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1. Feeding the Crowd (14:13–21)
¹³When Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there by boat to an uninhabited area
to be alone.¹ But when the crowds heard they left their towns and followed him
on foot. ¹⁴So when he went out he saw a great crowd, and his heart went out² to
them, and he healed those among them who were ill. ¹⁵As evening came on his
disciples came to him and said, “This place is uninhabited and it’s getting late.³
Send the crowds away so that they can go into the villages and buy themselves
something to eat.” ¹ But Jesus replied, “They don’t need to go away; you give
them something to eat.” ¹⁷They responded, “All we have here are five loaves and
two fish.” ¹⁸He said, “Bring them here to me.”¹ And when he had given orders
for the crowds to sit down on the grass, he took the five loaves and the two fish,
looked up to heaven, said a blessing⁴ and broke them; then he gave the loaves to
the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. ² And they all ate and
had as much as they wanted.⁵ The disciples collected twelve baskets full of the
left-overs from the broken loaves. ²¹Those who ate were something like five
thousand men, apart from women and children.
We move from Antipas’ lavish but degenerate feast to one with a simpler menu
but a more wholesome atmosphere. This, the first of two related feeding miracles
in Matthew (cf. 15:32–38), is recorded in all four gospels, with an impressive
similarity in all the essentials, both in the numbers of people, loaves, fish and
baskets and in the sequence of verbs which describe Jesus’ action.
The consistency in reporting the numbers reflects the way oral stories are passed
on, with the key elements maintained even when the surrounding narrative is
differently framed. In this case there is the further consideration of comparison
with the second feeding miracle, where the numbers are different (and again
Matthew and Mark agree on them). The point was clearly significant, as both
sets of numbers are taken up in the discussion in the boat in 16:9–10—and in
Mark’s fuller version the numbers are repeated in greater detail.
The significance of the verbs used becomes clear when the five Synoptic feeding
narratives are compared with the three Synoptic accounts of Jesus’ eucharistic
action at the Last Supper. In all eight pericopes we find the same sequence:
“took … blessed/gave thanks … broke … gave.”⁷ The same sequence of verbs
occurs also in Luke 24:30 where Jesus “presides” at the meal at Emmaus. This
can hardly be accidental, and suggests that the evangelists framed their accounts
of the feeding (and of the Emmaus story) to reflect the wording of the eucharistic
formula with which they and their readers were by now familiar. The feeding of
the crowd is therefore presented as a “foretaste” of the central act of worship of
the emergent Christian community, even though the menu was not quite the
same.⁸ And since the Last Supper was itself a foretaste of the messianic banquet
(26:29), that dimension too can legitimately be discerned in this story.
At the time, of course, this eucharistic nuance could not have been known. The
disciples (and the crowd, if they were aware of how the food had been produced)
would have been more likely to understand the event in terms of OT precedent.
An obvious parallel would be with the miracle of Elisha, who fed a hundred
people from twenty loaves, with some left over (2 Kgs 4:42–44); there are verbal
echoes of the Elisha story in this pericope, and the nature of Jesus’ miracle is the
same, though the scale is vastly higher. But another precedent which might have
been felt to be even more significant in view of Matthew’s emphasis on the place
being (literally) “wilderness” (vv. 13, 15) is that of Moses, under whose
leadership a far greater number of people were miraculously fed in the
wilderness not just on one occasion but for an extended period (Exod 16); the
manna was given to supply their need of “bread” (Exod 16:4, 8, 12). The parallel
is made explicit in John 6:25–34. Moses, however, is unlike Jesus in that he is
not himself presented as performing a miracle, but simply as spokesman for
God; he describes the manna as “the bread that the Lord has given you to eat”
(Exod 16:15; cf. Ps 78:25; 105:40). There is evidence that some Jews expected a
return of manna in the messianic age (2 Bar. 29:8; Qoh. Rab. 1:28; cf. Rev
2:17).¹
A belief that the event reveals Jesus as a new Moses, leader of God’s people in
the wilderness, may be a factor in the “political” enthusiasm which John
associates with this event (John 6:14–15). Matthew does not directly draw
attention to that aspect of the incident, though it is possible to interpret the
urgency in the verb “compelled” in v. 22 as indicating that the disciples were
infected with the unhealthy popular enthusiasm so that Jesus wanted to get them
away from the scene before he himself dealt with the crowd (see comments
below on vv. 22–23). For another suggested indication of a political flavor to the
incident see below on v. 21.
But whatever the OT or other nuances which might have been perceived either
by the disciples or the crowd at the time or by Matthew and his readers in
recalling the event, the incident stands out primarily as a spectacular miracle in
its own right, yet another staggering display of Jesus’ “authority” over nature as
well as over human conditions. The gospel writers give no encouragement to
naturalistic attempts to “explain” it by Jesus’ persuading those in the crowd who
had brought food to share it. Whatever exactly the disciples are supposed to have
learned from the two incidents (see on 16:9–10), it was not at the level of
psychological manipulation! The further suggestion that only a token amount
was actually received by each person is ruled out by Matthew’s wording in v. 20.
And by recording another such miracle shortly afterwards, Matthew and Mark
make it clear that this was no fluke.
The miraculous provision of bread here is in striking contrast with Jesus’ refusal
to do so in 4:3–4. But, as we noted, the temptation then was for the newly
declared “son of God” to satisfy his own hunger by the self-centered use of
miraculous power. Here that power is used for the benefit of others.¹¹ The
contrast between the two situations confirms our understanding that the
temptations in ch. 4 were not concerned with Jesus’ messianic agenda, aiming
for popular approval by miraculous means, but with his own relationship with
his Father. Even here there is in any case no indication that the crowd were even
aware of how the bread was provided and no crowd reaction is mentioned; see
on v. 20.
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