Today's reading, telling of another miracle performed by Jesus, continues the theme begun by the description of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves. The connection between the two accounts is indicated by the evangelist himself, while also noting that the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves was not enough for the apostles to understand something very important about Jesus' person and His ministry (vv. 51-52). Today's passage speaks of an event that happened during the storm that arose when Jesus' disciples, leaving the Teacher on the eastern shore of Lake Gennesaret, set out for the opposite shore, wanting to reach Bethsaida (vv. 45-48). Storms on Lake Gennesaret can be strong enough to endanger relatively small fishing boats, and the apostles, caught on the lake in such a storm, found themselves in a difficult and dangerous situation.

And once again Jesus Himself completely changes the situation, this time by His very appearance (v. 51). Here, as in the description of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, there are also no details or particulars. Jesus simply appears, and the wind immediately dies down, as though He carries with Himself some other, new world with other laws that act in this world too, bringing it under their authority.

In describing what is happening, the evangelist in effect emphasizes that Jesus does not need to do anything for the miracle to take place. It is enough for Him simply to be present where His intervention is needed, and that is enough, because Jesus bears in Himself the Kingdom of God, about which He constantly tells everyone ready to hear Him. He not only tells, but also shows everyone ready to see what this Kingdom is like, where five loaves are enough to feed several thousand people, and where one can walk on water as on firm ground.

In today's Gospel reading there is one small but rather difficult point, namely the words: and He wanted to pass them by. They are so hard to understand that in the parallel, later text of Matthew's Gospel they are omitted. Why did He want to pass them by, if it says that He saw them distressed in rowing, because the wind was against them? That is, He saw this and went to help them; why, then, did He want to pass them by?

The simplest thing in such difficult cases is simply not to notice the words that are unclear, as if they were not there. But not everyone will find such an approach acceptable. The author of the new translation "Good News," Valentina Kuznetsova, offers us one way to solve this problem: it looked as though He wanted to pass by them. That is, everything is very simple: it only appeared so to them.

It is hard for people untrained in philology to judge, but they can analyze different translations into modern languages, comparing the work of different translators. And nowhere else were we able to find the word "appeared." But how can it be that many different translators all omitted the same word in the same way?

Yet we are not at all frightened even by the degree of paradox present in the text without the word "appeared." Do we have the right to judge the Lord's intention? No. Therefore let us not try to solve what He actually wanted to do. There was some meaning in His actions, one now unknown to us. Let us look at the disciples' testimony: He wanted to pass by. Let us look, without any mental labor of our own, at the testimony in all its simplicity (especially since this is, after all, the Gospel according to Mark), and turn to our own life: does it not happen with us that we are in extremely harsh conditions, praying to the Lord for help, yet see only how help passes by us? It does not appear so to us; rather, we simply see with our own eyes that help is coming toward us, but we cannot make use of it.

Yet in the end the disciples were saved. As we too will be saved. Adding the word "appeared," however, shifts everything onto the unstable ground of unclear sensations whose relation to reality is unknown; and one gets the impression, precisely an impression, that such an approach is rather dangerous.

How much food does a person need in order to be satisfied? It is hard to answer this question unambiguously. Everything depends on the person: age, sex, height, physical condition. And on spiritual condition too, for a person is, on the one hand, spirit, and on the other, an animal, and his spiritual condition affects the physical, just as the reverse is also true. What, then, is this spiritual condition? What determines it? It is customary to think that a person's spiritual condition is determined by his own inner efforts, but this is only partly true. In reality, a person's spiritual condition is determined by the dynamic of his relationship with God, where human efforts themselves are certainly important, but God's action, His influence on the person and on human life, is still more important. A person's spiritual condition is determined in the process of his continuous dialogue with God; it depends on how deep and conscious this dialogue is.

Moreover, the same can be said not only of a person's spiritual condition, but also of the reality in which he lives. Today, even in science, one of the key problems is the problem of the observer, and scientists are becoming more and more convinced that any reality is real only insofar as it is observed. The universe can exist only insofar as it has an Observer who created it; this is another aspect of the so-called cosmological proof of the existence of God.

Yet the human being is also an observer, and as such he too creates his reality. It is, of course, real to the extent that the human being himself is real, and the human being is real to the extent that God determines his existence. Here lies the mystery of the Kingdom as a divine-human reality, which is revealed to us from the beginning in the Person of the God-Man. Here too lies the mystery of all the Gospel miracles: they are all divine-human miracles, not only in the sense that the God-Man performs them, but also in the sense that ordinary people participate in these miracles, entering into divine-human reality, entering its space.

In the space of divine-human reality, food is created not only by God, as in our fallen world, which is fallen because fallen humanity does not so much create it together with God as destroy it apart from Him, but also by the human being for whom the food is intended. The person's spiritual condition and the food's physical condition correspond perfectly to each other in the divine-human space of the Kingdom, and then any number of people can be satisfied with any amount of food, just as the evangelist describes.