_THE MIRACLE OF THE LOAVES._
LUKE ix. 1-17.
The Galilean ministry was drawing to a close, for the "great Light"
which had risen over the northern province must now move southward, to
set behind a cross and a grave. Jesus, however, is reluctant to leave
these borders, amid whose hills the greater part of His life has been
spent, and among whose composite population His greatest successes have
been won, without one last effort. Calling together the Twelve, who
hitherto have been Apostles in promise and in name rather than in fact,
He lays His plans before them. Dividing the district into sections, so
as to equalize their labours and prevent any overlapping, He sends them
out in pairs; for in the Divine arithmetic two are more than twice one,
more than the sum of the separate units by all the added force and
strength of fellowship. They are to be the heralds of the new kingdom,
to "preach the kingdom of God," their insignia no outward, visible
badge, but the investiture of authority over all demons, and power over
all diseases. Apostles of the Unseen, servants of the Invisible King,
they must dismiss all worldly cares; they must not even make provision
for their journey, weighting themselves with such _impedimenta_ as
wallets stored with bread or changes of raiment. They must go forth in
an absolute trust in God, thus proving themselves citizens of the
heavenly kingdom, whose gates they open to all who will repent and step
up into them. They may take a staff, for that will help rather than
hinder on the steep mountain paths; but since the King's business
requireth haste, they must not spend their time in the interminable
salutations of the age, nor in going about from house to house; such
changes would only distract, diverting to themselves the thought which
should be centred upon their mission. Should any city not receive them,
they must retire at once, shaking off, as they depart, the very dust
from their feet, as a testimony against them.
Such were the directions, as Jesus dismissed the Twelve, sending them to
reap the Galilean harvest, and at the same time to prepare them for the
wider fields which after the Pentecost would open to them on every side.
It is only by incidental allusions that we learn anything as to the
success of the mission, but when our Evangelist says "they went
throughout the villages, preaching the Gospel and healing everywhere,"
these frequent miracles of healing would imply that they found a
sympathetic and receptive people. Nor were the impulses of the new
movement confined to the lower reaches of society; for even the palace
felt its vibrations, and St. Luke, who seems to have had private means
of information within the Court, possibly through Chuza and Manaen,
pauses to give us a kind of _silhouette_ of the Tetrarch. Herod himself
is perplexed. Like a vane, "that fox" swings round to the varying gusts
of public opinion that come eddying within the palace from the excited
world outside; and as some say that Jesus is Elias, and others "one of
the old prophets," while others aver that He is John himself, risen
from the dead, this last rumour falls upon the ears of Herod like
alarming thunders, making him quiver like an aspen. "And he sought to
see Jesus." The "conscience that makes cowards of us all" had unnerved
him, and he longed by a personal acquaintance with Jesus to waive back
out of his sight the apparition of the murdered prophet. Who Jesus might
be did not much concern Herod. He might be Elias, or one of the old
prophets, anything but John; and so when Herod did see Jesus afterwards,
and saw that He was not the risen Baptist, but the Man of Galilee, his
courage revived, and he gave Jesus into the hands of his cohorts, that
they might mock Him with the faded purple.
What steps Herod took to secure an interview we do not know; but the
verb indicates more than a wish on his part; it implies some plan or
attempt to gratify the wish; and probably it was these advances of
Herod, together with the Apostles' need of rest after the strain and
excitements of their mission, which prompted Jesus to seek a place of
retirement outside the bounds of Antipas. On the northern shore of the
Sea of Galilee, and on the eastern bank of the Jordan, was a second
Bethsaida, or "House of Fish" as the name means, built by Philip, and to
which, in honour of Cæsar's daughter, he gave the surname of "Julias."
The city itself stood on the hills, some three or four miles back from
the shore; while between the city and the lake swept a wide and silent
plain, all untilled, as the New Testament "desert" means, but rich in
pasturage, as the "much grass" of John vi. 10 would show. This still
shore offered, as it seemed, a safe refuge from the exacting and
intrusive crowds of Capernaum, whose constant coming and going left
them no leisure so much as to eat; and bidding them launch the familiar
boat, Jesus and the twelve sail away to the other side. The excited
crowds, however, which followed them to the water's edge, are not so
easily to be shaken off; but guessing the direction of the boat, they
seek to head her off by a quick _detour_ round the shore. And some of
them do; for when the boat grates on the northern shingle some of the
swift-footed ones are already there; while stretching back for miles is
a stream of humanity, of both sexes and of all ages, but all fired with
one purpose. The desert has suddenly grown populous.
And how does Jesus bear this interruption to His plans? Does He chafe at
this intrusion of the people upon His quiet hours? Does He resent their
importunity, calling it impertinence, then driving them from Him with a
whip of sharp words? Not so. Jesus was accustomed to interruptions; they
formed almost the staple of His life. Nor did He repulse one solitary
soul which sought sincerely His mercy, no matter how unseasonable the
hour, as men would read the hours. So now Jesus "received" them, or
"welcomed" them, as it is in the R.V. It is a favourite word with St.
Luke, found in his Gospel more frequently than in the other three
Gospels together. Applied to persons, it means nearly always to receive
as guests, to welcome to hospitality and home. And such is its meaning
here. Jesus takes the place of the host. True, it is a desert place, but
it is a part of the All-Father's world, a room of the Father's house,
carpeted with grass and ablaze with flowers; and Jesus, by His welcome,
transforms the desert into a guest-chamber, where in a new way He keeps
the Passover with His disciples, at the same time entertaining His
thousands of self-bidden guests, giving to them truth, speaking of the
kingdom of God, and giving health, healing "those that had need of
healing."
It was toward evening, "when the day began to wear away," that Jesus
gave to a bright and busy day its crowning benediction. The thought had
already ripened into purpose, in His mind, to spread a table for them in
the wilderness; for how could He, the compassionate One, send them to
their homes famishing and faint? These poor, shepherdless sheep have put
themselves into His care. Their simple, unproviding confidence has made
Him in a sense responsible, and can He disappoint that confidence? It is
true they have been thoughtless and improvident. They have let the
enthusiasm of the hour carry them away, without making any provision of
the necessary food; but even this does not check the flow of the Divine
compassion, for Jesus proceeds to fill up their lack of thought by His
Divine thoughtfulness, and their scarcity with His Divine affluence.
According to St. John, it was Jesus who took the initiative, as He put
the test-question to Philip, "Whence shall we buy bread, that these may
eat?" Philip does not reply to the "whence;" that may stand aside
awhile, as in mathematical language he speaks to the previous question,
which is their ability to buy. "Two hundred pennyworth of bread," he
said, "is not sufficient for them, that every one may take a little." He
does not say how much would be required to satisfy the hunger of the
multitude; his reckoning is not for a feast, but for a taste, to every
one "a little." Nor does he calculate the full cost of even this, but
says simply, "Two hundred pennyworth would _not_ be sufficient."
Evidently, in Philip's mind the two hundred, pence is the known
quantity of the equation, and he works out his calculation from that, as
he proves the impossibility of buying bread for this vast company
anywhere. We may therefore conclude that the two hundred pence
represented the value of the common purse, the purchasing power of the
Apostolic community; and this was a sum altogether inadequate to meet
the cost of providing bread for the multitude. The only alternative, as
far as the disciples see, is to dismiss them, and let them requisition
for themselves; and in a peremptory manner they ask Jesus to "send the
multitude away," reminding Him of what certainly they had no need to
remind Him, that they were here "in a desert place."
The disciples had spoken in their subjunctive, _non possumus_, way; it
is now time for Jesus to speak, which He does, not in interrogatives
longer, but in His imperative, commanding tone: "Give ye them to eat," a
word which throws the disciples back upon themselves in astonishment and
utter helplessness. What can they do? The whole available supply, as
Andrew reports it, is but five barley loaves and two small fishes, which
a lad has brought, possibly for their own refreshment. Five flat loaves
of barley, which was the food of the poorest of the poor, and "two small
fishes," as St. John calls them, throwing a bit of local colouring into
the narrative by his diminutive word--these are the foundation repast,
which Jesus asks to be brought to Himself, that from Himself it may go,
broken and enlarged, to the multitude of guests. Meantime the crowd is
just as large, and perhaps more excited and impatient than before; for
they would not understand these "asides" between the disciples and the
Master, nor could they read as yet His compassionate and benevolent
thought. It would be a pushing, jostling crowd, as these thousands were
massed on the hill-side. Some are gathered in little groups, discussing
the Messiahship; others are clustered round some relative or friend, who
to-day has been wonderfully healed; while others, of the forward sort,
are selfishly elbowing their way to the front. The whole scene is a
kaleidoscope of changing form and colour, a perfect chaos of confusion.
But Jesus speaks again: "Make them sit down in companies;" and those
words, thrown across the seething mass, reduce it to order,
crystallizing it, as it were, into measured and numbered lines. St.
Mark, half-playfully, likens it to a garden, with its _parterres_ of
flowers; and such indeed it was, but it was a garden of the higher cult,
with its variegated beds of humanity, a hundred men broad, and fifty
deep.
When order was secured, and all were in their places, Jesus takes His
place as the host at the head of the extemporized table, and though it
is most frugal fare, He holds the barley loaves heavenward, and lifting
up His eyes, He blesses God, probably in the words of the usual formula,
"Blessed art Thou, Jehovah our God, King of the world, Who causeth to
come forth bread from the earth." Then breaking the bread, He
distributes it among the disciples, bidding them bear it to the people.
It is not a matter of moment as to the exact point where the
supernatural came in, whether it was in the breaking or the
distributing. Somewhere a power which must have been Divine touched the
bread, for the broken pieces strangely grew, enlarging rapidly as they
were minished. It is just possible that we have a clue to the mystery in
the tense of the verb, for the imperfect, which denotes continued
action, would read, "He brake," or "He kept on breaking," from which we
might almost infer that the miracle was coincident with the touch. But
whether so or not, the power was equal to the occasion, and the supply
over and above the largest need, completely satisfying the hunger of the
five thousand men, besides the off-group of women and children, who,
though left out of the enumeration, were within the circle of the
miracle, the remembered and satisfied guests of the Master.
It now remains for us to gather up the meaning and the practical lessons
of the miracle. And first, it reveals to us the Divine pity. When Jesus
called Himself the Son of man it was a title full of deep meaning, and
most appropriate. He was the true, the ideal Humanity, humanity as it
would have been without the warps and discolourations that sin has made,
and within His heart were untold depths of sympathy, the "fellow-feeling
that makes man wondrous kind." To the haughty and the proud He was
stern, lowering upon them with a withering scorn; to the unreal, the
false, the unclean He was severity itself, with lightnings in His looks
and terrible thunders in His "woes;" but for troubled and tired souls He
had nothing but tenderness and gentleness, and a compassion that was
infinite. Even had He not called the weary and heavy-laden to Himself,
they would have sought Him; they would have read the "Come" in the
sunlight of His face. Jesus felt for others a vicarious pain, a
vicarious sorrow, His heart responding to it at once, as the delicately
poised needle responds to the subtle sparks that flash in upon it from
without. So here; He receives the multitude kindly, even though they are
strangers, and though they have thwarted His purpose and broken in upon
His rest, and as this stream of human life flows out to Him His
compassion flows out to them. He commiserates their forlorn condition,
wandering like straying sheep upon the mountains; He gives Himself up to
them, healing all that were sick, assuaging the pain or restoring the
lost sense; while at the same time He ministers to a higher nature,
telling them of the kingdom of God, which had come nigh to them, and
which was theirs if they would surrender themselves to it and obey. Nor
was even this enough to satisfy the promptings of His deep pity, but
all-forgetful of His own weariness, He lengthens out this day of mercy,
staying to minister to their lower, physical wants, as He spreads for
them a table in the wilderness. Verily He was, incarnate, as He is in
His glory, "touched with the feelings of our infirmities."
Again, we see the Divine love of order and arrangement. Nothing was done
until the crowding and confusion had ceased, and even the Divine
beneficence waits until the turbulent mass has become quiet, settled
down into serried lines, the five thousand making two perfect squares.
"Order," it is said, "is Heaven's first law;" but whether the first or
the second, certain it is that Heaven gives us the perfection of order.
It is only in the lawless wills of man that "time is broke, and no
proportion kept." In the heavenly state nothing is out of place or out
of time. All wills there play into each other with such absolute
precision that life itself is a song, a _Gloria in Excelsis_. And how
this is seen in all the works of God! What rhythmic motions are in the
marches of the stars and the processions of the seasons! To everything a
place, to everything a time; such is the unwritten law of the realm of
physics, where Law is supreme, and anarchy is unknown. So in our earthly
lives, on their secular and on their spiritual side alike, order is
time, order is strength, and he who is deficient in this grace should
practise on it the more. Avoid slovenliness; it is a distant relation of
sin itself. Arrange your duties, and do not let them crowd one upon the
other. Set the greater duties, not abreast, but one behind the other,
filling up the spaces with the smaller ones. Do not let things drift, or
your life, built for carrying precious argosies, and accomplishing
something, will break up into pieces, the flotsam and jetsam of a barren
shore. In prayer be orderly. Arrange your desires. Let some come first,
while others stand back in the second or the third row, waiting their
turn. If your relations with your fellows have got a little disarranged,
atwist, seek to readjust the disturbed relation. Oppose what is evil and
mean with all your might; but if no principle is involved, even at the
cost of a little feeling, seek to have things put square. To get things
into a tangle requires no great skill; but he who would be a true
artist, keeping the Divine pattern before him, and ever working towards
it, if not up to it, may reduce the tangled skein to harmony, and like
the Gobelin tapestry-makers, weave a life that is noble and beautiful, a
life on which men will love to gaze.
Again, we see the Divine concern for little things. Abundance always
tempts to extravagance and waste. And so here; the broken remnants of
the repast might have been thrown away as of no account; but Jesus bade
them, "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost;" and we read they
filled with the broken bread, which remained over and above to them that
had eaten, twelve baskets full--and, by the way, the word rendered
"basket" here corresponds with the frugal fare, for, made of willow or
of wicker, it was of the coarsest kind, used only by the poor. What
became of the fragments, which outweighed the original supply, we do not
read; but though they were only the crumbs of the Divine bounty, and
though there was no present use for them, Jesus would not allow them to
be wasted.
But the true meaning of the narrative lies deeper than this. It is a
miracle of a new order, this multiplying of the loaves. In His other
miracles Jesus has wrought on the line of Nature, accelerating her
slower processes, and accomplishing in an instant, by His mere volition,
what by natural causes must have been the work of time, but which in the
specific cases would have been purely impossible, owing to the
enfeeblement of nature by disease. Sight, hearing, even life itself,
come to man through channels purely natural; but Nature never yet has
made bread. She grows the corn, but there her part ends, while Science
must do the rest, first reducing the corn to flour, then kneading it
into dough, and by the burning fires of the oven transmuting the dough
to bread. Why does Jesus here depart from His usual order, creating what
neither nature nor science can produce alone, but which requires their
concurrent forces? Let us see. To Jesus these visible, tangible things
were but the dead keys His hand touched, as He called forth some deeper,
farther-off music, some spiritual truth that by any other method men
would be slow to learn. Of what, then, is this bread of the desert the
emblem? St. John tells us that when the miracle occurred "the Passover
was nigh at hand," and this time-mark helps to explain the overcrowding
into the desert, for probably many of the five thousand were men who
were now on their way to Jerusalem, and who had stayed at Capernaum and
the neighbouring cities for the night. This supposition, too, is
considerably strengthened by the words of the disciples, as they suggest
that they should go and "lodge" in the neighbouring cities and villages,
which word implies that they were not residents of that locality, but
passing strangers. And as Jesus cannot now go up to Jerusalem to the
feast, He gathers the shepherdless thousands about Him, and keeps a sort
of Passover in the open guest-chamber of the mountainside. That such was
the thought of the Master, making it an anterior sacrament, is evident
from the address Jesus gave the following day at Capernaum, in which He
passes, by a natural transition, from the broken bread with which He
satisfied their physical hunger to Himself as the Bread come down from
heaven, the "living Bread" as He called it, which was His flesh. There
is thus a Eucharistic meaning in the miracle of the loaves, and this
northern hill signals in its subtle correspondences on to Jerusalem, to
another hill, where His body was bruised and broken "for our
iniquities," and His blood was poured out, a precious oblation for sin.
And as that Blood was typified by the wine of the first miracle at Cana,
so now Jesus completes the prophetic sacrament by the miraculous
creation of bread from the five seminal loaves, bread which He Himself
has consecrated to the holier use, as the visible emblem of that Body
which was given for us, men, women, and children alike, even for a
redeemed humanity. Cana and the desert-place thus draw near together,
while both look across to Calvary; and as the Church keeps now her
Eucharistic feast, taking from the one the consecrated bread, and from
the other the consecrated wine, she shows forth the Lord's death "till
He come."