NOTES for Mat 14:1-21

Christ gathers immense crowds of people and feeds them with bread. There is enough bread for everyone, and each of the apostles even manages to collect a whole basket of what remains. And this is the same Christ who said that a person lives “not by bread alone” and refused to engage in social reform. To understand this event, we must turn to its biblical parallels in which large numbers of people are fed: the manna that God gave Israel in the wilderness, and also the prophecies that people will be filled with bread when God’s Kingdom triumphs. For the first readers and hearers of the Gospel, the allusion to these sacred texts meant that God’s Kingdom was already being realized in Jesus, that in Him God had already come to humanity. This account was undoubtedly associated for them with their own experience of divine life, in which they participated through the breaking of bread: thanksgiving, blessing, breaking and distributing the bread, and gathering what remained were all actions involved in celebrating the Eucharistic meal. In that meal, as in this account, fundamental human concepts—bread, life, and God—are forever bound to the person of Jesus.