ALMOST everything which might have been said upon this miracle
the preceding one of the same nature has anticipated already; to which,
therefore, the reader is referred. [see The
Miraculous Feeding of Five Thousand. at Lent 4] Whether this
was wrought nearly in the same locality, namely, in the desert country
belonging to Bethsaida [1], and not rather on the western, as the former
on the eastern, side of the lake, has been sometimes debated. On the whole
it is most probable that it was wrought nearly on the same spot; for thither
the narrative of St. Mark appears to have brought the Lord. Leaving the
coasts of Tyre and Sidon after the healing of the daughter of the Syrophcenician
woman, He is said to have reached again the sea of Galilee, and this through
the midst of the coasts of Decapolis (vii. 31). But all the cities of the
Decapolis save one lay beyond Jordan, and on the eastern side of the lake;
this notice therefore places Him on the same side also. Not less does the
fact that immediately after the miracle He took ship and came to the region
of Magdala (Matt. iv. 39), since Magdala was certainly on the western side,
and His taking ship was more probably to cross the lake than to coast along
its shores. [2]
With many points of likeness, there are also some points of unlike-ness
in the two miracles. Here the people had continued with the Lord three
days, but on the former occasion nothing of the kind is noted; the provision,
too, is somewhat larger, seven loaves and a few fishes, instead of five
loaves and two fishes; as the number fed is somewhat smaller, four thousand
now instead of the five thousand then; and the remaining fragments in this
case fill but seven baskets, while in the former they had filled twelve.
[3] Of course, the work, considered as a miraculous putting forth
of the power of the Lord, in each case remains exactly the same.
At first it excites some surprise that the disciples, with that other
miracle fresh in their memories, should now have been as much at a loss
how the multitude should be fed as they were before. Yet their surprise
rises out of our ignorance of man’s heart, of our own heart, and of the
deep root of unbelief which is there. It is evermore thus in times of difficulty
and distress. All former deliverances are in danger of being forgotten
[4]; the mighty interpositions of God’s hand in former passages of men’s
lives fall out of their memories: each new difficulty appears as one from
which there is no extrication; at each recurring necessity it seems as
though the wonders of God’s grace are exhausted and have come to an end.
God may have divided the Red Sea for Israel, yet no sooner are they on
the other side than, because there is no water to drink, they murmur against
Moses, and count that they must perish for thirst, crying, ‘Is the Lord
among us, or not?’ (Exod. xvii. 1-7); or, to adduce a still nearer parallel,
God had once already covered the camp with quails (Exod. xvi. 13), yet
for all this even Moses himself cannot believe that He will provide flesh
for all that multitude (Num. xi. 21, 22) It is only the man of a full-formed
faith, a faith such as the Apostles themselves at this time did not possess,
who argues from the past to the future, and truly derives confidence from
God’s former dealings of faithfulness and love (cf. I Sam. xvii. 2 Chron.
xvi 7, 8).
Nothing but a strange unacquaintance with the heart of man could have
made any find evidence here of inaccuracy and genera’ untrustworthiness
in the records of our Lord’s life; arguing, as some have done, that the
disciples, with the experience of one miracle of this kind, could not on
a second occasion have been perplexed how the wants of the multitude should
be supplied; that we have here, therefore, evidence of a loose tradition,
which has told the same event twice over. Or, looking at the matter from
another point of view, could it not easily have happened that the disciples
perfectly remembering how their Master had once spread a table in the wilder-ness,
and fully persuaded that He could do it again, might still have doubted
whether He would choose a second time to put forth His creative might ;—whether
there was in these present multitudes that spiritual hunger which was worthy
of being met and rewarded by this interposition of divine power; whether
they, too, were seeking the kingdom of heaven, and were thus worthy to
have all other things, those also which pertain to this lower life, to
the supply of their present needs, added unto them. [5] But such earnest
seekers, for the time at least, they were; as others had faith to be healed,
so these had faith to be fed; and the same bounteous hand which fed the
five thousand before, fed the four thousand now.
____________________________
1. ‘Not Bethsaida, ‘the city of Andrew and Peter,’
but the Bethsaida already men-tioned, p. 267.
2. St. Mark, who for Magdala substitutes Dalmanutha,
does not help us here, as there are no further traces of this place. That
it was on the western side of the lake we conclude irom the fact that Christ’s
leaving it and crossing the lake is de-scribed as a departing eis to an
expression in the New Testament applied almost exclusively to the country
east of the lake and of Jordan. In some maps, in Lightfoot’s for instance,
Magdala is placed at the SE, of the lake; but this is a mistake, passages
which he himself quotes from Jewish writers (Chorograph. 76), showing
plainly that it was close to Tiberias. It is most probably the modern El-Madshchdel
lying on the S.W. of the lake, and in the neighborhood of the city just
named. So Gresswell, Lissert. vol. ii. p. 324; Winer, Realworterbuch,
s. v. Magdala; Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. iii. p. 278.
3. All four Evangelists, in narrating the first
miracle, describe the baskets which were filled with the remaining fragments
as kofinous, while the two who relate the second
no less agree in using there the term spuridas.
That this variation was not accidental is clear from our Lords after worth;
when referring to the two miracles. He preserves the distinction,
asking his disciples how many kofinous on the
first occasion they gathered up; how many spuridas
on the second (Matt. xvi. 9, 10; Mark viii. 19, 20). What the distinction
was is more difficult to say. The derivation of kofinos
from koftw (=aggeion plekton,
Suidas), and spuris from speira,
does not help us, as each points to the baskets being of wicker-work; see,
however, another derivation of spuris in Greswell
(Dissert. vol. ii. p. 358). and the distinction which he seeks to draw
from it. Why the Apostles should have been provided with the one or the
other has been variously explained. Some say to carry their own provisions
with them,while they were travelling through a polluted land, such as Samaria.
Greswell rather supposes, that they might sleep in them, so long as they
were compelled to lodge sub dio; and quotes Juvenal (Sat. iii. 13):
Judaeis quorum cophinus foenumque supellex; Cf. Martial (Efngr.
v.7), who mockingly calls the Jews cisteferos. It appears from Acts ix.
25 that the spuris might be of size sufficient
to contain a man: compare Blunt, Undesigned Coincidences, 1847,
p. 271.
4. Calvin: Quia autem similis quotidie nobis obrepit
torpor, eo magis cavendum eat ne unquam distrahantur mentes nostrae a reputandis
Dei beneficils, Ut praeteriti temporis experientia in futurum idem nos
sperare doceat, quod jam semel vel saepius targitas est Dens.
5. It is at least an ingenious allegory which Augustine
proposes, namely that these two miracles respectively set forth Christ’s
communicating of Himself to the Jew and to the Gentile; that as the first
is a parable of the Jewish people finding in Him the satisfaction of their
spiritual need, so this second, in which the people came from far, even
from the far country of idols, it a parable of the Gentile world. The details
of his application may not be of any great value; but the perplexity of
the Apostles here concerning the supply of the new needs, notwithstanding
all that they had already witnessed, will then exactly answer to the slowness
with which they themselves, as the ministers of the new Kingdom, did recognize
that Christ was as freely given to, and was as truly the portion of, the
Gentile as the Jew. This Sermon the Benedictine Edd. relegate to the Appendix
(Serm. lxxxi.), but the passage about Eutyches may easily be, indeed evidently
is, an interpolation; and the rest is so entirely in Augustine’s manner,
that I have not hesitated to refer to it as his. Hilary had before him
suggested the same: Sicut autem illa turba quam prius pavit, Judaicae credentium
convenit turbae, its haec populo gentium comparatur.
