The word miracle comes from the Latin miraculum, which is an object of wonder. One of the purposes of Our Lord’s miracles was to cause amazement in the minds of the beholders. His miracles demonstrate that He has power over the created order. They give Him credibility, so that when He makes claims which indicate His divinity they have to be taken seriously.
The multiplication of a few loaves and two fish into a feast that fed five thousand was a miracle so effective at causing wonder that the crowds who witnessed it and benefitted from it wanted to crown Him as a king. It might surprise us that He declined this opportunity of establishing His Kingdom on earth and made for the hills. After all, we Catholics honour Our Lord as Christ the King, with universal sovereignty over the whole of creation. Why should He not have accepted a throne that was owed to Him, and allowed these people to subject themselves to His reign?
The answer is that their appreciation of this miracle was as yet too shallow. For them, His supernatural powers promised prosperity for Israel. Never again hunger, or the fear of famine. No more poverty. This wonder worker seemed to offer an instant solution to every social problem.
Their attitude might well remind us of the temptations that came to Our Lord during His fast in the wilderness. They came directly from the devil. “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread,” said Satan, before promising Our Lord all the kingdoms of the earth if only He would bow down before him. Our Saviour’s answers to the devil were sublime: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” and “it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only’.”
This riposte remains as valid today as it did then, and it is one that the Church, constantly tempted by Satan, must always keep in mind in Her dealings with the powers of this world. “What sort of God is it that allows the world to go hungry?” is the demand with which we are so often assailed. The answer must be “Yes, of course God could multiply a few crumbs into a banquet vast enough to feed the population of this planet many times over. But such a miracle in itself would do nothing whatsoever to remove greed from a single human heart, or to dispel the selfishness that causes injustice.”
The truth is that Christ came into the world to perform a much greater work than turning stones into bread. He came to transform us, by changing hearts of stone into blazing furnaces of Divine Charity, so that those of us who are His disciples will lead the way in sharing what we have with those who have nothing, and building His Kingdom through our obedience and sacrifices.
It is only when there is universal obedience to the laws which God has written into nature that we can ever hope to see a solution to poverty, hunger and all injustices. When God’s laws are ignored in favour of purely material interests then the results can only be catastrophic. Communism promised bread for everyone. The reality was not only queues that stretched outside the bakeries for miles, but moral and spiritual starvation on a dreadful scale.
The crowds who wanted to crown Our Lord after His multiplication of loaves would no doubt have been happy for Him to build a kingdom in alignment with their own values. There is a lot of this attitude around today. It is present amongst those within the Church in those who insist that the Church’s raison d’être is essentially social activism. We find it in those who denigrate the church for her teaching on the use of contraception, on abortion and euthanasia. Faced with such opposition, it is easy for those of us who are responsible for preaching the Gospel to cave in, or to evade giving a clear answer. Perhaps it is naively imagined that if we are seen to be willing to compromise on the hot topics of the day then the media will give us a break and finally acknowledge that we can all work together in creating a brave new world in which scruples about the Commandments which God gave to Moses amid thunder and lightning on Mount Sinai have been conveniently sacrificed on the altar of secularist consensus.
The Mystical Body of Christ on earth cannot do business with the world on such terms. This is because Her primary concern is always the salvation of souls. To be true to Her identity as the Bride of Christ, She must teach what She has always taught, in perfect continuity with the Deposit of Faith that was entrusted by Our Lord to His Apostles.
The Church sees in the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes a meaning which is profoundly sacramental. Just as the transformation of water into wine at Cana prefigures the transformation of bread and wine into Our Lord’s Body and Blood in the Sacrifice of the Mass, so the feeding of the five thousand points to another wondrous aspect of the Blessed Sacrament. It shows how Our Lord’s one and undivided Body – the same Body that Ascended into Heaven and sits now at the right hand of the Father – is able to feed so many millions of men and women, in all generations and in every part of the globe, at the Altar. We must pray that the restrictions currently in place in this time of pestilence will soon be amended so that Our Lord may again feed millions of people around the world in Holy Communion. Our Lord changes bread into Himself so that we might in turn be transformed when we receive Him, and then set about transforming this broken, wounded world around us.
Father Julian Large