NOTES for Mar 6:30-44
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.