NOTES for Joh 6:5-14
The multiplication of the loaves is a great miracle in itself. But for Christians the most important thing, of course, is that this miracle becomes a prototype of a much greater miracle: the sacrament of the Eucharist. Through the centuries and until the end of the world, the Lord gives us Himself as food under the form of Bread, and, as with the multiplication of the loaves, this food is enough for everyone.
Because the Son of God Himself becomes food for people, life not only does not diminish, but increases in the world. This is exactly why the Cross, on which the Lord gives us His life, has become for Christians a synonym of that Tree of Life which the Lord planted in the midst of paradise.
And we also see in this miracle that it is not performed without the participation of the disciples: one way or another, each according to his calling, we all become participants and celebrants of the sacrament. Clergy participate in the Eucharist in one way, the laity in another, but the place of each of us in the Church of Christ depends in a most essential way on this participation. After all, the multiplication of the loaves also required the boy who gave his bread to Christ, and the apostles, and those who ate that blessed bread.
Orthodox theologians of the 20th century, mostly in emigration, created an entire theological movement, new and rather unusual, which received the name Eucharistic ecclesiology. Among these thinkers were Fathers Nikolai Afanasiev and Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff and Cyprian Kern, and many others. As a result of their work, arguments and positions appeared in theological discussions among Christians, perhaps for the first time among us, that we had needed for centuries. What matters most for us in their legacy is the thought that the Church is not simply a hierarchical institution in the Latin style and not simply a community of believers in the spirit of Protestantism. The Church is more an event than a structure, more an action than a state. And this event is the Eucharist.