Feeding of the Hungry Crowd

Note the disciples’ reaction to the plight of the hungry crowd: ‘Send the people away so that they can buy.’ The disciples have gone for the fix which puts no responsibility on them. They are willing to entrust the hungry crowd to market forces. Those with money can eat: those without, can’t. For the disciples, money and commerce are the answers to hunger.

Jesus rejects that solution. ‘There is no need for them to go; give them something to eat yourselves.’ The solution to the hunger of that crowd was to give generously what little the disciples had. What they could have kept for themselves was to become gift. Once the disciples were in Jesus’ frame of mind, the hunger of the crowd was satisfied. How did this come about? The answer lay in human cooperation with the impulse of Divine generosity which knows no limits. The story simply says that Jesus blessed and broke the loaves ‘and handed them to his disciples who gave them to the crowd.’ Jesus depended on the disciples to obey him: ‘Give them something to eat yourselves’.

Jesus still looks with gut-wrenching compassion on those who are hungry in our own society and throughout the world. If we answer that market forces will suffice, Jesus will reject our answer as decisively as he rejected the answer of his earliest disciples. We have to take responsibility to share what we have, to be generous with what we have. After all, Jesus, Our Lord and Master, commands us: ‘Give them something to eat yourselves’. Note how Jesus blessed those loaves and broke them before they were distributed, which reminds us of the words of Pedro Arrupe, former General of the Jesuits, ‘Eucharist will never be complete so long as people still go hungry in the world.’

We could pause for a moment at Mass to ask: Who are those hungry people crowding in on us, and then pray that we may respond to them as our Lord commanded, so that the hungers of the crowd, and our hunger to really follow our Lord, will be satisfied.

© Fr Michael Tate; mtate@bigpond.com