NOTES for Mar 6:30-44

"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..."

The multiplication of food is spoken of more than once in the Gospel: in a similar situation events develop in a similar way. This repeatedly recurring situation seems to remind us that this is not simply a miracle; this is precisely the Kingdom in all its fullness. What, after all, is a miracle?

From our point of view it is always some disruption of the regular course of events, the intrusion of a nonsystemic factor into the chains of cause and effect that determine the course of events in our world. Meanwhile, in such a situation a question is always appropriate: is the factor we perceive as outside the system not actually part of another system interacting with the one inside which we find ourselves?

Perhaps in many cases a miracle is a miracle only for us, living in our little world separated from God, which seems infinitely large to us, while in God's great world, which we usually do not notice, miracle is the norm of life. In our fallen world, substances are not very obedient to the human will; here they are limited by their own nature. But that is true only here, while in the Kingdom substances are limited and determined only by the action of God's will, and there they are far more pliant to human will when it acts together with God's will.

There, dense water is possible, water that holds a person if he wants to step onto it, and doors that are absolutely permeable, becoming so if a person needs to pass through them, and an increase in the amount of food if what is present is not enough to feed everyone. There water too can become wine if the human will wants to see water as wine and not as water. Of course, what is meant here is the will of a person not wounded by sin, and Jesus is precisely such a Man. He does not simply work miracles; He makes the people who entrust themselves to Him part of the Kingdom, where miracle is the norm.

The fact that the event described by the evangelist is repeated again in an analogous situation testifies that what stands before us is not simply a repeated miracle performed by Jesus again and again. What stands before us is participation in another, new world, where the norm is also different, where what is possible in our fallen world only as an exception, as a miracle, is always possible. Thus Jesus accustoms those who followed Him to another, new norm: the norm of the Kingdom.

The event described in today's reading has always raised many questions, and many commentators and preachers have reflected and reasoned about it, trying to understand what actually happened then in the wilderness. Usually, when setting out on a journey for several days, travelers naturally took a supply of food with them. But this time the decision was evidently made so hastily that there was no time to get ready (v. 33). Judging by the fact that the disciples later had to cross to the opposite shore of the Lake of Gennesaret in order to get to Bethsaida (Mark 6:45), the events described took place on its eastern shore, in Transjordan, which in Gospel times was not a desert in the literal sense but a dry steppe. The eastern shore of the Lake of Gennesaret was a deserted place, and the nearest villages where food could be bought were not close. That is when the miracle took place, the one usually called the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves. Nothing definite can be said about exactly how and at what moment it happened, since the Gospel text gives no details that would reveal, so to speak, the "mechanism" of the miracle. Only the result is described: five loaves and two fish were enough for several thousand people, and more than enough (vv. 41-44). The only explanation can be considered the blessing of the food by Jesus mentioned in the account (v. 41), without which no meal was possible for believing Jews, since during the blessing prayer those sitting down at the table call upon God, inviting Him to join them and bless the table and the food. In describing the miracle, the evangelist draws attention to the fact that Jesus' blessing was not an ordinary blessing, but one that allowed those present to enter directly into the Kingdom of God, where even the laws of nature do not work as they do in the ordinary world. Therefore hunger has no place there, and every hungry person is satisfied.

During close communion with Jesus, one can never say with certainty where the event is taking place: in the world not yet transformed or in the Kingdom. So it is in the account of feeding the multitude of people listening to Him with five loaves and two fish. Of course, the laws of the untransformed world do not allow this. But on the other hand, we are still dealing with ordinary people who are only listening to Jesus, and it is not yet known which of them will be ready to follow Him.

How, then, did they find themselves in the Kingdom? The answer to this question can only be the mention of the bread-breaking performed by the Savior. Bread-breaking is an ancient Jewish ritual whose roots go back at least to the exilic period, and perhaps to still earlier times.

This ritual was apparently always domestic, originally familial, and later, after the appearance of religious brotherhoods, both familial and fraternal. In every period it was understood as a continuation of the temple sacrifice, as its household dimension, complementing the communal dimension.

The original meaning of every sacrifice, even a pagan one, not to mention one in the worship of Yahweh, came down to communion with God. It was always and everywhere understood as a shared meal of God, or, among pagans, of the gods, and human beings. The faithful prepared a meal and invited God to the table so that He Himself would sanctify it and bless those gathered. This was so during temple assemblies, and it was also so during household gatherings. And now the One who has brought the fullness of the Kingdom into the world performs the bread-breaking.

It is no surprise that all who take part in it become, at least for the duration of the gathering, citizens of the Kingdom. With Christ, the presence of God is revealed in all possible fullness, and the Kingdom becomes the most certain reality. Of course, this participation is only the first step, only the beginning of the path. But the experience of it is very important, since it gives everyone who has lived through it the opportunity to understand what the Kingdom is, not in words but in deed, and to make a decision based not on someone else's words but on one's own experience.

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.

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.