Loaves and Fishes: Interpreting Away a Miracle

Loaves and Fishes: Interpreting Away a Miracle

By Bobby Neal Winters

Let’s talk about “the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes,” also known as “the feeding of the 5000,”  and use it as an opportunity to discuss the practice of biblical interpretation.

This miracle is mentioned in all four Gospels: Matthew, Chapter 14; Mark, Chapter 6; Luke, Chapter 9; and John, Chapter 6.  The gist of the story is this: There is a hungry multitude (the number 5000 is given) that needs to be fed. Jesus and his disciples don’t have enough food for so many.  The disciples despair of being able to feed them and want to send them away, but Jesus won’t let the disciples off the hook that easily.  As a result, they poll the crowd for what food the people themselves might have, but come up with only five loaves and two fish. (In John, this sharing of food comes from a child.)  Jesus blesses the food; it is distributed by the disciples; and miraculously, not only is everyone fed, but there are 12 baskets that are left over.

This is an intentionally telegraphic account of the story, but the gospel accounts themselves don’t have many more details. Some have a few details the others don’t, although they could all be harmonized quite easily.  But the point is, the event is described simply; it is clearly meant to be taken as a marvel. 

There is a lot of room for interpretation here.

No mechanisms for the miracle are described. That is to say, we don’t know how it all played out.  A child might imagine that the disciples started handing out food and just didn’t stop; I’ve seen it portrayed this way on television, and it is not inconsistent with the text. 

But--and this is important--we don’t know the details.  They aren’t described.  One might imagine that is because the details weren’t important to the point of the story.

When each of us comes to a text, we have a role, and we need to know what that role is.  Are we just readers? Are we coming as critical scholars?  Are we coming as interpreters? That is to say, do you just want to read it, do you want to analyze it, or do you want to take part in conveying the message?  

I must be careful here, because I am not sure if these last two roles can be separated.

Let’s talk about interpretation for a bit.

The woman who cuts my hair has some artistic quasi-photographs hanging in her shop. On occasion, we’ve talked about them.  They are essentially headshots of people who have other pictures imposed behind their faces. One is a picture of a pretty young woman. She has a wistful expression on her face, and the other picture is that of a young man with a more strident expression.  

Were these pictures drawn by hand or was a computer used? You could talk about the technique of layering pictures; you could talk about using photoshop versus literal cut-and-paste. 

Or you could talk about what the artist was trying to say in each. You could raise the question about whether the artist meant us to connect these two pictures.  Are the young man and young woman connected with each other?

Either of these approaches is good for the right audience. Learning about the artist, the artist’s background and education, the artist’s environment might help with interpreting the portrait, but an over-emphasis on the mechanism skews the interpretation. The meaning of the portrait is not about the technique. It’s about what the artist was trying to say; it is about what we can understand.

Jesus did his miracles with a purpose. In his actions, he is teaching us something deeper. In relating his miracles, his disciples are trying to convey that teaching.

In interpreting the Gospels, we have to look at the accounts of the miracles as if they were portraits.  We have to see the picture itself and not let ourselves be distracted by how the picture happened.

This is made difficult by the spirit of the age that wants to make everything understandable and repeatable. An age that strives to make the transcendent mundane. 

For example,   I’ve heard of some who preached that Jesus broke the food into tiny pieces and each of the multitude got--by my calculation--one one-thousandth of a loaf of bread and four ten-thousandths of a fish.

That’s just the math of it; don’t blame me.

By enough mental gymnastics, by holding your nose, you can make this fit the text.

Making the mechanism of the feeding the focus of the interpretation is a mistake. It misses the point entirely. It creates an easy way out for the modern, scientific mind and, by doing so, cuts-off, indeed, kills other interpretations.  

By explaining the miracle, we explain the miracle away. Read that sentence again, and make it a mantra.  We snuff-out the child-like faith that Jesus said we had to have.

As has been said by others, it is like the dissection of a butterfly: it not only kills the butterfly, but destroys its beauty as well.

As hard as it is for us to do, bound as we are in the chains of a scientific age, let’s try to look at this through a lens other than that of scientific analysis.

Consider the theme of food as it is offered in the scriptures that Jesus and his disciples used, that is to say, the Old Testament. 

The theme begins early. Eve brings Adam the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  Melchizedek the King of Salem and Priest of the Most High God gives Abraham the gift of bread and wine. Abraham gives his angelic visitors food. Jacob gives a bowl of pottage to Esau.  Joseph gives grain to his family.

And that is just Genesis.  

The theme continues, but to focus on our current topic, consider God giving manna to the children of Israel as they wandered in the desert.  This is parallel to Jesus feeding the multitude.

Food is important. Food for the body is important.  We have programs in my town through at least three different churches that give food to those who need it.  They can barely keep up with the need.  Indeed, sometimes they can’t, but that is beside my point.

Food for the body is not the only kind of food.

Jesus was a human, and he was tempted by food in the desert when Satan challenged him to turn stone into bread.  Jesus countered this with a quotation from Deuteronomy 8:3: “...man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”  

This quote was taken from Deuteronomy and “bread” is referring specifically to the manna God had bestowed upon the Israelites.  Through the use of this Jesus is comparing spiritual food with physical food, saying both are necessary. (Manna has been explained away as well, but I digress.)

To connect this with the point at hand: God gave manna and the Law; Jesus is giving bread-and-fish and his teaching. One can use this to argue that Jesus is Lord.  The Gospels are doing precisely that.

As noted above, in addition to feeding the multitude, Jesus is teaching the multitude.

I am a teacher. Teaching is a profession like being a farmer or a cobbler.  Farmers sell food; cobblers sell shoes; teachers sell knowledge.

There is a difference.  When the farmer and the cobbler sell their goods, those goods are gone. The farmer can grow more food; the cobbler can make more shoes; but when the product is gone, it is gone.

When a teacher sells his knowledge, he still has it.

But it’s better than that.  The teacher learns his knowledge, but in the act of teaching someone else, he learns his knowledge better.

What is more, teaching is scalable. That is to say, what you teach to five can often be taught to five thousand just as well.

I could go on, but my point isn’t to preach a sermon, it is to show another interpretation is possible.  This is lost if one gets hung-up on the mechanism of the miracle.  We go from “maybe this is what happened” to “this is what happened.”  Instead of reading meaning from it, we read mechanism into it.  Instead of a miracle we have the mundane.

For me to say, this is the only way to interpret his story would be to defeat my purpose.  

Let me now return to interpreting a painting.  This time the painting wasn’t where I was getting my hair cut, but in an actual museum.  It’s been a while, so I will get the details wrong, but when I looked at the portrait from a distance, it looked like a princess dressed as a shepherdess tending her sheep in the meadow.  When I got closer, I could see dirt on her face and clothing, like an actual shepherdess.

Where I stood, my perspective, made the difference.

I didn’t have to see how the picture was drawn.  I didn’t have to know about the kind of paint.  I just had to look at what was presented to me.

And it was simply marvelous.

We shouldn’t read our modern “explanations” into the story. We shouldn’t exclude the possibility of the mysterious, the marvelous, the reality of the child-like wonder.