Feeding the Five Thousand (Lk.9:12-17)

Feeding the Five Thousand (Lk.9:12-17)

Three times during His life on earth Christ shares a meal with people around Him—at the feeding of the five thousand of the four thousand, and of the twelve.  All three times He does the same: He takes the bread, He looks up to Heaven, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to the people.   It is the same gesture we recognize when the bread is consecrated at the altar.  In these acts He bestows imperishable life forces on the bread; it becomes “medicine of immortality.”  That is what this meal was called in earliest Christianity, pharmakon athanasias.  A meal that goes with us on the path of life, beyond death, into deathless life.

In the Act of Consecration of Man an expression is used for this which has fallen into disuse: “the bread for the way.”  The German word used here, Wegzehrung, literally means “food for on the way.”

At the feeding of the five thousand, when this blessed bread is distributed, the evangelist adds: “And all ate and were satisfied…”  We can’t say the same of our everyday bread.  We have hardly eaten and are feeling hungry again.

But when we receive the meal of bread and wine at the altar something else happens.  In that moment what is expressed as a promise in the Act of Consecration of Man becomes reality: “Christ in you.”  From that moment He is in us, literally and figuratively.  And if we make space for Him in us, He subsequently goes with us on our path of life, as bread for the way for our eternal being.

When we realize what we receive, Whom we receive, with the meal of bread and wine, that which happened at the miraculous feeding of the five thousand is fulfilled again: “And all ate and were satisfied…”

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, August 14, 2022