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Why do you think the Feeding of the Five Thousand is the only miracle of Jesus that appears in all four Gospels? Explain your thoughts.
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16 Replies
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This miracle would be mentioned in all the gospels because all Jews would know the same story of how God provided the people manna with Moses and understand the example of how Jesus is feeding the 5,000. Provisions are coming from God.
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This miracle powerfully connects Jesus to Moses–the one who God uses to deliver his people from oppression into freedom, providing the sustaining manna for the 40 years of wilderness travel before entering the promised land. Jesus not only delivers God’s people from oppression into freedom, he IS the bread that gives us spiritual life, as John records him saying, but also as Jesus himself institutes as the sacrament of the new covenant in his final Passover meal with his disciples, and the church everywhere remembers with every observance of the Lord’s Supper.
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This shows Jesus humanity, deity and the necessity of having a relationship with Him and also is symbolic of Moses and the children of Israel being fed in the wilderness by God’s provision.
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In many miracles, Jesus was the only one initiating and accomplishing the miracle. I think that this particular miracle was prominent in the minds of the apostles, not least because Jesus involved them from beginning to end. Jesus challenged them to meet the enormous need: “You give them something to eat” (Mark 6:37). They went to do ground research when Jesus asked them how many loaves there were. After walking among the crowd to inquire, they found to their dismay only five loaves and two fishes! (Mark 6:38) They could feel the hopelessness and urgency of the situation. Then they were involved in seating the people, in distributing the replicating food, in collecting the surplus. Their personal involvement in surveying the people, digging out the scant resources, discussing solutions, fretting over the hopelessness, co-operating with the execution of Jesus’ provision, marvelling over the surplus – all these must have made an indelible impression on them to trust Jesus. Of course, Jesus must have meant it as an object lesson to build faith in them.
As Dr Blomberg said, many miracles of Jesus had an evidential purpose (they gave evidence that Jesus was the Son of God), an evangelistic purpose (they encouraged people who had little or no faith to believe), and an empathetic purpose (Jesus had compassion on the crowd who were hungry and so far removed from any eating place). Of course, this miracle of feeding the five thousand fulfilled these purposes like the other miracles do. The main reason for its inclusion in all gospels must be the deep impression the apostles got from being personally involved in the execution of this miracle. This explains the oft-stated axiom that many things are more caught than taught. We catch it by being a participant instead of an observer. Biblical truths work this way too.
#Miracles
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Practically, it was well known, and the account would have been familiar to people far and wide. This would allow more people to connect with it on a more personal level, drawing more significance as people share the gospels. It also shows all of the purposes of miracles that the speaker explained in the lecture: it gives evidence of Jesus’ divinity, it was evangelical in that many who were simply curious were able to hear and see Jesus’ power, it shows how Jesus cared for humanity with compassion for their needs, and it shows that the Kingdom was breaking through. Therefore, each gospel writer would have much to pull from for their different purposes – Mark-evidence, Matthew-eschatological, Luke-evangelical, and John-empathetic.
