Isaiah 55:1-3; Romans 8:35,37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

Food and drink are essential for survival. They are not just sources of pleasure but also pure sustenance. They are so essential that the lack of it, the excess of it or the wrong quality of it can be harmful for human beings, and, in fact, for all creation.
The prophet Isaiah proclaims the message of God, inviting everyone to come and be fed by God who doesn’t charge for the food and drink. What God provides doesn’t have a value that can be weighed against human money.
The word ‘listen’ is used again as in the previous Sundays: hear and act as God would like you to do. Hear God’s invitation and come. God’s food doesn’t just satisfy the body, but also the soul.
When God made a covenant with David, he made a contract that lasts for generations. God loves us and cares for us. God keeps the promise that our souls will live.

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul comforts the people who feared of being separated from God. The same God who promised David to be with us and to always love us, sent us His Son to be with us. The love of Jesus Christ will never leave us, even when we might feel abandoned.
With the Christians in Paul’s time facing persecution and troubles, Jesus Christ becomes a kind of bridge over troubled waters.
Eating, drinking and clothing are human worries, but no power can come between us and Jesus.

The feeding of a multitude is mentioned also in the Gospel according to Mark and to Luke. While the details of the account slightly differ, the feeding is often seen as a call to discipleship of followers and part of the Church’s mission to gather the hungry for the breaking of the bread. Jesus is the ‘bread of life’.

In the Gospel according to Matthew, we learn that Jesus was trying to withdraw from the crowds and took a boat on the water together with his closest followers. Maybe the water reminded Jesus of his baptism by John. He wanted to be alone and wanted to mourn the death of his cousin John the Baptist.
God had sent Jesus to be with us and to live among us. Jesus’ desire of being on his own in this time of mourning is very human. When we are sad and grieving, we tend to send others away. We might want to sit quietly in nature, with friends – or in a church. However, God also wants us to be in the community. God sent Jesus to be a shepherd to the people, and to look after them. While Jesus wanted to withdraw from the world, the people were following him in the search for guidance, support and healing. This need of the living people had to take precedence over the dead.
Jesus has compassion with the people and returns from his escape on the boat. He is already expected at the shores and starts healing the people who come to him with their burdens. Jesus attends to their needs generously. Some of the people would have walked far to reach Jesus. They wanted to be with him, listen to him and be healed.
It says that 5,000 men had come – not counting women and children, which means that the number of people might have exceeded 20,000 people. If only one in ten of them needed individual physical healing, attending to all of them would take three days.

After Jesus had been attending to the people for several hours, the disciples realised that it was getting late and that the crowd would have to be fed. Up to this point, the disciples seem to have been spectators. When they see that the crowds make no attempt to leave, they don’t ask Jesus if they can send them away. Rather, they ask Jesus as their leader and the man the crowd wants to be with to tell the people go to the nearest villages and purchase food to satisfy the material needs of the body.
Considering that Jesus was healing the sick and they might have been standing in a queue, leaving for the villages would also mean losing the spot in the queue and potentially even missing the chance to be healed.
The disciples would have been shocked when Jesus replies: ‘There is no need for them to go: give them something to eat yourselves.’ Jesus wants the disciples to act, to get out of their position of spectators and mere followers of Jesus. True listeners – people who listen and do God’s work. Where is their compassion for the people? Do they feel privileged to be disciples rather than seeing the discipleship as a constant challenge?
Maybe the disciples were not realising how much the people wanted to be with Jesus but rather would have preferred being with Jesus on their own. The people were staying – and maybe some were even still arriving. If anybody was hungry or thirsty, wouldn’t they have left already and gone to the next village to purchase food?

When Jesus suggests feeding the crowd at the shore rather than sending them away, the disciples show him five loaves and two fish which might have been just enough to provide for Jesus and the disciples. Surprising the disciples again, Jesus doesn’t question the quantity. He makes the people sit down and, for all to see, he asks God for the blessing of the food, then breaks the bread according to Jewish tradition and asks his disciples to distribute the food to everyone. The disciples are sent on a mission, and 5,000 men, as well as women and children are being fed by five loaves of bread that were broken and shared. A miracle.
The people have come for spiritual nourishment and healing, and have also found material sustenance. All are fed, and the scraps collected after all are satisfied is much more than they started with. The disciples collect 12 baskets of scraps – bread and fish. The scattered fragments become a counted fullness.

No scraps are left behind. The people were thirsty, had come to the water to be with Jesus, and they were nourished through God’s blessings.

BM