Reflection for Trinity VIII

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

[Matthew 14.13-21]

The Gospels don’t just provide detail’s of Jesus’s life and teaching, they also reflect the life of the community for whom they were written. For instance it is clear that St Matthew’s Gospel is written for a primarily Jewish audience. We get hints of this in the way that in the way he tells his story, in particular that he sees Jesus is the new Moses, that is as a giver of God’s perfect Law.

Matthew actually draws our attention to the parallels between Jesus and Moses. For instance, just as Moses received the Law of God on Mount Sinai, so Jesus reveals the new and perfect in the Sermon on the Mount. There he gives a whole series of instructions about how God’s people are to live. Then there are those ‘you have heard it was said, but I say to you’ in Matthew 5. These are a fulfilment of what Jesus had said in Matthew 5.17 about his having come not to abolish but fulfil the Law (of Moses). Jesus takes the words of the Law of Moses, and rather than negate them, he expands them, showing how his teaching fulfils the fulness of the Law and the teachings of the prophets.

If Jesus is revealed as the new Moses in his teachings, then his actions also mirror those of Moses. not just in word, particularly in the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 men. (This is not me being sexist, Matthew tells us that there were 5,000 men, to say nothing of the women and children who were also present.) This miraculous feeding takes place in the Judean wilderness, far enough away from a village or town where the people could have found shelter and sustenance. This is a reminder of the people of Israel’s 40 years of wandering in the wilderness of Sinai. In the wilderness God had miraculously fed his people with Manna (the ‘bread of Angels’, as the Psalmist calls it), now Jesus miraculously feeds the crowd with bread and fishes. Again Matthew is showing us how the ministry of Jesus corresponds to that of Moses.

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Moses is revered to this day by Jews and Christians alike as the greatest of the prophets, and we continue to listen to and obey the law God has given to us through his and Jesus's teaching. The miracle of the Manna which the people of Israel received only lasted for the 40 years of the travels of God’s people, it ended on the day they entered into the Promised Land, after which they were able to eat its produce. The 5,000 only ate the miraculously provided fish and bread for one evening, after which they returned to their homes, but the teachings they’d heard and the miracles they’d seen lived on in their lives. (Some of those who’d received the bread and fish may well have become members of the earliest Jesus movement, from which the Church was born.)

Jesus continues today to feed his Church today through the transformed bread and wine of the Altar, bread and wine that through the miracle of transubstantiation have been transformed into his body and blood. Outwardly we receive his body and blood as bread and wine, their outward form (appearance, smell, taste) are that of bread and wine, but their inward form, their true meaning is that of his body and blood.