Jesus Feeds Five Thousand
John 6
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An enormous crowd followed Jesus up a hillside.
Thousands and thousands of people.
They had come to listen to him all day.
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Word had got around, and by the middle of the day an enormous crowd had followed Jesus up onto a green hillside above the lake. Five thousand men, and their wives and their children as well, so really far more. They sat down in the grass and they listened to him, and nobody wanted to leave.
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It got late.
Everybody was getting very hungry.
Send them home, said the disciples.
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The afternoon wore on and the sun started to drop and nobody had eaten a thing. The disciples came over, worried. This is a lonely place, they said, and it is getting late. Send everybody away so they can go and find some food. But Jesus said, no. You give them something to eat.
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That would take a fortune, said Philip.
We do not have anything like enough.
There was nowhere to buy food anyway.
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Philip did the sums out loud and they were hopeless. It would take most of a year's wages to buy enough bread for this lot, he said, and even then everyone would only get a mouthful. And there was no shop for miles. The disciples stood there looking out at all those people and had no idea at all.
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Then Andrew found a boy.
The boy had five small loaves and two little fish.
It is not much, said Andrew.
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Then Andrew came back through the crowd with a boy beside him. There is a boy here, he said, and he has five little barley loaves and two small fish. Barley bread was the cheap kind, the sort a poor family ate. And then Andrew said the thing everybody was thinking. But what is that, with this many people?
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Bring it to me, said Jesus.
The boy handed over his whole lunch.
Jesus said thank you to God, and started sharing it out.
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Bring it here, said Jesus. And the boy handed it over. All of it. His whole lunch, into the hands of a stranger, in front of thousands of people. Jesus told everyone to sit down on the grass. Then he took the little loaves, and he thanked God for them, and he began to break them and pass them round.
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Everybody ate as much as they wanted.
Every single person.
And afterwards there were twelve baskets left over.
More at the end than at the beginning.
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And it did not run out. It went round and round, and everybody ate until they had had enough, all five thousand of them and more. When they had finished, Jesus said not to waste any of it, and the disciples went round picking up the pieces, and they filled twelve baskets. There was more left at the end than the boy had brought at the start.
