Why does the Lord, who so often says when performing miracles, "Go and tell no one," perform such an obvious miracle, one that will certainly become known to everyone, and even a second time? After all, in order to reveal the authority of the Son of God over creation, it would have been enough to feed five thousand with five loaves...

The question as posed is off the mark, and this matters. It is not at all evident that the Lord consciously planned this situation. The Greek verb in verse 29, unlike the English "sat down," conveys an unfinished action: "having gone up on the mountain, He was sitting there." And crowds came to Him... What the Lord certainly could not do was refuse them healing and the word of life, and therefore evening came unnoticed during the preaching. He did not create the situation for a miracle deliberately, but once it arose, the miracle itself became the natural continuation of Christ's overflowing mercy.

It is also important for us that the evangelist preserves the story of the second feeding of a multitude, giving us the opportunity to see important similarities in the way the miracle is performed. Unlike the first time, the disciples no longer say skeptically that even two hundred Roman monetary units would not be enough bread for such a crowd; they ask the Teacher, where are we to get so much bread? And Christ takes what is there and gives thanks.

This is the key word of the whole account of this miracle: thanksgiving to God. It is this action that brings a miracle into the world and erases the boundary between earth and heaven.

When we read in the Gospel that this woman was a Canaanite, it does not mean she was "second-rate," or of the wrong origin, or had somehow else failed to please Jesus. We know, having read the Gospel and simply sensing it in our hearts, that Jesus is always ready to help and heal the poor, the sinful, and the rejected. For the evangelist's first listeners it was entirely clear that she was a real pagan: she believed in pagan gods, worshiped them, and offered sacrifices to them. That is exactly why the Lord subjects her faith to such a test - to help her understand why she is turning to Him for help and not to her own gods.

Here a line is drawn between a person's pagan ideas and turning to Jesus, that is, prayer. Prayer to Christ, and to the Father in Christ, is incompatible with paganism. At the same time, paganism does not necessarily mean belief in other gods. It can also be the very ordinary Christian hope not in the one God, but in something else: money, one's own abilities, one's political party, the thought that things will somehow work out, and so on. Paganism is when we live not for God, but for someone or something else, most often simply for ourselves. If we, while being such pagans, want to ask Christ for something and turn to Him in prayer, we will need, together with this Canaanite woman, to pass through a complete revaluation of our faith and understand why we have turned to Christ and not to our idols...

The many healings the Lord performs become something like an illustration of Isaiah's prophecy: "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute shall sing" (Isa. 35:5-6). We see the fulfillment of what the prophet says; we see Christ overcoming terrible diseases, incurable as we understand them. But the Lord does this not only to show that He came to embody what the prophets spoke of. He heals the sick because He loves each person brought to Him. In His eyes, the life of each of us is precious. We see that the Lord does not merely give; the Lord gives in abundance. He not only accomplishes everything the prophets spoke of, He not only heals the sick, He also makes sure that all these people are fed. He is concerned that the difficult trip back will drain their strength and rob them of the joy of healing. And He is not stopped by the fact that the disciples have only the smallest amount with them. And so, by God's mercy, the whole crowd of four thousand is fed, and quite a lot is left over.

We too cannot offer God very much; sometimes we have almost nothing at all, and each of us is immeasurably small beside the Lord. Then we become ashamed - truly, what can we give You, Lord? But the Lord shows us how our smallness can become a source of food and help for our brothers and sisters. Only this will no longer be our strength or our power; it will be the strength of His love, His mercy, and His Spirit.