Mark 6:35 Commentary and Bible Study

The feeding of the five thousand is the supreme teaching miracle. It is a teaching miracle, as are all the miracles. They were not only mighty invincible demonstrations of the divinity of Christ – the fact that he was God, come in the flesh – but they also showed that he was the true Messiah, the Prophet, Priest and King, prophesied, promised to the Old Testament, the great descendant of Abraham and of David, the one who would be the Saviour of the world, through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed. And all the features of the types were fulfilled in him, and this is demonstrated in the miracles. The miracles are so full of meaning. We do not see them only as demonstrations of his divinity. They were that, of course, first and foremost, but they were more. They were teaching miracles, and this is seen here in what is often called the supreme teaching miracle. What is the task of the preacher in approaching a miracle like this? It is not just to preach in a very lively manner, and in many interesting ways to embellish the narrative, and elaborate on it; he needs also to show its aims, its lessons, what it teaches us about Christ and the purposes of the miracle. It is the supreme teaching miracle because it is the only miracle in all four Gospels, and because it has the greatest number of beneficiaries of any miracle; not one person healed, but thousands fed, five thousand men, and elsewhere in the Gospels we are told that didn't count the women and the children. Who knows how many there were? Some people guess at very large numbers: twenty thousand. One would think perhaps that's unlikely, but maybe there were ten thousand. In fact this miracle hadn't been carried out by God for fifteen centuries – he manna that came down from heaven to the people in the time of Moses. The centuries pass and now comes the Messiah, and he feeds five to ten thousand people with miraculous bread, and they were privileged to be the first recipients of such bread since the giving of the manna. So it is the supreme teaching miracle. There you see that Christ even fulfils the great type of the giving of the manna, and he says so himself. He is the bread of God who comes down from heaven for the life of men and women. We do not have to go to the fanciful extremes of some of the mediaeval exegetes on these parables, and invent all sorts of ideas that perhaps they depict, but there are obvious features in every miracle, where Christ is shown. Not just, he must be the Son of God, but, look at him, fulfilling the types and the shadows; look at him, bringing all the features that are predicted and prophesied of the Saviour of the world. There is meaning and significance in them. Christ has been healing and teaching all day. The hour is now late and the people are far from home – they will never get home while it’s light. Some of them have walked for miles. They haven't eaten since breakfast, and it is now approaching the evening. What happened was that ‘the disciples came unto him, and said, ‘This is a desert place’, a deserted place. You could look and for miles there were very few cottages or homesteads in that vicinity.