Today we have one of the shortest Gospel readings, just three verses. Yet they allow us to see what is happening. The Pharisees took offense at Christ's words that we read yesterday and the day before, and He withdrew from Palestine into the region of Tyre and Sidon. At last He returned from there to the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, and crowds surrounded Him. These people had traveled a long way to gather around Jesus. They carried and led many sick and disabled people with them in order, as the evangelist says, to cast them down at His feet. The Greek verb used here, ρίπτω, means “to throw, toss, cast down, lay.” Carrying these sick people was very hard, and after reaching the place and climbing the mountain where Jesus sat, the people really did set down this heavy burden.

As with the healing of the paralytic, when his friends took apart the roof to lower him to Jesus' feet, here too people's perseverance and labor are necessary for God to perform His healing work. Bearing the burden of another person's illness is an important condition for being able to ask Christ for help.

All the most prominent religious systems—which, it should be noted, arose in warm climates—contain a concept of ritual purity and, conversely, defilement. This is usually understood to mean, quite literally, dirt: sweat, the dust that sticks to it, soot, and so on. All this leaves a person looking unfit to appear not only before the Most High but even before other people. The Old Testament is no exception, although the emphasis in the biblical concept of defilement shifts noticeably toward the moral sphere.

Christ does not reject the very concepts of defilement and cleansing. But, He says, it is not outward and accidental things that make you unworthy of the Almighty’s gaze, but what is done by your own heart. He contrasts the hygiene of the flesh with a kind of hygiene of the spirit: it is not dirt and soot that defile a person—a person, in Abraham’s words, is himself dust and ashes—but the active doing of evil. This is what spoils God’s design for the world; this is what disfigures creation.

It is natural that we, like the Pharisees, stumble over this, because it is far more convenient for us to establish outward cleanliness than to free ourselves from the evil in our own hearts. This is an essential checkpoint in the spiritual life: do you prefer appearance to reality?

But among other things, Jesus Christ’s words in today’s Gospel are an important revelation about the Father. Jesus explains to the disciples and to us that the Almighty looks at the essence of things. If you sincerely try to help your neighbor, it is the desire itself that matters in God’s eyes, not the weakness of its execution, because in that case He Himself makes up for your weakness. But if you do something vile, it remains vile in God’s eyes, however respectable its outward form may be.

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.