The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes

The Gospel readings will focus on the Eucharist from the Gospel of St. John for the next four weeks. The first of these readings directs our attention to the recognizable story of Jesus feeding the masses with only five barley loaves and two fish.

Analyses from some progressive theologians are quick to frame the miraculous action of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel as not a literal multiplication of the loaves and fish. Instead, they claim, it is a pedagogical tool promoting and encouraging the listener that the action on the hillside was to show how to be charitable to one another. In other words, those present were not without their provisions. They were motivated by Jesus to be charitable to their neighbor.  For them, the true miracle was motivating selfish people to share what they had in the act of selfless charity.

The problem with the progressive theological interpretation is there is no evidence in the reading that what they claim occurred. Quite differently, the Gospel recalls Jesus’ question to Philip to test him. He said, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” Jesus tested Philp because John told us he knew what he would do. Jesus would follow the plan of salvation first revealed to the chosen people of Israel.

The Israelites were released from their slavery in Egypt by the power of God and his miraculous act of dividing the Red Sea, giving the Israelites free passage into the desert. The chosen people soon forgot the benevolence of God and began to grumble, saying they were better fed as slaves in captivity. They lost their trust in God to provide for them. To help their unbelief, God assisted them again by giving them manna in the morning and quail in the evening for them to eat.  

Fast forward to Jesus’ time. People in the Middle East constantly battled to stave off starvation. These people in need needed consistent sustenance, as do all people. When the Apostles asked how they should pray, Jesus taught them the Our Father, which, for this reflection, includes the phrase, “Give us today our daily bread.” The interconnection between food and life is essential. The food we eat literally becomes part of our physical bodies. The multiplication of the loaves and fishes points more to the spiritual reality that we will always be in need without God. A problem answered by God through his gift of the Eucharist.

The multiplication of the loaves and fishes is the precursor to a greater feeding, the Eucharist. Just as the manna and quails were a means by which the Israelites trusted God again, the feeding of the multitude pointed to an even greater feeding. The species of bread and wine miraculously multiplied worldwide as the Body of Christ feeds our spiritual deficiencies.   

The faithful’s reception of the Eucharist is a spiritual reality but follows the same dynamic as ingesting food into our physical body; the food becomes part of our being. Similarly, receiving the Son of God in the Eucharist incorporates the resurrected Jesus into our very beings, Jesus living within us, feeding us spiritually with his body.  

However, the sacrament of the Eucharist is not the end of God’s salvific plan. The end is our destiny in the Kingdom of Heaven. All of our human needs will cease in heaven because we will be in complete union with God for all eternity. We will be eternally “fed” in the union because God will bestow life itself within us.

We now return to our initial criticism of progressive theology, questioning the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish. Those who find it difficult to believe the Son of God could multiply the loaves and the fishes would probably find it even harder to believe that ordinary bread and wine can be transformed into the Body of Christ. And if the Eucharist is in question, how can our spiritual needs ever be satisfied?

But they will. And the point is revealed again in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.