Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Meditation – 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr A

The story of the feeding of the five thousand is one of the best known in the Bible; it is recorded in each of the gospels. It all began because Jesus wanted some peace and quiet after he heard of the violent death of his cousin, John the Baptist. Piecing the sequence of events together from the various accounts, it appears that Jesus and his disciples sailed across the Sea of Galilee and a crowd of people ran round the lake so that they were there to meet Jesus as he landed. Rather than being impatient, not to say furious, he had compassion on them; the sick were healed and he taught the people “many things” (Mark 6 v 24). As the day wore on, the disciples became concerned for the multitude of people without food and so far from home. All they had was five loaves (small barley loaves according to John 6 v 9) and two fish, yet from this small amount of food, Jesus fed the entire crowd of “five thousand men, besides women and children” (v21), so probably over ten thousand people..

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