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| Mosaic Floor of 4th Cent. Church of the Multiplication, Israel |
Matthew 14:13–21
13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a lonely place apart. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 As he went ashore he saw a great throng; and he had compassion on them, and healed their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a lonely place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass; and taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
Catholic Exegesis:
The Second Vatican Council teaches that if we are to derive the true meaning from the sacred texts, attention must be devoted “not only to their content but to the unity of the whole of Scripture, the living tradition of the entire Church, and the analogy of faith. […] Everything to do with the interpretation of Scripture is ultimately subject to the judgment of the Church, which exercises the divinely conferred communion and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God” (Dei Verbum, 12).
St. John Paul II, when he promulgated the Catechism of the Catholic Church, explained that the Catechism "is a statement of the Church's faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church's Magisterium." He went on to "declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion" (Fidei Depositum).
Cited in the Catechism:
Commentary
First miracle of the loaves and fish
14:14–21. This episode must have occurred in the middle of springtime, because the grass was green (Mk 6:40; Jn 6:10). In the Near East loaves were usually made very thin, which meant it was easy to break them by hand and distribute them to those at table; this was usually done by the head of the household or the senior person at the meal. Our Lord follows this custom, and the miracle occurs when Jesus breaks the bread. The disciples then distribute it among the crowd. Here again we can see Jesus’ desire to have people cooperate with him.
Commentary Notes from parallel passage in Mark 6:35-42
6:41. This miracle is a figure of the Holy Eucharist: Christ performed it shortly before promising that sacrament (cf. Jn 6:1ff), and the Fathers have always so interpreted it. In this miracle Jesus shows his supernatural power and his love for men—the same power and love as make it possible for Christ’s one and only body to be present in the eucharistic species to nourish the faithful down the centuries. In the words of the sequence composed by St Thomas Aquinas for the Mass of Corpus Christi: “Sumit unus, sumunt mille, quantum isti, tantum ille, nec sumptus consumitur” (Be one or be a thousand fed, they eat alike that living bread which, still received, ne’er wastes away).
This gesture of our Lord—looking up to heaven—is recalled in the Roman canon of the Mass: “Et elevatis oculis in caelum, ad Te Deum Patrem suum omni-potentem” (and looking up to heaven, to you, his almighty Father). At this point in the Mass we are preparing to be present at a miracle greater than that of the multiplication of the loaves—the changing of bread into his own body, offered as food for all men.
6:42. Christ wanted the left-overs to be collected (cf. Jn 6:12) to teach us not to waste things God gives us, and also to have them as a tangible proof of the miracle.
The collecting of the left-overs is a way of showing us the value of little things done out of love for God—orderliness, cleanliness, finishing things completely. It also reminds the sensitive believer of the extreme care that must be taken of the eucharistic species. Also, the generous scale of the miracle is an expression of the largesse of the messianic times. The Fathers recall that Moses distributed the manna for each to eat as much as he needed but some left part of it for the next day and it bred worms (Ex 16:16–20). Elijah gave the widow just enough to meet her needs (1 Kings 17:13–16). Jesus, on the other hand, gives generously and abundantly.
Commentary Notes from parallel passage in John 6:10-13
6:10. The Evangelist gives us an apparently unimportant piece of information: “there was much grass in the place.” This indicates that the miracle took place in the height of the Palestinian spring, very near the Passover, as mentioned in v. 4. There are very few big meadows in Palestine; even today there is one on the eastern bank of the lake of Gennesaret, called el-Batihah, where five thousand people could fit seated: it may have been the site of this miracle.
6:11. The account of the miracle begins with almost the very same words as those which the Synoptics and St Paul use to describe the institution of the Eucharist (cf. Mt 26:26; Mk 14:22; Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:25). This indicates that the miracle, in addition to being an expression of Jesus’ mercy towards the needy, is a symbol of the Blessed Eucharist, about which our Lord will speak a little later on (cf. Jn 6:26–58).
6:12–13. The profusion of detail shows how accurate this narrative is—the names of the apostles who address our Lord (vv. 5, 8), the fact that they were barley loaves (v. 9), the boy who provided the wherewithal (v. 9) and, finally, Jesus telling them to gather up the left-overs.
This miracle shows Jesus’ divine power over matter, and his largesse recalls the abundance of messianic benefits which the prophets had foretold (cf. Jer 31:14).
Christ’s instruction to pick up the left-overs teaches us that material resources are gifts of God and should not be wasted: they should be used in a spirit of poverty (cf. the note on Mk 6:42). In this connexion Paul VI pointed out that “after liberally feeding the crowds, the Lord told his disciples to gather up what was left over, lest anything should be lost (cf. Jn 6:12). What an excellent lesson in thrift—in the finest and fullest meaning of the term—for our age, given as it is to wastefulness! It carries with it the condemnation of a whole concept of society wherein consumption tends to become an end in itself, with contempt for the needy, and to the detriment, ultimately, of those very people who believed themselves to be its beneficiaries, having become incapable of perceiving that man is called to a higher destiny” (Paul VI, Address to participants at the World Food Conference, 9 November 1974).
Source: The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries. Biblical text from the Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and by Scepter Publishers in the United States. We encourage readers to purchase The Navarre Bible for personal study. See Scepter Publishers for details.
"Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." St Jerome
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