? Hearing: Is the crowd grumbling about hunger? Can you hear the waves breaking on the shore? Feeling: How does it feel to sit on the green grass? Are you hungry? Taste: What does the bread taste like? The fish? And smell: Can you smell the fresh air coming off the sea?
Simple questions like these can help a person picture the scene. Then I read the passage again and invited them to envision themselves on the shore of the sea as participants, as part of the crowd. Ignatian contemplation doesn’t require you to do anything bizarre, merely that you imagine and trust that God can work through that imagining.
After thirty minutes of silence I asked the group to open their eyes and invited them to share what they experienced in their prayer. Many were drawn to parts of the story they had never noticed before. One young teacher noticed that the miracle was a communal event, taking place in the midst of the group, and she linked that to the communal aspect of faith, which she could sometimes overlook. Experiences of God come not just in quiet moments of solitary prayer, but together with others.
The crowd in Tabgha may be the largest group with whom Jesus spends time, which underlines the communal aspect of his ministry and serves as a reminder that religion is not simply a solitary affair. A solipsistic God-and-me approach can lead to a skewed spirituality, closed off from the nourishment that a group can provide.
One woman’s comments remained with me. “I never knew that there was a little boy there!” Frankly, until I had read the passage aloud that day, neither had I. But there it is in John: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.”
“I’ve been a Catholic my whole life, and I must have heard that passage dozens of times during Mass,” she said. “But I never noticed him.” Her attention was drawn to the boy with the loaves and fishes, and she saw for the first time that a child provided the basis for Jesus’s miracle. So we discussed what she thought God might be asking her to notice. Perhaps it was an invitation to notice, in a new way, the children with whom she worked. Or to see how God can make something great from something small. Or to pay attention to blessings she had overlooked in her life, as she had previously overlooked the boy.
Who knows where this boy came from or why he brought Jesus his food. It seems improbable that he would have brought all that food for himself to eat. Perhaps his mother and father, standing in the crowd, overheard Philip complaining about the lack of food and said to the boy, “Give our food to the Master, son.” Perhaps the parents were members of Jesus’s larger group of followers. (Scholars posit a series of expanding groups: the Twelve, the disciples, and then the followers.) Perhaps among these were a couple and their son.
It was probably easy to overlook the young boy in the middle of the throng on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The disciples apparently didn’t bother to ask his name; or, if they asked, they didn’t bother to pass it along to the evangelists; and if they did pass it along, the evangelists didn’t bother to record it. After the boy steps on the world stage and offers his bread and fish to Jesus, he recedes into obscurity, leaving behind only a miracle.
One of the more common experiences of those who work in spiritual ministries is hearing a grateful person tell you how something you barely remember doing changed his or her life. How something you believed to be small became something big for someone else. Sometimes in a homily I make a brief aside about, say, suffering, and afterward a parishioner will say through tears, “That was so helpful, Father. It’s just what I needed to hear today.” It may have been the right time for that person to hear—a kairos moment—so she is naturally more open to the message. But those experiences are also exampl
es of God’s multiplying what few loaves and fishes we can offer, whether on the grass at Tabgha or inside a church in New York City.
We are invited to trust that the few loaves and fishes we bring will provide nourishment, even if we cannot see the results. After working for two years in Kenya with refugees, helping them start small businesses with modest financial grants, I could see many successes in the refugees’ lives: flourishing businesses, families lifted out of poverty, men and women given new hope. Many times, though, the refugees would gradually lose touch with our office, and I had to trust that whatever help we had furnished—spiritual or financial—was somehow bearing fruit.
We also may feel that our efforts are inadequate. We try to help our friends and family, but nothing seems to work. We try to fix our children’s lives, but it doesn’t seem to help. We try to seek forgiveness, but others are still resentful. We try to encourage our friends, but they still seem disconsolate. We try to love, but it doesn’t seem enough.
But Jesus accepts what we give, blesses it, breaks it open, and magnifies it. Often in ways that we don’t see or cannot see. Or will not be able to see in this lifetime. Who knows what a kind word does? Who knows what a single act of charity will do? Sometimes the smallest word or gesture can change a life. A few years ago I told a Jesuit priest how what he had said to me on retreat helped me through a tough time. When I repeated what he had told me—word for word—he laughed and said he didn’t even remember saying it. Yet his loaves and fishes had been multiplied.
Other times we are privileged to witness this abundance. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and spiritual writer, recently told me a story. He had received a letter from a man he had met only once, decades before, and who wanted to visit him at his home in New Mexico. “What you said changed my life,” he wrote, “and I’d like to say thank you.” Richard wondered what he had said all those years ago. The man drove a great distance, and when he arrived, Richard escorted this now-middle-aged man into the parlor.
“When I was in my twenties,” the man explained, “I was in a crisis and didn’t know what I wanted to do in life, and do you remember what you said to me?”
Richard did not.
“You said, ‘You do not need to know.’ Every time I get confused, I remind myself of that.” He told Richard how that phrase had become his life’s mantra in all business situations and relationships and in marriage. It had made him a happy man, he said.
Richard laughed when he told me that story. “And I don’t even remember saying that!”
God can take any small offering that we make—a kind word, a brief visit to a hospital, a quick apology, a short thank-you note or e-mail, a smile—and multiply it.
GOD DOES THE SAME in our spiritual lives as well, providing enormous nourishment from what seems like a fleeting event, a passing comment from a friend, a brief sentence in a book, or a few words in Scripture.
Often I’ve read a word or phrase in the Bible that offers consolation entirely out of proportion to what might be expected. During one retreat, I read the story of the Rich Young Man, in the Gospel of Mark, and something caught my eye.25 In the story Jesus meets a wealthy man who asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus reminds the man of his obligation to follow the Law and then lists the Commandments. The man, portrayed by Mark as a good person, tells Jesus that he has kept these commandments “since my youth.”
I had heard this story dozens of times. In fact it was one of the Gospel passages that prompted me to enter a religious order. But when I read the next line, it was as if I had never seen it before. Jesus, I knew, was about to tell the man to give up all his possessions in order to be able to follow Jesus.
It is a difficult story for many Christians, because it is often interpreted as meaning that they must divest themselves of all they own—at least the best disciples must. But even in Jesus’s time, not all of his followers were called to do this. Martha and Mary, after all, entertain Jesus in their house. As I see it, Jesus is asking the man to let go of whatever prevents him from hearing God’s voice. It is an invitation to simplicity, but an even greater one to freedom.
So I knew this story and was ready for Jesus to utter his famous next line: “You lack one thing; go sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
But before Jesus opens his mouth, Mark writes, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said . . .”
Jesus “loved him”? Where did that come from? I had heard this Gospel story dozens of times. How had I missed that line? I scoured the retreat house library for a Greek New Testament, opened up to the Gospel of Mark, located the passage and was shocked to read: Iēsous emblepsas autō ēgapēsen auton: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.”
Those three words—Jesus loved him—led to several hours of meditation. They altered the familiar story and thus altered how I saw Jesus. No longer was it the exacting Jesus demanding perfection; it was the loving Jesus offering freedom. Now I could hear him utter those words with infinite compassion for the man. Those three words changed the way I saw Jesus and his commands. I didn’t even think of them as commands any longer, but rather as loving invitations. For Jesus always acts out of love. I couldn’t believe how something so small—three little words—had provided such abundance in prayer.
Later in the story of the Rich Young Man, Jesus explicitly offers a promise of abundance: for everyone who leaves behind something, as the rich young man was called to do, he or she will receive “a hundredfold.” More abundance.
This may be one reason so many of Jesus’s parables are about things growing. The tiny mustard seed, so minuscule that it is hard to see with the naked eye, grows into a bush so large—sometimes as high as six feet on the shores of the Sea of Galilee—that birds can build their nests in it. A sower scatters seed, and when some of it falls onto fertile ground its crop yield is a hundredfold.26 And the real work of multiplication is done quietly and mysteriously by God. How amazing it must have been for the farmers at the time, without our understanding of biology, to see the seed germinate, push forth its green shoots from the earth, grow leaves, and finally produce its yield, all under God’s providential care.
Lohfink also suggests that the small seed, almost hidden from view, shows “not only the unstoppable growth of the reign of God but also the shockingly minute and hidden character of its beginning.” The seed grows even as we cannot see God’s work upon it. And the only response to this marvelous phenomenon is trust.27 Overall, the reign of God grows.
ALL WE NEED TO do is bring what little we have, generously and unashamedly. At Tabgha, the disciples seemed embarrassed that there was not enough for the crowd and were about to send everyone away hungry. But Jesus knew that whatever there is, God can make more of it. But first we are asked to offer our loaves and fishes, no matter how inadequate they may seem. Only then can God accomplish the kind of true miracle that occurred at Tabgha.
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THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE LOAVES AND FISHES
Mark 6:35–44
(See also Matthew 14:13–21; Luke 9:12–17; John 6:1–15)
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When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” When they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled; and they took up twe
lve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.
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CHAPTER 16
Bethesda
“There is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes.”
RELIGIOUS LEGENDS SOMETIMES HAVE a strange way of turning out to be true. The best-known example may be the discovery of what is now almost universally accepted as the tomb of St. Peter. It was reputed to lie directly underneath the great dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, though many scholars had judged this location doubtful and most likely inauthentic.
It was believed that the Galilean fisherman ended his earthly life in the great city in AD 64 after being martyred by the Roman authorities. St. Peter is said to have asked to be crucified upside down, considering himself unworthy of ending his life as Jesus had. The basilica in his honor was also known to have been built atop a site—the Vatican Hill—occupied by a church since the time of Constantine in the fourth century. But whether the actual remains of Peter lay there was an open question.
In the 1930s and 1940s, however, a series of archaeological finds under St. Peter’s Basilica led to the discovery of the tomb of a man in his late sixties, near graffiti that included the word Petrus. Over time, the Vatican examined sufficient evidence to conclude that the bones of St. Peter had been located. The collection of the man’s bones was largely intact, except for the feet, which were missing—not surprising given that the easiest way to remove a body crucified upside down would have been to chop off the feet first.1
Locations reputed to be only “legendary” or based on “popular piety” often turn out to have a basis in fact.
Why is this? Well, it’s human nature to remember important places and to pass these memories along to descendants. This is particularly the case in the Holy Land. In Jesus’s day, people didn’t move around much; a family may have stayed in the same town for generations. Thus, if Christians in those early centuries visited Nazareth or Bethlehem and asked about important sites in Jesus’s life, it’s not unreasonable to think that his extended family (or their children or grandchildren) would not only have been in the area, but would also have remembered, say, the location of his carpentry shop. To take another example, Peter’s descendants would have surely known the location of his house in Capernaum. These locations would have been treasured by pilgrims and knowledge of them passed down to later generations. That doesn’t mean that every site in the Holy Land is the precise spot at which a Gospel story occurred, but often these locations may be more accurate than we imagine.