In this passage we see the remarkable humanity of Jesus. Being fully human, He understood well how much people need rest. In the Gospel one can find places where Christ withdraws into the mountains to pray and be alone with the Father. Therefore He sends the disciples to a deserted place where they could rest from the crowd, which was so large that they did not even have time to eat. The disciples go away, but the number of people needing help does not become smaller. Seeing these "sheep without a shepherd," the Lord had compassion and Himself remained beside them.

When our strength leaves us and we understand that we urgently need rest and solitude, it can be so frightening to leave those who need us and be alone with the Father. But if we nevertheless decide to do this, the Lord stands in our place and solves the problems for which our own strength is no longer enough.

"You give them something to eat!" These words of Christ are addressed not only to the apostles two thousand years ago, but to each of His disciples in every age. When we ask Him how He intends to care for the people He has created, He says exactly these words to us. Of course, we will not have to perform miracles in His place; He will multiply both the bread and the fish.

But for this our participation is necessary: our readiness to come to the aid of someone in need, to comfort someone who is weeping, to share love with someone who lacks it. All the puzzled questions addressed to God He redirects to us: "You give them something to eat; you be My presence in this world; you become channels of My love..."

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.