33-25. The Miraculous Feeding of Four Thousand

25. The Miraculous Feeding of Four Thousand Mat 15:32-39; Mark 8:1-9

Almost everything which might have been said upon this miracle, the preceding one of the same nature has anticipated already. Whether this was wrought nearly in the same locality, namely, in the desert country belonging to Bethsaida,^[1] and not rather on the western, as the former on the eastern, side of the lake, has been sometimes debated. On the whole it is most probable that it was wrought nearly on the same spot; for thither the narrative of St. Mark appears to have brought the Lord. Leaving the coasts of Tyre and Sidon after the healing of the daughter of the Syrophenician woman, He is said to have again reached the sea of Galilee, and this through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis (vii. 31). But all the cities of the Decapolis save one lay beyond Jordan, and on the eastern side of the lake; this notice therefore places Him on the same side also. Not less does the fact that immediately after the miracle He took ship and came to the region of Magdala (Mat 15:39), since Magdala was certainly on the western side, and his taking ship was more probably to cross the lake than to coast along its shores.^[2] With many points of likeness, there are also some points of unlikeness in the two miracles. Here the people had continued with the Lord three days, but on the former occasion nothing of the kind is noted; the provision too is somewhat larger, seven loaves and a few fishes, instead of five loaves and two fishes; as the number fed is somewhat smaller, four thousand now instead of the five thousand then; and the remaining fragments in this case fill but seven baskets, while in the former they had filled twelve.^[3] Of course the work, considered as a miraculous putting forth of the power of the Lord, in each case remains exactly the same. At first it excites some surprise that the disciples, with that other miracle fresh in their memories, should now have been as much at a loss how the multitude should be fed as they were before. Yet this surprise rises out of our ignorance of man’s heart, of our own heart, and of the deep root of unbelief which is there. It is evermore thus in times of difficulty and distress. All former deliverances are in danger of being forgotten;^[4] the mighty interpositions of God’s hand in former passages of men’s lives fall out of their memories; each new difficulty appears insurmountable; as one from which there is no extrication; at each recurring necessity it seems as though the wonders of God’s grace are exhausted and have come to an end. God may have divided the Red Sea for Israel, yet no sooner are they on the other side, than because there is no water to drink, they murmur against Moses, and count that they must perish for thirst, crying, “Is the Lord among us, or not” (Exo 17:1-7)? or, to adduce a still nearer parallel, once already the Lord had covered the camp with quails (Exo 16:13), yet for all this even Moses himself cannot believe that He will provide flesh for all that multitude (Num 11:21-22). It is only the man of a full-formed faith, a faith such as Apostles themselves at this time did not possess, who argues from the past to the future, and truly derives confidence from God’s former dealings of faithfulness and love (cf. 1Sa 17:34-37; 2Ch 16:7-8).

Nothing but a strange unacquaintance with the heart of man could have made any find here an evidence of the inaccuracy and general untrustworthiness of the records of our Lord’s life; arguing, as some do, that the disciples, with the experience of one miracle of this kind, could not on a second occasion have been perplexed how the wants of the multitude should be supplied; that we have here therefore evidence of a loose tradition, which has told the same event twice over. Or, looking at the matter from another point of view, might it not easily have happened that the disciples, perfectly remembering how their Master had once spread a table in the wilderness, and fully persuaded that He could do it again, may yet very well have doubted whether He would choose a second time to put forth his creative might;—whether there was in these present multitudes that spiritual hunger, which was worthy of being met and rewarded by this interposition of divine power; whether they too were seeking the kingdom of heaven, and were thus worthy to have all other things, those also which pertain to this lower life, to the supply of their present needs, added unto them.^[5] But so it was; and the same hand which fed the five thousand before, fed the four thousand now.

Footnotes [1] Not Bethsaida, “the city of Andrew and Peter,” but the Bethsaida already mentioned, p. 265.

[2] St. Mark, who for Magdala substitutes Dalmanutha, does not help us here, as there are no further traces of this place; yet that it was on the western side of the lake may be concluded from the fact that Christ’s leaving it and crossing the lake is described as a departing εἰς τὸ πέραν, an expression in the N.T. applied almost exclusively to the country east of the lake and of Jordan. In some maps, in that for instance which Lightfoot gives, Magdala is placed at the S. E. of the; lake; but this is a mistake, and does not agree with passages which he himself quotes from Jewish writers (Chorograph. 76), which all go to show that it was close to Tiberias. It is most probably the modern El-Madschdel, lying on the S. W. of the lake, and in the neighbourhood of the city just named.. So Greswell, Dissert, vol. ii. p. 3^4; Winer, Realwörterbuch, s. v. Magdala; Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. iii. p. 278.

[3] It is remarkable that all four Evangelists, in narrating the first miracle, agree in using the term κοϕίνους to describe, the baskets which were filled with the remaining fragments, while the two that relate the second equally agree there in using the term σπυρίδας. And that this variation was not accidental, but that there was some difference, is clear from our Lord’s after words; when referring to the two “miracles, He preserves the distinction, asking his disciples how many κοϕίνους on the first occasion they gathered up; how many σπυρίδας on the last (Mat 16:9-10; Mark 8:19-20). What the distinction was, is more difficult to say. The derivation of κόϕινος from κόπτω (= ἀγγεῖον πλεκτόν, Suidas), and σπυρίς from σπεῖρα, does not help us, as each points to the baskets being of wicker-work. See, however, another derivation of σπυρίς in Greswell, Dissert, vol. ii. p. 358, and the distinction which he seeks to draw from it. Why the people, or at least the Apostles, should have been provided with the one or the other has been variously explained. Some say, to carry their own provisions with them, while they were travelling through a polluted land, such as Samaria. Greswell rather supposes, that they might sleep in them, so long as they were compelled to lodge sub dio; and quotes Juvenal (Sat. iii. 13): Judaeis, quorum cophinus foenumque supellex. It appears from Acts 9:25 that the σπυρίς might be of size sufficient to contain a man; compare Blunt, Undesigned Coincidences, 1847, p. 211.

[4] Calvin: Quia autem similis quotidie nobis obrepit torpor, eo magis cavendum est ne unquam distrahantur mentes nostrae a reputandis Dei beneficiis, ut praeteriti temporis experientia in futurum idem nos sperare doceat, quod jam semel vel saepius largitus est Deus.

[5] It is at least an ingenious allegory which Augustine proposes, namely that these two miracles respectively set forth Christ’s communicating of Himself to the Jew and to the Gentile; that as the first is a parable of the Jewish people finding in Him the satisfaction of. their spiritual need, so this second, in which the people came from far,. even from the far country of idols, is a parable of the Gentile world. The details of his application may not be of any very great value; but the perplexity of the Apostles here concerning the supply of the new needs, notwithstanding all that they had. already witnessed, will then exactly answer to the slowness with which they themselves, as the ministers of the new Kingdom, did recognize that Christ was as freely given to, and was as truly the portion of, the Gentile as the Jew. This sermon the Benedictine Edd. relegate to the Appendix (Serm. lxxxi.), but the passage about Eutyches may easily be, indeed bears witness of being, an interpolation; and the rest is so entirely in Augustine’s manner, that I have not hesitated to quote it as his. Hilary had before him suggested the same: Sicut autem ilia turba quam prius pavit, Judaicae credentium convenit turbae, ita haec populo gentium comparatur.