Feeding the Five Thousand

(John 6:4-13, GNB)

The time for the Passover Festival was near. Jesus looked around and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, so he asked Philip; “Where can we buy enough food to feed all these people?” (He said this to test Philip: actually he already knew what he would do.)

Philip answered, “For everyone to have even a little, it would take more than two hundred silver coins to buy enough bread.”

Another one of the disciples, Andrew, who was Simon Peter’s brother, said, “There is a boy here who has five loaves of barley bread and two fish. But they will certainly not be enough for all these people.”

“Make the people sit down,” Jesus told them. (There was a lot of grass there.) So all the people sat down; there were about five thousand men. Jesus took the bread, gave thanks to God, and distributed it to the people who were sitting there. He did the same with the fish, and they all had as much as they wanted.

When they were all full, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces left over; let us not waste a bit.” So they gathered them all and filled twelve baskets with the pieces left over from the five barley loaves which the people had eaten.