Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius · 58 of 80

Mysteries: Feeding the Five Thousand

OF HOW CHRIST OUR LORD GAVE TO EAT FIVE THOUSAND MEN St. Matthew writes in the fourteenth Chapter [13-22]. First Point. First: The Disciples, as it was getting late, ask Christ to dismiss the multitude of men who were with Him. Second Point. Second: Christ our Lord commands that they bring Him bread, and commanded that they should be seated at the table, and blessed and broke and gave the bread to His Disciples, and the Disciples to the multitude. Third Point. Third: "They did eat and were filled and there were twelve baskets over."

Insight

The Feeding of the Five Thousand is one of the few miracles in all four gospels, and the Church Fathers read it as a deliberate prefiguration of the Eucharist. The verbs are the same as at the Last Supper — He took, He blessed, He broke, He gave. Ignatius does not say this explicitly because he is writing for retreatants who knew it; the connection between this Mystery and the Last Supper four weeks later is structural. The composition of place asks the meditator to feel the abundance from inside the scene: the hungry crowd, the small offering, the multiplication, the twelve baskets left over. The image of divine generosity that turns scarcity into surplus has parallels in the Bhagavad Gita's teaching on the Lord as the inexhaustible source from which gifts return greater than offered (Gita 9.26).Matt 14:13-22; also Mark 6, Luke 9, John 6. Patristic Eucharistic readings: Augustine, 'Tractates on John' 24-25; Cyril of Alexandria's commentary on John 6.