Mark 8:4

BREAD IN THE WILDERNESS

‘From whence can a man satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?’

Mark 8:4

These words were the question of the disciples which drew forth the answer of beneficent miracle. These same words, in a deeper spiritual sense, are the question which the world has asked in all ages from the same Divine Compassion in regard to man’s pilgrimage through the wilderness of life.

I. The beneficent miracles.—The miracles of feeding the five thousand and the four thousand are, as miracles of the quasi-creative power, absolutely incomprehensible to us.

(a) They stand out, perhaps beyond all others, as wonders; while their meaning as signs of a Divine compassion and beneficence comes most easily home to us.

(b) They produced a wider and more startling effect than usual upon the mass of men. The multitude hailed Him with enthusiasm as the promised Messiah; they were (John 6:15) prepared to take Him by force to make Him their king.

(c) The spiritual significance of these miracles is brought out with especial clearness by John in connection with the feeding of the five thousand. In our Lord’s subsequent discourses to His disciples and to the Jews (John 6:26) He draws out the whole tenor of that significance.

II. The wilderness of life.—How can men be supplied in this wilderness of pilgrimage with the bread which, like the angel’s food given to Elijah (1 Kings 19:6), shall sustain them in their journey to the mount of God’s unveiled presence?

(a) We may not exclude from our thoughts the ‘daily bread,’ of ‘all things needful for our souls and bodies’ here, for which our Lord bade us pray.

(b) But it is on the spiritual sense that the miracle, as interpreted by our Lord’s own teaching, would bid us lay stress. It is a ‘spiritual food and sustenance’ which He gives, or rather which He is to us; or, to use St. Paul’s fuller description, it is in Him that we ‘all eat the same spiritual meat, and all drink the same spiritual drink’—the meat for ‘the strengthening,’ the drink for ‘the refreshing’ of our souls. This great truth we realise in its fullest sense in the Holy Communion. Not only by faith, but by spiritual experience, we know that through it we have the indwelling of Christ in us, which is our eternal life.

(c) It is to all human life that His promise applies. ‘He that cometh unto Me shall never hunger, and He that believeth on Me shall never thirst.’

—Bishop Barry.

Illustration

‘ “It is well known,” so runs the Homily, “that the meat we seek for in this Supper is spiritual food; the nourishment of our soul; a heavenly refection and not an earthly; an invisible meal and not bodily; a ghostly substance, and not carnal; so that to think that without faith we may enjoy the eating and drinking thereof, or that that is the fruition of it, is but to dream a gross carnal feeding, basely objecting and binding ourselves to the elements and creatures.… That when thou goest up to the reverend Communion to be satisfied with spiritual meats, thou look up with faith upon the holy body of thy God, thou marvel with reverence, thou touch it with the mind, thou receive it with the hand of thy heart, and thou take it fully with thy inward man. Thus, we see, beloved, that, resorting to this table, we must pluck up all the roots of infidelity, all distrust in God’s promises, that we make ourselves living members of Christ’s body. For the unbelievers and faithless cannot feed upon that precious body. Whereas the faithful have their life, their abiding in Him, their union and, as it were, their incorporation with Him.” ’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE BREAD OF LIFE

The multitude are an emblem of humanity, the wilderness of the world, and Christ’s miracle of the provision amidst the world’s barrenness and emptiness of the Bread of Life, eternal life.

I. The powerlessness of the world to supply the deepest wants of men.

(a) There are needs and pangs of spiritual hunger.

(b) The wilderness is silent to man’s appeal.

II. Satisfaction through Christ.—Coming into the world He satisfies these wants, and enriches the poor and hungering souls of men.

(a) The true Bread of Life is not from or of the wilderness, but is nevertheless in the wilderness.

(b) Christ, as the living bread, communicates Himself to our souls.

(c) They who in the wilderness eat of this bread are satisfied.

(d) To eat of this provision in the wilderness is a foretaste of the feast above.

Illustration

‘A lifeless body has no power of assimilating food. A feeble, living body can only assimilate a little, administered by degrees. But a body with the pulses of life beating strong and quick within it, a hungry and craving body, can assimilate it thoroughly and easily, and grow thereby. And the soul resembles the body. With a feeble, spiritual pulse we can apprehend Christ but feebly in the Holy Communion; but if there be a strong hunger and thirst after righteousness, a strong craving for the Bread of Life, a strong sense of spiritual poverty and indigence, a strong resolve formed in reliance on God’s grace, a strong faith which pierces the veil of things sensible and material, great will then be the comfort received from this Holy Communion, and in the strength of that meat we shall go forward, like Elijah of old, to the mount of God, the end and goal of our pilgrimage.’