Canter Bridge

It might not be commonly agreed that a life accompanied by the biblical text is likely to be a life that grows towards a quiet courage. That does not make the observation less true.

The courage that Jesus inspires does not often call attention to itself. For good reason does the apostle refer to it and to other aspects of Christian maturity in terms of fruit. A slow-growing, non-dramatic but eminently harvestable product captures the phenomenon as well as an image could.

Likely manifold thousands of audacious acts have been inspired by Jesus’ way of turning the dilemma of a hungry crowd back upon those intimates of his who felt he was the one to resolve the matter:

The day was drawing to a close, and the twelve came to him and said, ‘Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions; for we are here in a deserted place.’ But he said to them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said, ‘We have no more than five loaves and two fish—unless we are to go and buy food for all these people.’ For there were about five thousand men. And he said to his disciples, ‘Make them sit down in groups of about fifty each.’ They did so and made them all sit down. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. And all ate and were filled. What was left over was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces.

In the case at hand, Jesus does indeed subvert the impending limitations of things in order to perform what we abbreviate with the word ‘miracle’. Yet his disciples are made partisans of the act, compelled to place their own reputations and their understanding of what is possible and what is not onto the table of public opinion and—what was most decidedly a probable outcome—public ridicule.

The narrative is astonishingly simple. It does not delve into mechanics. The report that people were fed by the most inexplicable defiance of nature and convention seems to stand in as the story’s principal burden.

Yet Jesus will circle around and ask his disciples in a moment still to come whether they do not remember ‘about the bread’. Clearly the act signifies something about his command over created reality. And, astonishingly, about theirs.

It is difficult to quantify the recurrence of miracle. On the other hand, it is nearly indisputable that—in the shadow of this report from Galilee—countless followers of Jesus have stood against the lethality of limitation and done the impossible.