by Eric Metaxas
It is only after performing perhaps hundreds of miracles that we arrive at the miracle of the loaves and fishes:
When it was evening, His disciples came to Him, saying, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is already late. Send the multitudes away, that they may go into the villages and buy themselves food.” But Jesus said to them, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.” And they said to Him, “We have here only five loaves and two fish.” He said, “Bring them here to Me.” Then He commanded the multitudes to sit down on the grass. And He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples; and the disciples gave to the multitudes. So they all ate and were filled, and they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments that remained. Now those who had eaten were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
Before we can appreciate the richness of this great miracle, we should first strain out the gnat of an idea that this was not a miracle at all but merely an example of Jesus inspiring the stingy crowds to share with each other. That might sound funny, especially if you’ve never heard it before, but many have heard sermons along these lines, so it’s worth explaining why this interpretation ignores the facts and must itself be ignored.
The notion that what really happened that day was a “miracle of sharing” maintains that in reality there was plenty of food but that people were selfishly hiding it from each other, until Jesus somehow inspired or guilt-tripped everyone into sharing what they had, thus solving the problem. If our goal is to explain away the miracle with another “naturalistic explanation,” or to promote communism, this interpretation does the job nicely. But if we wish actually to understand the passage, it simply won’t do. In fact, this interpretation unravels with a single verse from Matthew’s Gospel (15:32), where Jesus says: “I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days, and have nothing to eat; and I am unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.” Was Jesus kidding or playing games when he said that? What is there that would allow us to believe these people actually were hiding food? For sure, these were desperate people who had been following Jesus around the countryside, who now had been camped out for three days, being healed and hearing his teaching, and evidently giving little thought to their bodily needs. Jesus knows they have no food left and his disciples know it too. What other interpretation can we take away without willfully doing damage to the text?
In John’s account of the story, Jesus asks Andrew: “Where shall we buy bread, that these may eat?” Jesus often asked rhetorical questions to make a point. He knew very well that it would cost infinitely more money than any of them had to feed this vast multitude. He also knew what he was about to do to feed them. So the disciples, discerning the problem, come to Jesus and essentially tell him that he must tell the crowds that the show is over, that they must now go away and take care of their bodily needs, because Jesus and his disciples simply didn’t have the cash on hand to buy the food that would be needed.
But this is precisely when Jesus makes plain that the show is not over, that everything has been preamble to what he is about to do. The miracle of feeding the five thousand is the culmination of all that has gone before and it signifies a number of important things.
First, it communicates that Jesus’s heavenly father cares about people’s physical needs, not just their “spiritual needs.” Just as he has compassion on the sick and heals them, he has compassion on the hungry and feeds them. He is not a God of disembodied spirits, but of flesh-and-blood human beings, and just as Jesus in his resurrected body ate food and made plain that he was not a ghost, so Jesus in this miracle makes plain that feeding hungry people is something that God takes seriously.
Second, Jesus once again gives us a picture of the superabundance of God. He is not a utilitarian God who only gives everyone what we need. After everyone is fully satisfied there are twelve large baskets left over. He wants to overwhelm us with the blessings of Heaven.
A third point being made in this great miracle of “multiplication” requires that we remember what most people present would have known, namely the other miracles of multiplication in their Scriptures. Many of them in witnessing Jesus’s miracle would have instantly recalled that the prophet Elisha had famously multiplied olive oil, as recounted in 1 Kings 4–17. As that story goes, a widow who was in debt had only a single jar of oil. Elisha asks for it and then proceeds to fill jar after jar with oil, which is then used to pay her great debt. Later in the same chapter he miraculously multiplies twenty barley loaves to feed one hundred men. The text itself is similar to the account of Jesus feeding the five thousand.
Then a man came from Baal Shalisha, and brought the man of God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley bread, and newly ripened grain in his knapsack. And he said, “Give it to the people, that they may eat.” But his servant said, “What? Shall I set this before one hundred men?” He said again, “Give it to the people, that they may eat; for thus says the Lord: ‘They shall eat and have some left over.’” So he set it before them; and they ate and had some left over, according to the word of the Lord.
Those present would have understood that what Jesus did was like what Elisha had done, but dramatically superior, since many thousands were fed. This miracle would have indicated to them that he was a prophet of God, like the great Elisha, but they would have also understood that he was something far beyond Elisha.
The fourth point being made concerns another parallel. The Jews knew that one day a Messiah would come who was like Moses. They of course knew that Moses had fed the multitudes in the wilderness with manna, which appeared miraculously every morning and which was called “the bread of Heaven.” So what Jesus did that day would have explicitly reminded people of what Moses had done and would have linked him in their minds to Moses.
The fifth point Jesus makes in this miracle is one that would have been lost on all present, but it would not be lost on anyone familiar with what he later did at the Last Supper. Jesus’s praying and breaking the bread that day amid the vast multitudes was a prefigurement and a foreshadowing of his breaking the bread in the Upper Room, which in turn was a prefigurement of Jesus’s body being broken on the cross and through Communion being shared through the centuries with all generations.
Finally, the number of baskets left over—twelve—is almost certainly intended to remind us of the twelve tribes of Israel and of the twelve Disciples, who by being the first followers of Jesus represented the “church” of all his followers through history, and who were meant to be the “new Israel.”
So the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand, like all of his other miracles, is not a nice “naturalistic” story about sharing our food, nor is it a mere magic trick performed by a sorcerer to delight and impress. It is rather first and foremost a sign pointing beyond itself to the identity of the one behind it and behind all other miracles. Like every miracle that ever was, it is a sign from beyond this world, pointing us to the God beyond this world, to the God who came into this world to lead us back to himself and who is himself the way back.
LAZARUS RAISED FROM THE DEAD
The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is in many ways a miracle of miracles. It gives us a picture of God entering and acting in our world in a kind of unadulterated way, in a way that is as simple and unmistakeable and dramatic as anything within the pages of Scripture. The story is regarded by most Bible scholars as the very culmination of all Jesus’s miracles in the New Testament. Everything that has gone before builds to this scene, which takes place just before the end—before Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem amid shouts of acclamation and before his death on the cross a few days later.
To understand the significance of this miracle, we have to understand the context in which it takes place. First of all, we must remember that Jesus was very close with Lazarus, and with his sisters
, Mary and Martha. So when Lazarus became very ill, his sisters immediately sent word to Jesus, believing he would swiftly come and heal their brother. Jesus was many miles away at this time, but when he finally received word of Lazarus’s illness, he said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” The disciples, when they heard this, assumed that Jesus knew Lazarus would not die (but of course they didn’t understand this fully), so they didn’t try to push him to go to Lazarus right away. They assumed he had the timing of it all under control, which of course he did. Jesus did not hurry to Lazarus but remained where he was for two more days. It is, of course, clear in retrospect that Jesus knew Lazarus would indeed die, and that Lazarus’s death would give him the opportunity to perform the greatest of all his miracles and to glorify God more powerfully than he had yet done.
So two days after he learned that Lazarus was sick, Jesus decided it was time to go to Bethany, the village where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived, less than two miles from Jerusalem. His disciples knew that the chief priests in Jerusalem had been threatening Jesus with death, so they were worried that he should go near Jerusalem. But Jesus was not worried, although he knew what he was about to do would only infuriate the chief priests all the more.
As he began the journey, Jesus made things plain to his disciples: “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” Jesus knew that this would be more powerful than all that had gone before. It would dramatically build the faith of his disciples, and many who did not yet believe in him would come to believe in him as a result of what was about to occur.
When Jesus arrived in Bethany, he heard that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. There was a Jewish belief that the soul stayed near the body for three days, so this detail that he had been in the tomb for four days made it clear that there was no possibility of anything like mere resuscitation. The other two people Jesus raised from the dead had been dead for a very short time: The son of the widow of Nain was being carried from his house, having presumably died, and Jairus’s daughter died a few hours or perhaps even mere moments before Jesus arrived. But Lazarus had been lying in the tomb for four days and was by now decomposing.
His sisters had hoped Jesus would return in time to heal their brother. They also knew that Jesus had raised two others from the dead, so even after Lazarus had died they likely still had faith that Jesus might arrive in time to restore him to life. But now that he had been in the tomb for four days, they had almost certainly given up any such hope.
When Jesus met Martha, he told her, “Your brother will rise again,” and she replied, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” But Jesus had not gone there to remind them of what they already knew. He had gone there to show them something new, something that would startle them like a thunderbolt. He had come to reveal to them and to the world the unbridled, unfathomable power of God.
In this conversation with Martha, Jesus made a truly staggering statement. He said: “I am the resurrection and the life.” Such words are either sheer unparalleled hubris or they are madness—unless they are true. He then said: “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
The reason that those who believe in him will never die is because Jesus is himself the source of life. He is the one who created the universe and who created life. Although the disciples and Mary and Martha believed he was the Messiah, they did not yet seem to have grasped that their friend was the creator of the universe and the source of life itself. But as he approached the end of his days on Earth, it was time to reveal these things, to speak them and to demonstrate them.
But first we would see the other pole of who he is. We would see the humble humanity of Jesus when—seeing his friends and others weeping—Jesus himself wept. The verse is two words: “Jesus wept.”* These words show that the one who is life itself is not some impersonal energy force but a person, one whose heart breaks for the sadness of his friends, and one who was likely also weeping at the power that death still has in the broken world he has come to restore to wholeness.
Even as Jesus approached the tomb, he was riven with emotion. The text says he was “once more deeply moved.” But then he did what he had come to do. “Take away the stone,” he said. Martha protested, saying, “[B]y this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”
Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” They took away the vast stone from the front of the tomb and Jesus then prayed loudly: “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.” He did not want the meaning of what he was about to do to be missed. As with all miracles, it was what God was communicating through the miracle that was most important. So this was not merely about restoring his beloved friend Lazarus to life; it was about revealing his true identity such that many will come to believe in him, and it was their belief in him that would restore all of them to true life as well.
“Lazarus, come out!” he cried. It is a strange thing to command a corpse. But this is the one who had cursed a fig tree. This is the one who had rebuked the boisterous wind and waves, saying to them, “Peace, be still!” We recall that the fig tree withered and the wind and the waves obeyed him—and now we see Lazarus too obeying the creator of the universe. In a moment, he came out of his tomb, alive and still wrapped in his grave clothes.
Because Bethany was so close to Jerusalem, there were many mourners present that day to witness Lazarus emerge from his tomb. All who saw it must have become unhinged. Who can imagine what one would think in seeing someone dead four days obey the command to leave death and the darkness of the tomb for life and the light of day? We know that it was Jesus’s intention to show forth the power and the glory of God, and we know that he knew what would be the result. He knew that those who saw it would tell everyone they encountered, that the news of this miracle would spread like wildfire and would ignite passionate faith in many. But he also knew that the religious leaders would now be so infuriated that they would know they must kill Jesus. Amazingly, the word of this event led so many to believe in Jesus that the religious leaders even planned to kill Lazarus.
The miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection illustrates a number of things, the first perhaps being the simple existence of evil. How can it be that when Jesus raises a man to life, the religious leaders should seethe with anger? What good person could fail to rejoice that a young man dead four days had returned to life? But we know that these men were thinking only of their own power, which was gravely threatened. They had allowed themselves to be blinded by their own power and were not thinking about God and about life, but about themselves, and the logical culmination of such thinking ends in murderous thoughts, in evil acts.
The second is that God really does perform miracles to communicate with us. Jesus wanted to demonstrate God’s power specifically so that people might see who he really was and come to believe in him. Even though he did what he did out of compassion and love for Lazarus and his sisters, nonetheless he said to his disciples, “[F]or your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you might believe.” If Jesus were interested only in keeping his friend Lazarus alive, he could have returned early and healed him. Or he could have returned slightly later and raised him from the dead an hour after he had died. But Jesus waited deliberately. He wanted to magnify the effect of the miracle so that it would point people to him as the Messiah and so that God would be glorified.
This leads to the third point: that for God to be glorified, it sometimes means first allowing something unpleasant to transpire. Jesus could have saved Lazarus from dying, or could have raised him from the dead immediately, but he did not. In a sense this miracle shows us that w
e can trust God, and if we do trust him he might take us on the long and difficult road, but it’s only to bless us the more in the long run. So we must consider the implications of this. Can it be that God allows us to go through things specifically so that we have an opportunity to trust him and then to see him do something we wouldn’t have expected, something beautiful and extraordinary that wouldn’t have been possible if we had had our prayers answered when and how we wanted them to be answered? If this is true, wouldn’t it follow that any difficulty we encounter is an opportunity to trust God, to see how he might bring something glorious out of our trial? Wouldn’t it also follow that if we did not look to God in our difficulty we would be missing the opportunity to see him do something more wonderful than merely taking away the difficulty? Or perhaps it tells us that if we really know who God is, we will want to trust him, and we will allow him to bring us into difficulties or suffering, knowing that if we let him, he will use these things to bless us and to do something beautiful that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
