Every Known Passage Runs a Risk

As a rule, when we first read a biblical passage or hear a sermon on it, we form an idea about it. And, as often happens, the first impression sticks. We all develop a way of interpreting certain Scripture texts. Perhaps later, we return to them to draw other lessons. But once we’ve reached a conclusion, it’s very difficult to see the same passage in another light.

What usually changes this perspective? Sometimes, a life experience. Sometimes, time. Other times, new learnings. But above all, the willingness to keep seeking, not settling for the first reading. The first reading is merely the foyer to a much greater feast.

Perhaps that’s exactly what’s missing. We are creatures of habit. And habit, when it comes to the Bible, can prevent us from seeing new shades in the same text.

One such passage is the beginning of John 6.

It’s a text as well-known as the parable of the prodigal son or the crucifixion of Jesus. And almost always, we end up with the same conclusion: “Give Jesus the little you have.”

This conclusion isn’t wrong. On the contrary, it does justice to the text.

The problem is, when we rush to the conclusion, we miss appreciating the scenery.

Why Believe This Story?

The account of feeding the multitude appears in all four Gospels. This, in itself, is noteworthy. After all, John is quite different from the other three evangelists. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called synoptic because they follow a very similar structure. John writes differently.

And he explains why.

At the end of his Gospel, he states that Jesus performed many other signs not recorded, “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

Nothing there is incidental.

John carefully chooses the events he narrates. And it’s no accident that he places the multiplication of the loaves before the great discourse on Jesus as the Bread of Life.

Moreover, the Gospels were written when there were still many living witnesses of those events. Thirty years had passed since the death and resurrection of Christ. It was enough time for the apostles to see the need to record in writing what the Church had proclaimed from the beginning, yet there were still people who could confirm or deny those facts.

Either this story happened, or it would be a monumental lie.

There’s not much room between one thing and the other.

And a community willing to die for what it proclaimed would hardly build its message on a fable so easily disproven.

Starting then from the assumption that we are facing a true event, it’s worth observing some details.

Who Prepared That Lunch?

Jesus was teaching a huge crowd.

Speaking outdoors to five thousand people would already be, in itself, an extraordinary challenge. It was necessary to keep their attention, make the message reach those farthest away, not lose the thread of the conversation.

But there comes a moment when a very simple concern arises.

Who will feed these people?

Jesus calls Philip and asks where they could buy bread for so many. The text itself explains that Jesus did this to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.

Trials are always more for us than for God. They don’t serve to prove our faithfulness to Him. They serve to reveal to us who we really are.

Philip looks at the situation and responds in the most honest way possible. Not even two hundred denarii—practically the wages of two hundred days of work—would be enough for each person to get a small piece of bread.

Then Andrew appears.

And he does exactly what he had done in the first chapter of the Gospel. There, he finds his brother Simon and brings him to Jesus. Now he finds a boy and does the same.

“Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish…”

John is the only evangelist who tells this.

He’s the only one who says the loaves were barley.

He’s the only one who mentions the boy.

And this raises a series of questions.

Who prepared that lunch?

The mother?

The boy himself?

Who thought he would spend the day out and needed to bring food?

Barley was the bread of the common folk. Not of absolute poverty, but of the everyday table of workers. And those fish were probably small salted fish, used more as a side dish than as the main meal.

It was a common lunchbox.

Nothing extraordinary.

And perhaps that’s exactly where the extraordinary lies.

The God Who Continues Creating

We tend to expect God to intervene by suspending the laws of nature.

But this sign begins precisely with nature functioning perfectly.

There was rain.

There was earth.

There was planting.

There was harvest.

Someone ground the barley.

Someone baked the bread.

Someone caught those fish.

Someone prepared that lunch.

And only then did Jesus take it into His hands.

John calls these events signs.

And a sign always points to something greater.

Perhaps this points precisely to the fact that God has not given up on His creation.

We live surrounded by a spirituality that seems to want to escape the world. As if creation were just a temporary place from which the soul needs to flee.

The Gospel points in the opposite direction.

The Word became flesh.

God entered creation.

And, before that crowd, chose to perform a sign using exactly what creation itself had produced and what human hands had prepared.

The Kingdom doesn’t begin by destroying the world.

It begins by restoring it.

Therefore, perhaps the great lesson of this text is not just to give Jesus the little we have in our hands.

Perhaps it’s to learn to look at the everyday with different eyes.

Because God continues doing the extraordinary from the ordinary.

Five barley loaves.

Two fish.

An anonymous boy.

A family that never imagined the lunch prepared that morning would become part of the story of redemption.

Perhaps that’s exactly how God continues working.

And perhaps we are looking for His miracles in the wrong place.