Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
2^nd of August 2026

Matthew 14:13-21

‘Those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.’ The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle told in all four of the gospels. It was obviously of the greatest importance to the early church. But, as the author of the Gospel according to Matthew reminds us, the church has been misnaming it down the centuries. In the Gospel according to Mark, we are told that ‘Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.’ (Mark 6:44) Luke writes, ‘For there were about five thousand men.’ (Luke 9:14) But Matthew makes explicit what is implicit in the other gospels; these men have not sought Jesus out alone. Women and children accompany them. Those being fed by the five loaves and two fish are some 20,000 to 35,000 people.

These tens of thousands of people have come to seek Jesus in a time of terror. Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee and Perea under the Romans, has just had John the Baptist killed, and John’s disciples have claimed and buried his body and come to tell Jesus of his death. (Matthew 14:3-12) This is why Jesus is seeking time alone with God in a deserted place. John’s murder is a forerunner of his own death; he knows that this is what happens to prophets who annoy the authorities. Matthew tells us that Herod himself made the connection between John and Jesus: ‘At that time Herod the ruler heard reports about Jesus, and he said to his servants, “This is John the Baptist; he has been raised from the dead, and for this reason these powers are at work in him.”’ (Matthew 14:1-2) Later, as Jesus approaches his death, he will lament, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’ (Matthew 23:37) Here, already, after John’s death, Jesus knows that the fate of prophets is to be killed.

It is not only Jesus who needs comfort after John’s murder. We are told that when Herod first arrested John, he was afraid to put him to death because ‘he feared the crowd, because they regarded [John] as a prophet.’ (Matthew 14:5) The crowd who had regarded John as a prophet are now, like Jesus, mourning him. News of a murder conducted at the order of their ruler will have terrified them. So they seek out Jesus in their thousands, looking for healing and consolation. And Jesus has pity on them and gives them what they need: ‘he had compassion for them and cured their sick.’

All is going well until evening comes, when the disciples tell Jesus to send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves. The disciples could mean just what they say; they could be concerned that a crowd of people who probably have not worried about food while Jesus has been healing now need it. Or it may be an excuse to get Jesus to themselves for a while. There is the slightest suggestion that the disciples only care about those who can afford to buy their own food in a strange place, not about the poorest who have no money with which to buy. If that is the case, Jesus’ response must be a shock: ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ This is a miracle of Jesus, but it is important to note that it is not Jesus who feeds the thousands. After Jesus has taken, blessed, and broken the food available, he gives the food to the disciples, and it is the disciples who feed the crowds. One of the reasons that all four gospels tell this story is to remind the early church, and us, that the absence of the living presence of Jesus is no reason for us not to feed the hungry. As Jesus’ disciples, we have been given that awesome responsibility as Jesus’ continuing body in the world.

This awesome responsibility is one that Jesus’ first disciples did not want to accept. The number of hungry people is so great, and the resources are so few. So few are the resources that the disciples first describe them as ‘nothing’: ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ But five loaves and two fish are not nothing. It turns out that they are exactly enough.

Commentators on this miracle story say that we cannot know the exact mechanism by which the tens of thousands of hungry are fed. The prophet Elisha once helped a widow who had nothing but a single jar of oil in the house. He told her to collect every vessel she had, and all those she could borrow from her neighbours, and pour the oil from the jar into each vessel until it was full. She did: ‘they kept bringing vessels to her, and she kept pouring. When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” But he said to her, “There are no more.” Then the oil stopped flowing.’ (2 Kings 4:2-6) Is this what happens: does Jesus start breaking the bread and just keep breaking it as the disciples distribute the pieces? Or does Matthew’s mention of the women and children suggest that once the disciples share what they have, those women also begin to unload their own supplies? Commentator Megan McKenna writes that, ‘It was a woman in Chiapas, Mexico, who told me that the [twelve] baskets [that the scraps were collected in] came from the women. “No woman in her right mind would head into a deserted place with an elderly person or a child or someone who was sick without taking food, drink, diaper changes, the works,” she pointed out.’[1] Maybe the women not only provided the baskets; they also provided the extra food.

However the food was provided, it was just enough for everyone. Twelve baskets of scraps sound a lot, until we remember that between 20,000 and 35,000 people had been fed. The meal that satisfies them is not yet the messianic banquet described by the prophets: ‘a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.’ (Isaiah 25:6) Bread and fish is the basic meal of a Galilean peasant; this is the daily bread for which Jesus has already taught his disciples to pray, and a reminder that God has already provided everyone in the world with enough as long as no one takes more than they need.

This simple but filling meal is in stark contrast to what immediately preceded it: the banquet at which Herod the ruler celebrated his birthday, where the daughter of Herodias danced before the company, and so pleased Herod that he gave her the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Jesus is providing an alternative to the brutal world where Herod Antipas rules under the authority of Rome. Jesus rules not in a palace, but in a deserted place; he shows his authority not by execution but by healing; while Rome proclaims it is the breadbasket of the world and the emperors provide the crowds with bread and circuses, Jesus feeds thousands with five loaves and two fish.

Later in this service we are going to share communion, celebrating a sacred event with bread and wine, goods of this earth that recall the gift of creation. Like today’s miracle story, these goods raise a question of justice, because however symbolic they may have become they still represent real food. At the beginning of the church’s life this liturgy took place at a meal eaten to satisfy hunger, in which the bread and wine were not merely symbols but the staples needed for life. In the same way that this story of miraculous feeding reminds us that there is enough food to go around as long as we take only what we need, eating bread and drinking wine as part of our worship of God reminds us of all the places in the world where there is a desperate need of food to feed the hungry. As Jesus said to his first disciples, he still says to us, ‘you give them something to eat,’ and when we think our resources are too little, he reminds us that even five loaves and two fish are not ‘nothing.’

As I have said, we do not know how those five loaves and two fish were multiplied. But if Megan McKenna is right, it would make sense if the women did not initially share what they were carrying with others. After the murder of John the Baptist by the powers-that-be they would all have been feeling especially vulnerable, and that vulnerability would make it hard to share what they had with strangers. Where communities feel under attack they often turn inwards, holding on to what they have rather than sharing it. I want to end by sharing a story that shows the opposite. Gaza-born theologian Yousef AlKhouri (who I am going to hear speak tonight at Ashburton Baptist Church) writes:

One afternoon during the First Intifada (1987-1993), an Israeli military unit invaded our house in the old city of Gaza, searching for young men accused of throwing stones. While I, a terrified seven-year-old, watched [my grandmother] Naima calmly sat on the floor, baking bread. As the soldiers prepared to leave, she suddenly shouted at one of them, handing him a warm loaf and urging him to share it with the others. I was bewildered – why would she feed them? Later, as I grew in my faith and understanding of what it means to be a Christian, I realised Naima was faithfully following Jesus’ command to love one’s enemy and Paul’s teaching to feed one’s enemy. Naima chose faithfulness over resentment, embodying a logic of resistance grounded in love … Naima, like her Lord, extended bread even to those who intended harm to her family.[2]

Naima AlKhoury, in this story, obeys Jesus’ commands to his disciples: ‘You give them something to eat.’ If a Palestinian woman living in Gaza during the First Intifada was able to share bread with Israeli soldiers, how much more should those of us living here, in the safety and peace of Australia, be able to share bread with our neighbours and with the world? Amen.

[1] Megan McKenna, Not Counting Women and Children: Neglected Stories from the Bible (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 24.

[2] Yousef Kamal AlKhouri, ‘Teita’s Faith: The Story of Palestinian Christians in Gaza through the Eyes of Grandmothers,’ in The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2025), p. 22.