NOTES for Luk 9:12-18
There can hardly be any doubt that the miraculous feeding of the many-thousand-person crowd with five loaves and two fish was yet another of the many manifestations of the Kingdom mentioned in the Gospel. It was a manifestation that neither the people gathered to listen to Jesus nor the apostles expected at all: it is no accident that the disciples asked Jesus whether they should go and buy bread for all the multitude of people around Him. But He acts differently, letting not only the apostles but everyone present see what the Kingdom is, where nature is completely subject to the spirit.
But in order to feel the breath of the Kingdom, one had to enter this Kingdom. Of course, the easiest way to enter it was to hold, figuratively and sometimes even literally, the hand of Jesus. Yet He, as we can see, wants those who are walking to form a spiritual chain whose participants can also hold on to one another. Apparently it is precisely for this purpose that He tells the disciples to seat the people in groups of fifty.
It should be noted that in Judaism the number ten, and numbers that are multiples of ten, generally have special meaning. The point is that ten people, more precisely, ten men who have reached religious adulthood, are enough to form a prayer assembly, to organize a community that will be considered a synagogue. And Jesus is clearly not simply organizing the crowd at random; He is turning it into a fellowship based on separate communities of fifty people each.
This appears to be the very form that, according to the Savior's design, the Kingdom was to take in our transforming but not yet transformed world: it was to become a collection of communities, communities including those who seek the Kingdom and those who have already managed to share in its life. In this way the spiritual chain of those seeking salvation and the Kingdom was to take shape and grow. But it was needed not only to help those seeking the Kingdom, but also so that the Kingdom itself would receive the form of its existence in our transforming world, not yet transformed to the end. A form that would allow it to grow, including ever new people, conquering ever new hearts.