Was Christ thinking of the Holy Eucharist when he multiplied the loaves?
This miracle prepared the world for the Holy Eucharist, the priesthood and the holy sacrifice of the Mass.
This miracle prepared the world for the Holy Eucharist, the priesthood and the holy sacrifice of the Mass.
Editor’s Notes
In this piece, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ multiplied the loaves with the Eucharist already in mind.
That this miracle was designed to prepare men for the mystery, doctrine, and sacrifice to come.
Why his foreknowledge embraced not only the fruits of Holy Communion, but also its profanation.
He shows us that this miracle was both promise and prophecy—revealing not only the Blessed Sacrament, but the glory and grief bound up in its history.
For more context on this episode, its significance and its place in the Roman Liturgy, see here:
Feeding the Five Thousand
The Training of the Apostles, Part IV, Chapter VII
St. Matt. xiv. 13-21; St. Mark vi. 30-34; St. Luke ix. 10-17; St. John vi. 1-13.
Story of the Gospels, § 72
Burns and Oates, London, 1885
Headings and some line breaks added.
Sung on the Fourth Sunday of Lent
Part I: Why did Christ and his Apostles withdraw before feeding the five thousand?
Part II: Why did Christ wait until evening to feed the multitude?
Part III: What does the multiplication of loaves teach about the Church and the Apostles?
Part IV: Was Christ thinking of the Holy Eucharist when he multiplied the loaves?
Tenderness and charity of our Lord
The immense tenderness and charity of our Lord would be quite enough to account for all the beautiful incidents and characteristics of the miracle. But we know that He must have had more in His Heart than the simple action of the feeding so large a multitude with the food of the body, after having refreshed and healed their souls with the Word of God.
Just so it is not too much to think of His compassion, that He would have changed the water into wine at the prayer of His Mother at the marriage of Cana. For there is no limit to His power, and the poverty and possible shame of the entertainers would have had a claim on Him, even if there had not been the powerful intercession of His Mother to aid it.
But yet we do not ordinarily think that our Lord worked that beginning of signs without a distinct purpose in His Heart, to prepare the minds of the Apostles for future mysteries, as well as to confirm their faith in Him. He chose to begin His signs at the appeal of His Mother, not, we may suppose, without a design of fixing for ever her place in the administration of the graces of His Kingdom. He chose to supply the deficiency of wine at the banquet in that particular way of the changing into it of the water.
This choice was made for a Divine reason, on which the perpetual miracle of the Blessed Sacrament throws a flood of light. So on the present occasion it is not well to consider that our Lord’s designs, in the details of the miracle as in the miracle itself, were limited to the simple relief of that amount of want and inconvenience which might have pressed on the crowds who had come from their homes to listen to Him, and whom He had detained so late by the charm of His teaching.
Our Lord’s foreknowledge
This seems to be conveyed to us by the words of St. John, at the beginning of his account of the miracle, ‘He Himself knew what He would do.’ It would take us long to draw out all that these words contain of mysterious signification.
At first sight they seem to mean that He knew how He was to supply those wants of the people, which Philip thought could not be met, except by the buying of a very large amount of bread for them to eat. He knew that He was about to supply these wants in a different way. He knew that the five loaves and the two fishes that were in the basket of the youth of whom St. Andrew spoke later on would be more than enough for His purpose.
But He knew more than that.
He knew that by this great miracle He was to prepare the minds and hearts of men for a far more abundant and life-giving banquet, even the feast of His own Precious Body and Blood, of which this multiplication of the loaves was the type and forecast. For it was the normal state and condition of our Lord in His Public Life to have immense treasures of designs and plans and inventions of love and wisdom, for the benefit of mankind, in His Heart, of which those about Him were incapable of forming even an idea.
He was full of compassion and tenderness and patience, and He had need of all His patience in bearing with the very narrow minds and dull apprehensions of those who were to be the recipients and even the ministers of His bounty. And He had but a short time to do all His work, of which no part was more difficult than that of gradually raising the minds and hearts of men to an intelligence and appreciation of what He was about, the counsels of His love, the devices of His wisdom and condescension.
Men’s notions of God are always low and dull, feeble and small. This comes much more into full light when He is about to introduce new institutions and systems into the world, all of which are necessarily stamped with the character of His own exceeding greatness and magnificence.
And all this was to be done in a few months. St. John tells us that this miracle happened about the time of the feast of the Pasch. Thus before another year had fully come round, He would be on the very eve of His Sacred Passion. So He was, as we say, obliged to catch His opportunities and make the most of His occasions, as they presented themselves in the Providence of His Father, in order to pour into human minds and hearts around Him, if not all the truths and all the benefits He had ready, at least a certain amount of knowledge and intelligence, which would help men, when the time came for the full manifestation of His counsels, to receive them with less difficulty.
Doctrine of the miracle
This then was another thing that our Lord knew He would do. And we see traces of this in the discourse which follows immediately after the narrative of this miracle in the Gospel of St. John, for the sake of which, it is probable, in accordance with the usual method of this Evangelist, the miracle itself is mentioned by him. For that discourse is the one remaining discourse of our Lord that we possess, in which the doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament is contained.
We shall comment on this discourse presently, but for the moment it is enough to refer to it in general. It shows beyond a doubt that our Lord must have had the Blessed Sacrament in His thoughts in connection with this miracle, and that, indeed, He forced the mention of it, as far as it is contained in what He there says about the feeding on His Body and Blood, on the attention of His hearers, even at considerable risk of startling them, and alienating many.
Moreover He did not as yet fully explain how it was that men were to feed on that Body and that Blood, except so far as that teaching had been conveyed in a figure by the miracle of the loaves. There is something wanting to the full doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament in the discourse. This was afterwards supplied at the Last Supper, when He consecrated the Bread and the Wine and told the Apostles they were His Body and His Blood. With that text added, we read the discourse in a new light, and we see its connection with the miracle, which those who heard Him speak on that occasion could not have discerned.
This then is another of the things which He knew He would do. He would not only work the miracle for the relief of the pressing wants of the hungry multitude, but He would take occasion from it to put forward a most startling and wonderful and difficult doctrine, concerning the Blessed Eucharist, the full meaning of which must wait until a later time to be divulged.
The record of St. John
Further still, our Lord not only knew what He was to do with regard to the doctrine founded on this miracle, and the great boon which was foreshadowed and prefigured by it, but He also knew that He would, many years later, commission one of those beloved disciples who were His instruments and ministers in the feeding of the people with the multiplied bread and fishes, to put on record for the benefit of the Church, in all ages, that same discourse in the Synagogue of Capharnaum, of which we have just now been speaking. Thus He was to provide for the Church, not only the Blessed Sacrament, but the doctrine also concerning the Blessed Sacrament, with all its consequences and manifold parts, in one of the inspired Gospels.
Now this is a further boon, and a boon distinct from that of the Blessed Sacrament itself. And on this doctrine, thus imparted authoritatively to the Church, was to be founded an immense fabric of Christian dogma and theology, a treasure which would feed the minds of sages among men, and of the holy angels throughout all eternity. Putting together the doctrine and the miracle, and the subsequent institution of the Holy Eucharist, we have the whole truth concerning the Sacrament, the Christian priesthood, the Adorable Sacrifice, and all their issues in time and in eternity, all the familiar intercourse He was to have with His chosen souls in Holy Communion, and all the benefits to soul and body conveyed thereby.
And His most loving Heart would have present to it, then and there, not only all He Himself was to do, but all that His saints would do for Him, in the power and might communicated to them by Him, all their returns of love and service, all the fruits to His glory which were to come from their devotion to His Sacramental Life. He could follow His own boon into the hearts into which it was to be received, and see all that it would produce, and even all that it might produce, and was intended by Him to produce.
And alas! this thought suggests another, that this prevision of our Lord might have two sides, the side of the gratitude and correspondence of men to His grace, and the side of their unfaithfulness and ingratitude, of all the outrages to His honour and His love which would be occasioned by the infinite condescension which was to be carried out in the history of the Blessed Sacrament among men. All this infinite amount of sacrilege and outrage He was to submit to with the utmost patience, for the sake of the return He would have in other souls.
And if Heaven was to be full for ever of the glories and fruits of this new counsel of love, so also the place of eternal torment was to have its most miserable trophies in the indelible disgrace and ineffable misery of those who have violated His most tender gifts in Holy Communion, wearing on their brows the character of the Priesthood after the order of Melchisedec.
Feeding the Five Thousand
Part I: Why did Christ and his Apostles withdraw before feeding the five thousand?
Part II: Why did Christ wait until evening to feed the multitude?
Part III: What does the multiplication of loaves teach about the Church and the Apostles?
Part IV: Was Christ thinking of the Holy Eucharist when he multiplied the loaves?
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