Encounters with Jesus by Destro Ariana

Author:Destro, Ariana
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4514-2372-3
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2011-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

Miracles to Feed the Hungry: The Sign of Abundance

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ attentiveness to the people who follow him also finds expression in an active concern to satisfy their hunger. The narrative first presents five thousand persons, then subsequently four thousand, who have no means of support. They are attracted by Jesus and remain with him. They are hungry, but they seem to have no idea what to do. Instead of dispersing, they wait. Jesus performed the functions of a host: he shared with those present the little he had, making it increase enormously and distributing it generously. The narrative does not describe a banquet or a convivial gathering of the community. It speaks of the need to help thousands of people and to supply them with food out in the open countryside. These miracle stories depict an ideal of extreme abundance for those who are in need, as we see from the fact that a huge quantity of loaves and fishes remain even after all have eaten their fill. And the fact that thousands are present shows how great is the celebrity and the power of Jesus.

The narrative of the miraculous event emphasizes the disproportion between the human and the superhuman, and between life and death. The enormous quantity of food that is given to help those who are hungry underlines how essential food is to human life: abundance guarantees that life will continue but scarcity puts life at risk. Jesus’ action here is an immensely powerful statement that lends added strength to the content of his message and shows what his own expectations were. The supreme ideal in Jesus’ eyes seems to be that anyone who is in distress should be able to have his needs supplied through the work of God. The question of righting the imbalances in society is absent.[35]

The miraculous aspect has led many scholars to doubt the historicity of this scene and to read the stories of the multiplication of food as something created by the followers of Jesus after his death in order to construct an “idealized” image. Consequently, these miraculous narratives should be “analyzed as components of the literary motifs of the Gospel narratives,”[36] not as aspects of the historical Jesus. We are forced to hypothesize, however, that these narratives did not appear out of thin air and that something extraordinary did take place. It is, of course, true that those who transmitted the stories were not present; they could not relate something they themselves experienced directly.[37] All they related is second-hand information that they could not verify. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the authors of the Gospels regard commensality and the abundance of food as a symbol that we cannot dispense with if we want to understand the practice of life of Jesus in its totality.

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