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I've been visiting this site a lot: www.sacredspace.ie

Each day they feature a prayer with a biblical text, and the text today is
good old loaves and fishes, which of course I've heard preached on since I
was a kid, but don't remember ever reading very closely.

Here's the text as they quote it:

' Now when Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, 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." [and the miracle follows] '

Now, I've often thought that Christ's miracles come across as a bit
pointless. The loaves-and-fishes story was taught to me in school as a
parable of the importance of compassion and feeding the hungry. Which is
fine. But if that's the case, then what's the point of Jesus feeding just
this little group of a few thousand? He's God, right? It's not like he
doesn't know there are other hungry people.

And not only that, these people aren't even all that hungry. If Christ
didn't feed them, they wouldn't starve--Matthew tells us they would simply
walk to the nearby villages and buy some food.

So, nice miracle, Jesus--good job. Way to unnecessarily use magic to feed
some people who could just as easily have gone to a restaurant, while
ignoring the masses who are actually in material need.

Or that's what I had thought of the story in the past

This time, though, I noticed the first couple of sentences, which I don't
remember being talked about back in school.

At the beginning of the story, Jesus is grieving over the death of his
friend, John the Baptist. And in his grief he has sought out solitude, going
out to the desert alone to mourn.

But his followers won't let him be alone. Five thousand people come swarming
out to his supposedly private desert retreat, wanting healing, wanting
teaching, wanting attention of one kind or another. And Matthew says:

"and he had compassion for them and cured their sick."

Jesus has turned away from his own grief, turned away from his private
meditations, in order to bring comfort to the ones who have sought him out.

Which makes the miracle that comes next look a little different. The five
thousand are not, in fact, in desperate need of loaves and fishes. But to