August 3, 2025 • 17 mins
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Matthew 14: 13-21 - 'The feeding of the five thousand.'
Catechism of the Catholic Church Paragraphs:
- 1335 (in 'The Signs of Bread and Wine') - The miracles of the multiplication of the loaves, when the Lord says the blessing, breaks and distributes the loaves through his disciples to feed the multitude, prefigure the superabundance of this unique bread of his Eucharist (abbreviated).
- 1329 (in 'What is this Sacrament called'?) - The Breaking of Bread, because Jesus used this rite, part of a Jewish meal when as master of the table he blessed and distributed the bread, above all at the Last Supper (abbreviated).
Got a Bible question? Send an email to logicalbiblestudy@gmail.com, and it will be answered in an upcoming episode!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:10):
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Logical Bible
Study, the Catholic podcast that's all about taking a look
at the scriptures from an academic perspective, in
particular, trying to discern the literal sense of Scripture.
What does it mean on the most fundamental level?
What is the author trying to communicate to their audience
today? We're looking at Matthew chapter
(00:31):
14, verses 13 to 21. So we'll read the text, it's
quite a well known one, and thenwe'll try and pull it apart a
bit. What is going on with the words
of this text? What do they mean in their
original context? How should we take them?
So Matthew chapter 14, verses 13to 21.
(00:51):
When Jesus received the news of John the Baptist's death, he
withdrew by boat to a lonely place where they could be by
themselves. But the people heard of this,
and leaving the towns went afterhim on foot.
So as he stepped ashore he saw alarge crowd and he took pity on
them and healed their sick. When evening came, the disciples
(01:14):
went to him and said this is a lonely place and the time has
slipped by. So send the people away and they
can go to the villages to buy themselves some food, Jesus
replied. There is no need for them to go
give them something to eat yourselves.
But they answered. All we have with us is 5 loaves
(01:36):
and two fish. Bring them here to me, he said.
He gave orders that the people were to sit down on the grass.
Then he took the five loaves, and the two fish raised his eyes
to heaven and said the blessing and breaking the loaves handed
them to his disciples, who gave them to the crowds.
(01:57):
They all ate as much as they wanted, and they collected the
scraps, remaining 12 baskets full.
Those who ate numbered about 5000 men, to say nothing of
women and children. So this is the famous feeding of
the 5000 story, one which is quite well known amongst
Christians because it's in all four Gospels, which means it's
(02:20):
an important one. If all four gospel authors felt
the need to include it when theydidn't have to, then there must
be something fundamentally important about it, and we'll
talk about what that might be. So what's the context?
Jesus has just found out that John the Baptist has been
killed. That was mentioned at the start
of chapter 14, that word has gotten out that John the Baptist
has been killed. Verse 13, when Jesus heard the
(02:42):
news of John the Baptist's death, he withdrew.
Now this is interesting because earlier this is exactly what
Jesus did when he heard that John the Baptist was in prison.
Apparently, when Jesus heard that John the Baptist was
imprisoned, that was his motivation to withdraw into the
desert. Often we miss that.
So that's a really interesting connection.
(03:02):
Something about Jesus hearing about John the Baptist fate
makes Jesus withdraw. So it seems that Jesus feels
that he has a strong connection to John and he's quite deeply
saddened by his fate. So it says he goes by boat to a
lonely place where they could beby themselves.
So Jesus and the apostles have been preaching by the Sea of
(03:23):
Galilee to the crowds. We would have seen that in the
previous chapters. And Jesus now wants some time
alone with the apostles. So they get in the boat and on
the Sea of Galilee, they go across to the other side of the
of the sea. And they're hoping that people
won't follow them. They're hoping that they can go
to a place where they can just spend some time alone and
recharge. But the people heard of this and
(03:44):
leaving the towns went after himon foot.
The Sea of Galilee is not that big.
So lots of people hear about theJesus has crossed to the other
side, and they actually sort of beat him there.
They run around the edge of the lake to wait for Jesus so that
by the time he gets there, they're already there.
Verse 14. So as he stepped ashore, he saw
(04:05):
a large crowd. Now we know from a bit later in
this passage that's possibly around 20,000 people here.
It's a huge crowd. And by this point Jesus had
become a very well known as a healer.
And the teacher, Mark's version,gives us a bit more information.
Here it says that Jesus looked at them and saw that they're
like a sheep without a shepherd.And so here it says he took pity
(04:29):
or compassion on them and healedtheir sick.
So think about Jesus here. He could have been annoyed
because Jesus had. It says Jesus had tried to get
some time alone here. That was the plan.
But now all these people are coming to him, and yet he still
chooses to show compassion. He could have been angry, but
he's not. This word here for compassion
(04:49):
connotes this kind of deeply felt passion in the gut.
Jesus is deeply moved. Even though he's tired, even
though he wants some time alone,he chooses to heal their sick.
Verse 15. When evening came, the apostles
went to him and said this is a lonely place and the time has
slipped by. So it's getting late basically.
And the apostles, thinking logically, they realize that if
(05:12):
it gets any later, the crowds won't be able to get to the
markets in time in the nearby villages, and apparently not so
nearby because it's a lonely place.
So they figure it's time to wrapit up.
It's they need to be enough timefor the crowds to get back to
the villages and get some food. So they recommend to Jesus that
he should send the crowds away. That's what they say to him.
(05:34):
So send the people away and theycan go to the villages to buy
themselves some food. Now the disciples aren't being
selfish, they're not being cruelhere, They're actually being
quite practical to them. It seems like the logical thing
to do, it's time for the people to go so they can get some food
for themselves. But Jesus says in verse 16,
there is no need for them to go give them something to eat
(05:54):
yourselves. Now the disciples have probably
already thought of this and theyrealized they didn't have enough
food. And Jesus, It can seem like
Jesus is being quite abrupt here, but think about it.
Jesus knows what's about to happen.
So when he says give them something to eat yourselves,
he's actually being serious because that's literally what
their disciples are about to do.They're about to feed the
(06:17):
people. So Jesus knows that that's what
there is about to happen, and infact that's what they're
expected to do, even though the disciples themselves probably
hadn't even thought of that possibility.
Verse 17. This is the disciples.
All we have with us is 5 loaves and two fish.
So the disciples might have had their own supplies here, but
(06:38):
John's Gospel tells us that there was a boy that also
brought them some loaves and fish here, and they counted up.
They've got 5 loaves and two fish, and that's not enough to
feed even Jesus and his disciples.
So it's barely anything. That's the point.
Verse 18. Jesus says bring them here to
me. And then he gave orders that the
people were to sit down on the grass.
(07:00):
Now this is a fairly big task for the disciples to manage
15,000 to 20,000 people to get them to sit down on the grass.
So this could have taken a while.
Mark's Gospel said that they're sitting down in groups of 50 and
100, and Jesus specifically tells them not to just stand in
groups, but to sit on the ground.
And the word there is actually recline.
So Jesus is getting them ready for a meal.
(07:22):
That's the meal position. If you think about the parallels
here to the Old Testament, the wandering in the wilderness,
when the the people of Israel were lacking in food, God
provided them with manner. So just as God's people received
bread in the wilderness, now in a sense God's new people are
receiving bread in this lonely place in the wilderness.
(07:43):
There's probably a deliberate parallel here.
So Jesus took the five loaves and the two fish raised his eyes
to heaven and said the blessing.Now we probably brush past those
words because we hear them at Mass all the time.
But in that culture was quite common in a Jewish meal for the
man presiding to give a blessingand then break the food.
(08:03):
Jesus didn't invent this. It was a Jewish thing to bless
the meal and then break it, and we know from the writings of the
essays at Komran that they had aparticular emphasis on breaking
bread. Now for Matthew's readers, this
language of Jesus raising his eyes to heaven and saying the
blessing would have called to mind the events of the Last
(08:24):
Supper because as we'll see, thesame verbs are used as what's
used in the Last Supper. So it says here that Jesus
takes, blesses, breaks, and thengives.
It's the same words that are used at the Last Supper, takes
bread, blesses it, breaks it andgives it.
Think about there's more parallels here as well.
(08:44):
Both events occur at nighttime, both involve people reclining.
The recipients of the bread are the same.
The apostles receive the bread both here and at the Last
Supper, and then the apostles are to feed others with that
food afterwards. So clearly, Matthew and I would
say probably most of the gospel authors see the multiplication
of the bread here as clearly foreshadowing the Eucharist.
(09:07):
It's an anticipatory sign of theEucharist, just as here with the
5000. The bread is distributed to the
multitudes of God's people. The Eucharist as well is
designed to be distributed to the multitudes of God's people.
So clearly there's a parallel here, and I suspect that's why
all four Gospels included even John.
John doesn't have sort of the the Last Supper blessing of the
(09:31):
bread. It doesn't really have a
Eucharistic narrative as such atthe Last Supper, but even John
includes it, and John has other things to say about the
Eucharist as well. So all four Gospel authors seem
to see this particular miracle as telling us something very
powerful about Jesus, probably in connection with the
Eucharist. Now the language here where it
(09:52):
says Jesus broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, here
it actually says more literally,he continued to give.
He kept on giving to the disciples, which is interesting.
It's like Jesus that more food just keeps coming out of the
basket as Jesus gives it to the disciples.
Interestingly, he chooses to usethe apostles to distribute the
bread, which points to the intermediary role in the
(10:14):
priesthood. He might have missed that.
Jesus doesn't just distribute tothe crowd himself, he gets the
apostles to do it. So he wants to use the apostles.
And of course we believe as Catholics that he made them the
first priests, so that makes sense.
Verse 20, they all ate as much as they wanted.
Now that's quite miraculous. No one went hungry.
(10:35):
Just as in Exodus 1618, with themanner in the wilderness, the
Israelites had enough to eat here.
The 5000 or in fact the 20,000 people have enough bread to eat,
even though it started with onlyfive loaves and two fishes.
So it's quite incredible. And the apostles collect the
scraps, remaining 12 baskets full.
So for such a big meal like this, the disciples would want
(10:57):
to collect any scraps that they could use as leftovers for
future meals. I think we're supposed to take
away from this the fact that 12 baskets are full.
That's more than they even started with in the 1st place.
And that's what's so interestingabout this.
But there might be some more significance to the number 12 as
well. Some scholars have thought that
maybe this indicates the 12 thatGod will provide for the 12
(11:20):
tribes of Israel in terms of theold covenant.
Or maybe it indicates that Jesusis gathering a new Israel for
the new covenant. Maybe it symbolizes that Jesus
is going to call all the 12 tribes himself and none of them
will be lost. They'll all be kept.
So there's all these interestingconnections to the 12 tribes
here. It probably also has a link to
the 12 apostles as well. Who would be the people who
(11:43):
would feed God's new Israel? Now notice that this miracle
story doesn't tell us exactly when the miracle occurs.
We don't know when the bread multiplied.
At some point, the bread miraculously multiplies.
It seems to be, although it's not 100% clear, but it does seem
to be that it's in the process of Jesus passing the bread to
(12:05):
the apostles. That's the point at which it
just keeps multiplying. And then the apostles just keep
distributing whatever Jesus gives them.
Now obviously this supersedes all the known laws of physics.
The bread just keeps on coming. This is not supposed to be
taken, as you sometimes might hear this interpretation as
though it's a sharing miracle that everyone just shared what
(12:26):
they had. And isn't that incredible that
God's people are so loving to share with each other and that's
what we're supposed to take awayfrom it?
Clearly that goes against what the text is saying.
If you read the Gospels, this and other miracles are clearly
presented as though Jesus is actually doing something
miraculous that could not be explained without God.
So this is an actual miracle. That's what the text says on the
(12:49):
literal level. Now notice that Jesus doesn't
just make the bread out of thin air.
He takes what they already have and multiplies it.
And there's probably some theological significance there.
Jesus takes what we have and multiplies it.
This isn't the first time in theBible that bread is multiplied.
We often think it is, but it's actually not.
There's a few places, and the most prominent one is when
(13:10):
Elijah the prophet in Second Kings chapter four.
He multiplies 20 loaves of breadfor 100 men and still had some
left over, and that was miraculous in the Old Testament.
So Jesus does the same thing here, except he started with
fewer loaves and he fed a largercrowd.
So to Matthew's audience, who would have been quite familiar
(13:31):
with the Old Testament, they probably would have compared
Jesus to Elijah and realized that Jesus is even greater than
him. Verse 21, Those who had eaten
the loaves numbered 5000 men. So sometimes in that culture,
particularly if you're dealing with a very large numbers of
people, when they were doing a head count, instead of numbering
everyone because that would taketoo long, they would just count
(13:53):
only the men and that would represent the entire family.
And then the idea was you would just multiply that by three or
four as a rough estimate of how many people there were total.
So if there's 5000 men and we say that every man brought his
wife and two kids, probably dealing with about 20,000 people
here, possibly more. We see the same numbering system
(14:16):
in Exodus and Numbers when they are trying to number take a
census of the people in Israel. So that's the end of today's
section. The next section, verses 22 to
36 of Matthew, chapter 14. It's read on a different weekday
depending on the liturgical year.
Usually it's the same readings on weekdays regardless of
(14:36):
whether it's year A/B or C, but this is one of the few readings
that does change depending on which particular year it is.
So verses 22 to 36 is read on Monday of week 18 of Ordinary
Time in year A. But in year B&C, that reading is
read on Tuesday of week 18 in Ordinary Time.
And they do that because Matthewyear A is the year of Matthew.
(15:00):
That's when it's read on Sundays.
And so in year A they want the next passage to follow on from
this passage, which is read on Sundays of year A.
So hopefully that makes sense. You'll either hear it on Monday
of week 18 or Tuesday of week 18.
Now let's turn to the Catechism.Where do we see this passage
discussed? It's discussed in two places,
(15:22):
and they're both in connection with the Eucharist.
So clearly the Church sees a parallel here with the Eucharist
paragraph 1335. The miracles of the
multiplication of the loaves. When the Lord says the blessing
breaks and distributes the loaves through His disciples to
feed the multitude, prefigure the Super abundance of this
unique bread of His Eucharist. So that's what the Catechism
(15:46):
says and that's exactly what scholars have pointed out here.
There's clearly literary parallels.
This is prefiguring the greater Eucharist.
And then paragraph 1329, this isa short section about what are
the different names of the sacrament of the Eucharist.
It says one of the names of the sacrament is the breaking of
bread, because Jesus used this right part of a Jewish meal when
(16:09):
as master of the table, he blessed and distributed the
bread above all at the Last Supper.
So it was Jesus custom to often bless and break bread.
And we see him do this a couple of times in his ministry, and
this is obviously one of the most important ones, and that
prefigures the Last Supper. So a famous passage, the feeding
(16:30):
of the 5000. Hopefully you've learned
something new. There's always new things to
discover when you dive into the text of the Gospels,
particularly the Gospel of Matthew.
There's so much fascinating background there.
If you think others would benefit from this, then I'd ask
you to please share this with someone new so the podcast can
grow. More and more people can hear
about God's word and grow closerto God and his Kingdom.
(16:52):
Thank you. And we'll continue in Matthew
tomorrow.
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Logical Bible
Study, the Catholic podcast that's all about taking a look
at the scriptures from an academic perspective, in
particular, trying to discern the literal sense of Scripture.
What does it mean on the most fundamental level?
What is the author trying to communicate to their audience
today? We're looking at Matthew chapter
(00:31):
14, verses 13 to 21. So we'll read the text, it's
quite a well known one, and thenwe'll try and pull it apart a
bit. What is going on with the words
of this text? What do they mean in their
original context? How should we take them?
So Matthew chapter 14, verses 13to 21.
(00:51):
When Jesus received the news of John the Baptist's death, he
withdrew by boat to a lonely place where they could be by
themselves. But the people heard of this,
and leaving the towns went afterhim on foot.
So as he stepped ashore he saw alarge crowd and he took pity on
them and healed their sick. When evening came, the disciples
(01:14):
went to him and said this is a lonely place and the time has
slipped by. So send the people away and they
can go to the villages to buy themselves some food, Jesus
replied. There is no need for them to go
give them something to eat yourselves.
But they answered. All we have with us is 5 loaves
(01:36):
and two fish. Bring them here to me, he said.
He gave orders that the people were to sit down on the grass.
Then he took the five loaves, and the two fish raised his eyes
to heaven and said the blessing and breaking the loaves handed
them to his disciples, who gave them to the crowds.
(01:57):
They all ate as much as they wanted, and they collected the
scraps, remaining 12 baskets full.
Those who ate numbered about 5000 men, to say nothing of
women and children. So this is the famous feeding of
the 5000 story, one which is quite well known amongst
Christians because it's in all four Gospels, which means it's
(02:20):
an important one. If all four gospel authors felt
the need to include it when theydidn't have to, then there must
be something fundamentally important about it, and we'll
talk about what that might be. So what's the context?
Jesus has just found out that John the Baptist has been
killed. That was mentioned at the start
of chapter 14, that word has gotten out that John the Baptist
has been killed. Verse 13, when Jesus heard the
(02:42):
news of John the Baptist's death, he withdrew.
Now this is interesting because earlier this is exactly what
Jesus did when he heard that John the Baptist was in prison.
Apparently, when Jesus heard that John the Baptist was
imprisoned, that was his motivation to withdraw into the
desert. Often we miss that.
So that's a really interesting connection.
(03:02):
Something about Jesus hearing about John the Baptist fate
makes Jesus withdraw. So it seems that Jesus feels
that he has a strong connection to John and he's quite deeply
saddened by his fate. So it says he goes by boat to a
lonely place where they could beby themselves.
So Jesus and the apostles have been preaching by the Sea of
(03:23):
Galilee to the crowds. We would have seen that in the
previous chapters. And Jesus now wants some time
alone with the apostles. So they get in the boat and on
the Sea of Galilee, they go across to the other side of the
of the sea. And they're hoping that people
won't follow them. They're hoping that they can go
to a place where they can just spend some time alone and
recharge. But the people heard of this and
(03:44):
leaving the towns went after himon foot.
The Sea of Galilee is not that big.
So lots of people hear about theJesus has crossed to the other
side, and they actually sort of beat him there.
They run around the edge of the lake to wait for Jesus so that
by the time he gets there, they're already there.
Verse 14. So as he stepped ashore, he saw
(04:05):
a large crowd. Now we know from a bit later in
this passage that's possibly around 20,000 people here.
It's a huge crowd. And by this point Jesus had
become a very well known as a healer.
And the teacher, Mark's version,gives us a bit more information.
Here it says that Jesus looked at them and saw that they're
like a sheep without a shepherd.And so here it says he took pity
(04:29):
or compassion on them and healedtheir sick.
So think about Jesus here. He could have been annoyed
because Jesus had. It says Jesus had tried to get
some time alone here. That was the plan.
But now all these people are coming to him, and yet he still
chooses to show compassion. He could have been angry, but
he's not. This word here for compassion
(04:49):
connotes this kind of deeply felt passion in the gut.
Jesus is deeply moved. Even though he's tired, even
though he wants some time alone,he chooses to heal their sick.
Verse 15. When evening came, the apostles
went to him and said this is a lonely place and the time has
slipped by. So it's getting late basically.
And the apostles, thinking logically, they realize that if
(05:12):
it gets any later, the crowds won't be able to get to the
markets in time in the nearby villages, and apparently not so
nearby because it's a lonely place.
So they figure it's time to wrapit up.
It's they need to be enough timefor the crowds to get back to
the villages and get some food. So they recommend to Jesus that
he should send the crowds away. That's what they say to him.
(05:34):
So send the people away and theycan go to the villages to buy
themselves some food. Now the disciples aren't being
selfish, they're not being cruelhere, They're actually being
quite practical to them. It seems like the logical thing
to do, it's time for the people to go so they can get some food
for themselves. But Jesus says in verse 16,
there is no need for them to go give them something to eat
(05:54):
yourselves. Now the disciples have probably
already thought of this and theyrealized they didn't have enough
food. And Jesus, It can seem like
Jesus is being quite abrupt here, but think about it.
Jesus knows what's about to happen.
So when he says give them something to eat yourselves,
he's actually being serious because that's literally what
their disciples are about to do.They're about to feed the
(06:17):
people. So Jesus knows that that's what
there is about to happen, and infact that's what they're
expected to do, even though the disciples themselves probably
hadn't even thought of that possibility.
Verse 17. This is the disciples.
All we have with us is 5 loaves and two fish.
So the disciples might have had their own supplies here, but
(06:38):
John's Gospel tells us that there was a boy that also
brought them some loaves and fish here, and they counted up.
They've got 5 loaves and two fish, and that's not enough to
feed even Jesus and his disciples.
So it's barely anything. That's the point.
Verse 18. Jesus says bring them here to
me. And then he gave orders that the
people were to sit down on the grass.
(07:00):
Now this is a fairly big task for the disciples to manage
15,000 to 20,000 people to get them to sit down on the grass.
So this could have taken a while.
Mark's Gospel said that they're sitting down in groups of 50 and
100, and Jesus specifically tells them not to just stand in
groups, but to sit on the ground.
And the word there is actually recline.
So Jesus is getting them ready for a meal.
(07:22):
That's the meal position. If you think about the parallels
here to the Old Testament, the wandering in the wilderness,
when the the people of Israel were lacking in food, God
provided them with manner. So just as God's people received
bread in the wilderness, now in a sense God's new people are
receiving bread in this lonely place in the wilderness.
(07:43):
There's probably a deliberate parallel here.
So Jesus took the five loaves and the two fish raised his eyes
to heaven and said the blessing.Now we probably brush past those
words because we hear them at Mass all the time.
But in that culture was quite common in a Jewish meal for the
man presiding to give a blessingand then break the food.
(08:03):
Jesus didn't invent this. It was a Jewish thing to bless
the meal and then break it, and we know from the writings of the
essays at Komran that they had aparticular emphasis on breaking
bread. Now for Matthew's readers, this
language of Jesus raising his eyes to heaven and saying the
blessing would have called to mind the events of the Last
(08:24):
Supper because as we'll see, thesame verbs are used as what's
used in the Last Supper. So it says here that Jesus
takes, blesses, breaks, and thengives.
It's the same words that are used at the Last Supper, takes
bread, blesses it, breaks it andgives it.
Think about there's more parallels here as well.
(08:44):
Both events occur at nighttime, both involve people reclining.
The recipients of the bread are the same.
The apostles receive the bread both here and at the Last
Supper, and then the apostles are to feed others with that
food afterwards. So clearly, Matthew and I would
say probably most of the gospel authors see the multiplication
of the bread here as clearly foreshadowing the Eucharist.
(09:07):
It's an anticipatory sign of theEucharist, just as here with the
5000. The bread is distributed to the
multitudes of God's people. The Eucharist as well is
designed to be distributed to the multitudes of God's people.
So clearly there's a parallel here, and I suspect that's why
all four Gospels included even John.
John doesn't have sort of the the Last Supper blessing of the
(09:31):
bread. It doesn't really have a
Eucharistic narrative as such atthe Last Supper, but even John
includes it, and John has other things to say about the
Eucharist as well. So all four Gospel authors seem
to see this particular miracle as telling us something very
powerful about Jesus, probably in connection with the
Eucharist. Now the language here where it
(09:52):
says Jesus broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, here
it actually says more literally,he continued to give.
He kept on giving to the disciples, which is interesting.
It's like Jesus that more food just keeps coming out of the
basket as Jesus gives it to the disciples.
Interestingly, he chooses to usethe apostles to distribute the
bread, which points to the intermediary role in the
(10:14):
priesthood. He might have missed that.
Jesus doesn't just distribute tothe crowd himself, he gets the
apostles to do it. So he wants to use the apostles.
And of course we believe as Catholics that he made them the
first priests, so that makes sense.
Verse 20, they all ate as much as they wanted.
Now that's quite miraculous. No one went hungry.
(10:35):
Just as in Exodus 1618, with themanner in the wilderness, the
Israelites had enough to eat here.
The 5000 or in fact the 20,000 people have enough bread to eat,
even though it started with onlyfive loaves and two fishes.
So it's quite incredible. And the apostles collect the
scraps, remaining 12 baskets full.
So for such a big meal like this, the disciples would want
(10:57):
to collect any scraps that they could use as leftovers for
future meals. I think we're supposed to take
away from this the fact that 12 baskets are full.
That's more than they even started with in the 1st place.
And that's what's so interestingabout this.
But there might be some more significance to the number 12 as
well. Some scholars have thought that
maybe this indicates the 12 thatGod will provide for the 12
(11:20):
tribes of Israel in terms of theold covenant.
Or maybe it indicates that Jesusis gathering a new Israel for
the new covenant. Maybe it symbolizes that Jesus
is going to call all the 12 tribes himself and none of them
will be lost. They'll all be kept.
So there's all these interestingconnections to the 12 tribes
here. It probably also has a link to
the 12 apostles as well. Who would be the people who
(11:43):
would feed God's new Israel? Now notice that this miracle
story doesn't tell us exactly when the miracle occurs.
We don't know when the bread multiplied.
At some point, the bread miraculously multiplies.
It seems to be, although it's not 100% clear, but it does seem
to be that it's in the process of Jesus passing the bread to
(12:05):
the apostles. That's the point at which it
just keeps multiplying. And then the apostles just keep
distributing whatever Jesus gives them.
Now obviously this supersedes all the known laws of physics.
The bread just keeps on coming. This is not supposed to be
taken, as you sometimes might hear this interpretation as
though it's a sharing miracle that everyone just shared what
(12:26):
they had. And isn't that incredible that
God's people are so loving to share with each other and that's
what we're supposed to take awayfrom it?
Clearly that goes against what the text is saying.
If you read the Gospels, this and other miracles are clearly
presented as though Jesus is actually doing something
miraculous that could not be explained without God.
So this is an actual miracle. That's what the text says on the
(12:49):
literal level. Now notice that Jesus doesn't
just make the bread out of thin air.
He takes what they already have and multiplies it.
And there's probably some theological significance there.
Jesus takes what we have and multiplies it.
This isn't the first time in theBible that bread is multiplied.
We often think it is, but it's actually not.
There's a few places, and the most prominent one is when
(13:10):
Elijah the prophet in Second Kings chapter four.
He multiplies 20 loaves of breadfor 100 men and still had some
left over, and that was miraculous in the Old Testament.
So Jesus does the same thing here, except he started with
fewer loaves and he fed a largercrowd.
So to Matthew's audience, who would have been quite familiar
(13:31):
with the Old Testament, they probably would have compared
Jesus to Elijah and realized that Jesus is even greater than
him. Verse 21, Those who had eaten
the loaves numbered 5000 men. So sometimes in that culture,
particularly if you're dealing with a very large numbers of
people, when they were doing a head count, instead of numbering
everyone because that would taketoo long, they would just count
(13:53):
only the men and that would represent the entire family.
And then the idea was you would just multiply that by three or
four as a rough estimate of how many people there were total.
So if there's 5000 men and we say that every man brought his
wife and two kids, probably dealing with about 20,000 people
here, possibly more. We see the same numbering system
(14:16):
in Exodus and Numbers when they are trying to number take a
census of the people in Israel. So that's the end of today's
section. The next section, verses 22 to
36 of Matthew, chapter 14. It's read on a different weekday
depending on the liturgical year.
Usually it's the same readings on weekdays regardless of
(14:36):
whether it's year A/B or C, but this is one of the few readings
that does change depending on which particular year it is.
So verses 22 to 36 is read on Monday of week 18 of Ordinary
Time in year A. But in year B&C, that reading is
read on Tuesday of week 18 in Ordinary Time.
And they do that because Matthewyear A is the year of Matthew.
(15:00):
That's when it's read on Sundays.
And so in year A they want the next passage to follow on from
this passage, which is read on Sundays of year A.
So hopefully that makes sense. You'll either hear it on Monday
of week 18 or Tuesday of week 18.
Now let's turn to the Catechism.Where do we see this passage
discussed? It's discussed in two places,
(15:22):
and they're both in connection with the Eucharist.
So clearly the Church sees a parallel here with the Eucharist
paragraph 1335. The miracles of the
multiplication of the loaves. When the Lord says the blessing
breaks and distributes the loaves through His disciples to
feed the multitude, prefigure the Super abundance of this
unique bread of His Eucharist. So that's what the Catechism
(15:46):
says and that's exactly what scholars have pointed out here.
There's clearly literary parallels.
This is prefiguring the greater Eucharist.
And then paragraph 1329, this isa short section about what are
the different names of the sacrament of the Eucharist.
It says one of the names of the sacrament is the breaking of
bread, because Jesus used this right part of a Jewish meal when
(16:09):
as master of the table, he blessed and distributed the
bread above all at the Last Supper.
So it was Jesus custom to often bless and break bread.
And we see him do this a couple of times in his ministry, and
this is obviously one of the most important ones, and that
prefigures the Last Supper. So a famous passage, the feeding
(16:30):
of the 5000. Hopefully you've learned
something new. There's always new things to
discover when you dive into the text of the Gospels,
particularly the Gospel of Matthew.
There's so much fascinating background there.
If you think others would benefit from this, then I'd ask
you to please share this with someone new so the podcast can
grow. More and more people can hear
about God's word and grow closerto God and his Kingdom.
(16:52):
Thank you. And we'll continue in Matthew
tomorrow.
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