This Sunday, Jesus Shows Us the Multiplying Effect of Our Love

Jesus in the Gospel this Sunday performs a miracle so significant that all four of the Gospel writers, including John, tell the tale.

Think of the miracle of the loaves and fishes as a “live action version” of the parables he has been telling on previous Sundays — a demonstration of how grace works in our lives.

Here are five takeaways for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: There is something very strange about the miracle of the loaves that is easy to miss.

It is clear that a tiny amount of food feeds an enormous number of people in the miracle — 5,000 families in fact, which is what the tax collector Matthew means when he says there were “five thousand men, not counting women and children.”

St. Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea quotes St. Hilary of Poitiers explaining, “The five loaves are not multiplied into more, but fragments take the place of fragments, the substance growing whether upon the tables or in the hands that took them up, I know not.” St. Rabanus Maurus says Jesus “creates no new pieces of food, but having taken what the disciples had, he gave thanks.”

Frank Sheed in his book To Know Christ Jesus says the same thing, and suggests that the miracle should be called the “multi-location” of the loaves. “Observe how strange a miracle it was,” Sheed writes. “Jesus did not simply hand out the five loaves and the two fish to the first few people, and then create further loaves and further fish for the rest. In some mysterious way he fed everybody with those five loaves and those two fish.”

He points out what John says in his telling of the tale: “They filled 12 baskets with the fragments from the five barley loaves” (John 6:13). The original loaves were the leftovers, too.

Second: This makes this a  miracle about how love multiplies our gifts.

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis points out in his masterful commentary on Matthew (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word) that rather than focusing on the multiplication, “the text carefully stresses the passing of the loaves from hand to hand.”

“In whose hands were the loaves in fact ‘multiplied?’” he asks. “Apparently the bread grew in the distribution of it, as a result of both Jesus’s blessing and of the disciples’ collaboration with him.”

The lesson: Jesus doesn’t want to make a spectacle of what he is doing. Rather, he chooses a way of doing the miracle so that you almost wouldn’t notice it: He takes five loaves that are offered and breaks them to hand to his disciples, who bring them to the people.

No single disciple gets to see the full miracle, and the crowds could easily miss it altogether.

This is the quiet way Jesus always works: He accepts the small, inadequate gifts we offer him and quietly makes them greater than they were in such a way that we do not recognize the full impact of what he is doing.

Third: This is a demonstration of how grace works, completing a lesson which Jesus started with the parables.

On previous Sundays, we have heard Jesus describing the seeds that give a hundredfold, tiny seeds that grow large, wheat that grows with weeds, and finding a treasure while preparing a field.

What the parables describe by analogy, the Feeding of the Multitudes shows in action.

The scientific principles written into the instruction manual of the universe make seeds and yeast work. The master hides this growth principle like a treasure in the field of time and space. But Jesus can disregard the rules whenever he wants — and he does, all the time.

In our spiritual lives, we can’t make anything swell and grow fruitful either. Our best efforts fall short. Our selfishness leaves its mark on everything we try. But grace is the unseen supernatural principle that makes our spiritual efforts grow.

This is what the alcoholic finds in AA, when she turns to a higher power. This is what a married couple finds when marriage becomes impossible, and they finally turn to God in desperation. It is what each of us finds when we say, “Enough. I can’t handle this. I need help, Lord.”

As Leiva-Merikakis puts it, “The word ‘multiplication,’ smacking of magic, does not best convey the mysterious nature” of the event, which, in its reality “powerfully illustrates the theological principle that, where the Fire of Mercy is involved, the more that is given, the more there is.”

This is how grace always works. Grace “escapes our experience and cannot be known except by faith,” says the Catechism (No. 2005). We only see it in retrospect, when “reflection on God’s blessings in our life and in the lives of the saints offers us a guarantee that grace is at work in us.”

Fourth: After all, the miracles in the Gospels aren’t just history lessons, but introduce us to how God lives with us now.

The Gospel miracles don’t just describe what Jesus did; they describe what he does.  Grace fills our lives and produces fruit “a hundred, sixty or thirtyfold.”

But it takes faith, Isaiah’s faith in the generosity of a God when he says, in the First Reading:

“You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat;
Come, without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk!”

It takes hope, the hope of St. Paul who says, “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And it takes love.

• Jesus loved the crowds —“his heart was moved with pity for them.”
• The crowds loved Jesus — 5,000 men after a long day didn’t grumble for supper. The disciples had to bring it up. They were too busy encountering Jesus Christ.
• The apostles loved both — as Pope Leo XIV put it, “The multiplication of the loaves and the fish happened while sharing.”

Adding love to the equation always has the same multiplying effect. God is love, and so wherever there is real love, there is God.

Fifth: We get to see this exact miracle at every Mass.

In the multiplication (or “multi-location”) of the loaves, Jesus reveals the the miracle of the Eucharist possible.

The Eucharistic hosts, found  in tabernacles across the world, are not just fragments of the loaves Jesus blessed at the Last Supper — Jesus is truly present in each communion, the same Jesus, again and again, growing in the sharing.

This enormous love should inspire us to love him back.

• We give him hosts at Mass; he gives us back himself.
• We give him our sins in confession; he gives us peace and strength.
• We give him our service on earth; he gives us back eternity in heaven.

The math seems to work this way again and again: Our effort minus God equals nothing — but our effort plus God equals infinity. To change the world, all we have to do is love.

By Tom Hoopes