God Gives Enough for All - Reflections on Matthew 14:13-21, Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Monday, June 15, 2026
Today’s text is surely among the most familiar and beloved of the stories of Jesus, and it is repeated in all four gospels, and even is provided in a slightly different guise—a feeding of four thousand— twice more in two of them. Obviously, this tale of the miraculous feeding of a huge crowd with a tiny amount of food proved memorable and thus powerful as a witness to the authority and power of Jesus of Nazareth.
Perhaps we should be clear about one matter before we approach the text in more detail. It is frankly ludicrous to “explain” what happens here by so-called “rational” explanations. What really happened, some have surmised, is that the members of the large crowd reached into their garments and pulled out various foodstuffs to share with those around them, thus explaining just how all were satisfied and how all those food pieces were left over. And, the preacher concludes, “So should we all reach into our larders and share what we have with others!” I have even read that the two fish were particularly large (tuna from the Sea of Galilee?), and the five loaves of bread were baked in huge ovens, thus providing enough for the five thousand, not to mention the “women and children” included by Matthew in 14:21. No need to speculate in this way anymore; if you want a miracle, go ahead and have one! Two fish and five loaves plainly cannot feed five thousand men and their households, and afterward have twelve baskets full of leftovers. Too much rational historical proof-texting runs the risk of missing Matthew’s larger interests in connecting this story with antecedents in his favorite text: the Hebrew Bible filtered through the Greek Septuagint translation, and with another story just preceding this one.
Two major events undergird the feeding story. The first is signaled to the reader by the use of the Greek word, eremos, a “deserted place” (Mt.14:13). This noun is related to the word for desert; of course, we are hardly to picture a desert in this scene, since the location is obviously near the Sea of Galilee. There are no deserts nearby! But the word reminds us of the significant time of Israel’s desert wanderings, found in the books of Exodus and Numbers, during which YHWH fed the former Egyptian slaves miraculously with the manna from God. Manna in Hebrew means quite literally, “What is it,” and is thus a hilarious attempt to designate the magic substance that partially sustained the exiles in the desert. That was the most famous miraculous feeding, known and remembered by all Jews, and here Jesus is about to perform a similar act.
The second major event from the Hebrew Bible, one much more directly akin to the feeding of the five thousand, is found in 2 Kings 4:42-44. There the prophet Elisha orders his servant to place before one hundred hungry men twenty loaves of barley and a few fresh ears of grain. The servant rightly finds the order ridiculous and resists, but finally follows the prophet’s orders. Thus the text reads:
“But his servant said, ‘How am I to set this in front of one hundred men?’ But Elisha repeated, ‘Give them to the men, that they may eat, for thus says YHWH, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’ So he set it before them. And they ate, and had some left, according to YHWH’s word.”
Matthew’s telling repeats the salient points of the prophetic tale: the plainly inadequate amount of food; the rejection of the command by the follower; the command that promises not only satisfied eating but significant leftovers; the eating by all assembled. Thus Matthew, as is his usual gambit, reminds his readers/hearers of ancient texts, that they all know, to convince them that Jesus of Nazareth is recapitulating and fulfilling promises that those old texts made.
Then, too, not only does Matthew point backward to the Israelite desert and to Elisha’s power, he also points forward to Jesus’s last supper and to all later celebrations of Christian eucharist. When Jesus in Mt.14:19 takes the five loaves and two fish, “he looked up to heaven and blessed, and broke, and gave them to the disciples,” we hear an echo of Mt.26:26, which became the model for all subsequent communion celebrations.
And one more observation will serve to demonstrate Matthew’s literary skill. Earlier in this same chapter (Mt.14:1-12), Matthew recounts the sordid tale of the gruesome execution of John the Baptist, a murder that is set in the midst of another sort of banquet. Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and environs after the death of his father Herod the Great, imagines that John has somehow been raised from the dead, and thus is possessed of miraculous and dangerous powers (Mt.14:2). He has thrown John in prison, because he is enraged that John has accused him of marrying, Herodias, wife of his brother Phillip, thus breaking the Torah law of Leviticus 18:16: “You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother’s wife.” Be that as it may, Matthew bases this accusation, borrowed from Mark’s gospel, on a historical mistake. Herodias was not Phillip’s wife. She was in fact married to a paternal half-uncle, also named Herod, whom she abandoned to marry Herod Antipas. That still sounds sordid enough to raise the ire of any prophet!
On Herod’s birthday, his wife’s daughter, unnamed here, but called Salome in Mark, danced for his pleasure which causes Herod to utter a phrase first found in Esther: “He swore an oath to give her whatever she might ask” (Mt.14:7). What she wants from the charmed tetrarch is the head of John the Baptist on a platter! The foul request makes Herod “sad,” though because he has vowed, he gives her what she wants. (Oscar Wilde’s play and Richard Strauss’ subsequent opera based on it , “Salome,” are both exceedingly lurid attempts to portray this sensational story in word and music.) In short, this terrible scene is presented by Matthew in the sharpest contrast to the wonderful and miraculous feast presided over by Jesus in the wilderness. The gross immorality of the former stands over against the beauty and grace of the latter. Matthew has taken his Markan model and molded it in his own ways for his own concerns. Once again we see that each of our Gospel writers have gifts of composition and shaping that make each presentation of the great story unique to them. Yet each story focuses squarely on God's desire to sustain God’s people, sometimes in ways very difficult to discern or understand.