Mark 6:35-44
Five Loaves, Two Fish, Green Grass
35By now the hour was already late. So the disciples came to Jesus and said, “This is a desolate place, and the hour is already late.
36Dismiss the crowd so they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.”
37But Jesus told them, “You give them something to eat.” They asked Him, “Should we go out and spend two hundred denarii to give all of them bread to eat?”
38“Go and see how many loaves you have,” He told them. And after checking, they said, “Five—and two fish.”
39Then Jesus directed them to have the people sit in groups on the green grass.
40So they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties.
41Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, Jesus spoke a blessing and broke the loaves. Then He gave them to His disciples to set before the people. And He divided the two fish among them all.
42They all ate and were satisfied,
43and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish.
44And there were five thousand men who had eaten the loaves.
Berean Standard Bible
It is getting late, they are a long way from anywhere, and the disciples come to Jesus with a sensible plan: send the crowd off to the surrounding countryside and villages so that people can buy themselves something to eat. There is nothing hard-hearted in it. Given an empty field, an evening, and thousands of hungry people, it is a reasonable thing to say.
You give them something to eat.
Six words, and the disciples answer them with arithmetic. Should they go and spend two hundred denarii on bread for this lot? Two hundred denarii was most of a year's wages for a working man. They are not volunteering the money. They are holding the number up in front of him so he can see how far the instruction sits from anything possible.
He does not argue with the arithmetic. He asks a much smaller question instead.
Go and see how many loaves you have,
They go and count, and they come back with five loaves and two fish, which is the kind of answer a person gives quietly. Then Mark keeps a detail the account never uses again.
Then Jesus directed them to have the people sit in groups on the green grass.
Green. The hills in that country are brown for most of the year and the green does not last, so this is the sort of thing a man remembers because he was standing in it, looking at it.
Mark has just called the crowd sheep without a shepherd. Now he sits five thousand of them down on green grass, and the psalm they had all learned as children opens with the LORD as shepherd and goes straight on to green pastures, where he makes his people lie down. Mark does not explain the join. He puts the two of them near each other and carries on with the story.
Something close to this had happened before, at a smaller size. A man brought twenty loaves to Elisha, Elisha told him to set them in front of a hundred men, and his servant asked how that was supposed to work. Elisha said the LORD says they will eat and have some left over, and they did. Here it is five loaves against five thousand men, and twelve baskets of broken pieces at the end.
The handing out is done by the disciples. He breaks the loaves, gives them to the men who had just finished explaining why this could not be done, and they carry it along the rows themselves.
How We Know
There is an earlier account standing behind this one. In 2 Kings 4:42-44 Elisha is brought twenty loaves for a hundred men and says to give it to the people, his servant objects that it is not enough, Elisha repeats the command with the LORD's promise, and they eat and have some left over.
Mark 6:37-43 runs the same four beats at fifty times the scale, and the leftovers are counted.
The correspondence supports a writer who expected readers to hear Elisha behind it. Verse 39 adds something the older account has no reason to: the grass was green, which places this in the spring.
Questions
1 Jesus makes the disciples go and count what they already have. If we counted what this family has to give away this week, what would honestly be on the list?
AnswerTime, money, food, a spare room, somebody willing to make a phone call. The list is usually shorter than we would like and longer than we expected, because most of it never gets counted at all.
2 What did the disciples want to do about the crowd, and was it a bad plan?
AnswerSend everyone off to the villages to buy food, which was the sensible plan and probably the only one. Nothing about it is unkind. It just takes the evening to be exactly what it looks like.
3 Mark says the grass was green. Why would he keep a detail like that?
AnswerPartly because somebody was there and remembered it, since those hills are brown most of the year. And partly because he has just called the crowd sheep without a shepherd, and the psalm about the LORD as our shepherd has him making his people lie down in green pastures.
4 Who actually handed the food out to the people?
AnswerThe disciples did. Jesus broke the loaves and passed them to the men who had just finished explaining why this was impossible, and they walked it down the rows themselves.
What This Means for Us
He made them count before he did anything. Five loaves and two fish is an embarrassing thing to say out loud in front of five thousand people, and saying we have nothing would have been easier, because nothing needs no explaining and cannot be laughed at.
He did not ask them to produce something. He asked them to count what was already in their hands and come back and tell him the number, and counting is the step we skip. We know what we have will not be enough, so we never name it, and something nobody has counted cannot be handed over. So count one thing this week, say the number out loud, and put it in his hands.
Prayer
Father, we have five loaves and we are embarrassed about it. Thank you for asking us to count rather than to produce. Here is what we actually have. Do with it whatever you intend, and let us be the ones carrying it out to people. Amen.