The feeding of the multitude has always been one of my favorite Gospel readings. It’s a familiar story, the only miracle aside from the Resurrection that is included in all four Gospels, with, of course, some variations. For me, it’s the end of the story that strikes a chord. The part where, after taking an impossibly small amount of food and dividing it among an impossibly large number of people, the disciples were told to gather up the leftovers — 12 baskets of extra food, according to three of the Gospels, and seven baskets according to the fourth. I’m pretty sure the accuracy of the number isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that there was a lot of food left over. More food than the disciples found when they started looking for something to feed thousands of hungry people. Kind of like when we have a party or a barbecue, and I encourage all the guests to take leftovers (“Please, take as much as you want! Then take two more servings! Please!”) and somehow the refrigerator is more full when the last guest leaves than it was when the first guest arrived. I’m joking, sort of. It’s not a miracle that we have friends and family who are generous and often bring their own specialty dishes, or that leftovers in containers take up more room in the fridge than bulk food yet to be cooked. But it is a reminder that we have to trust that there is enough to go around, if only we are generous and share what we have. I have been at buffet-style functions where the food ran short by the time the last of the guests were served; in those cases, many of the first people in line loaded their plates with more food than they ended up eating, whether because their eyes were bigger than their stomachs, as my parents would say, or because they were afraid that the food would run out and they would not be able to get seconds. Scarcity then became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with some plates more than half-full of food being thrown out while some guests ate crackers and cheese with their meals. Better for everyone to take a modest portion, enough but not too much, first, and go from there. Because God did make enough to go around; it’s up to see that everybody gets their fair share. And gets fed before we get to the leftovers part. That’s the part we’re not always good at. Once we figure that out, we can turn our minds to the true mystery: What did the disciples do with all those leftovers?
About the Author Michelle Martin is staff writer at Chicago Catholic. Contact her at [email protected].