TRANSLATION MATTHEW 15:32

Jesus gathered his pupils and said, “I’m gutted for the crowd who have already been here with me three days without having anything to eat. I don’t want to send them off, in case they collapse on the way.”

But the pupils said to him, ” Where in this wilderness are we to get enough bread to feed such a crowd?”

Jesus said to them, “How many loaves do you have?”

“Seven,” they said, “And a few tiny fish.”

Then he ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground, took the loaves and the fish, and once he had given thanks to God, he broke them, and gave to his pupils who in turn gave to the crowd. They all ate and were satisfied. And they collected seven full baskets of leftover pieces. Those who ate numbered four thousand men, not counting children and women.

And when he had let the crowd depart, he got into the boat and came into the territory of Magadan

We should note the connection with the previous passage: Matthew insists on connecting Jesus miraculous feeding with his compassionate healing of people. In that connection he has referred to Isaiah 53, “He himself bore our illnesses and carried our diseases” – Jesus’ healings are not mere acts of power, but rather of therapeutic transference. The king who feeds his people does so at a cost to himself.

I have used the informal word ‘gutted” because it is a precise equivalent of the Greek word which refers to the bowels.

The whole incident is narrated to match the story of the feeding of the 5000. The numbers only are different, “Seven” is emphasised here, which almost certainly refers to the traditional number of gentile nations in the Jewish tradition. Jesus is presented as the compassionate king of gentiles as well as Jews. The fact is however, that this presentation is symbolic, maybe even coded. Would a gentile member of Matthew’s community have been able to decode it? Both presentations of Jesus as true king are made without explicit language through numbers and stories of feeding. I don’t know why he, and Mark his source, did this.

The language of the feeding of the 4000, like that of the 5000 reminds the attentive reader of the language of the last supper, and therefore of the Christian eucharist. In this case, the Greek root eucharistein, to give thanks, which is used here by Matthew, may already have come to describe the Jesus meal in the young assemblies of believers.

There is clearly in all the gospels a tradition of Jesus eating with people, and of him telling stories about meals, some of which may relate to the the common belief that the victorious messiah of Israel would celebrate his divinely empowered victory with a banquet for the faithful. It is at least possible, if by no means certain, that in his ministry Jesus shared meals with large crowds in secret places, where his messianic status was acknowledged. If so, these would have been secret and spoken about only in code. Matthew’s oblique narratives of feeding may ultimately derive from events in Jesus’ ministry.

The above does not rule out another connection: with the narrative in Exodus of the divine feeding of the hungry people IN THE WILDERNESS, with quails and manna.

The belief that Jesus is the true messiah of Israel is handled with discretion by Matthew (as it was also by Jesus?). When Peter expresses his conviction that Jesus is the Messiah, he is praised and given authority, but when he misinterprets its meaning for Jesus, he is firmly put in his place. Perhaps Matthew would have approved of Paul’s habit of referring to Jesus as the “crucified Messiah.”