Matthew 14:13-23 – Bereavement, Hunger, and Our Daily Bread

As we transition to the next section of Matthew’s Gospel, it might help to look back to see how Matthew’s Gospel helps us understand how to better pray the Lord’s Prayer:

• Matthew 1-2 shows the Father’s hand in the birth and protection of his son, providing insight into ways to pray, Our Father in Heaven, hollowed be your name.
• Matthew 3-7 begins with John the Baptist preaching the coming kingdom and concludes with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, both showing the object of our prayers when we pray Your kingdom come…
• Matthew 8-9 reveals Jesus as he heals the downtrodden and the sick, showing what it means to pray, Your will be done
• Following Jesus’s comment that the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few, Matthew 10-14:12 shows Jesus teaching, warning, and sending the disciples out to preach the Father’s kingdom and do the work of the Father’s will on earth as it is in heaven.
• This brings us to the present section of Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew 14:13-17:27, where we are shown what it means to pray the next petition in the Lord’s Prayer: Give us this day our daily bread.

While most of us have been taught the Lord’s Prayer, we probably have not spent sufficient time meditating upon the subtle facets of each petition. But when we do, we often read the Lord’s Prayer on its own, which in the case of this present petition, usually leads us to thank God for the food he has supplied for our stomachs each day, but such a simplistic view shortchanges Jesus’s reason for telling us to pray in such a way.

Previously, I suggested that Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount expanded our understanding of this petition to include storing up treasures in heaven instead of on earth (Matt. 5:19-24), reliance upon God for food, drink, and clothing (Matt. 5:25-33), and anxiety about the future (Matt. 5:34), (Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer). But these prayers are not the full story of praying Give us this day our daily bread.

It is only when we see the Lord’s Prayer through the lens of the entirety of Matthew’s Gospel, (as we have been doing in this present study, Meditations on Matthew’s Gospel) that our understanding of the petition, “Give us this day our daily bread,” becomes nearly complete. Each layer (Layer 1: the Lord’s Prayer on its own, Layer 2: the Lord’s Prayer as seen through the Sermon on the Mount, and Layer 3: the Lord’s Prayer as seen through the Gospel of Matthew) amplifies and expands on the single petition, providing greater depth to our meditations as we pray the Lord’s Prayer.

The third layer of understanding Give us this day our daily bread in Matthew’s Gospel begins with a simple phrase, that first glance, may not seem to be about daily bread. Matthew writes,

13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself.

Matthew 14:13a

In the verses prior to this, Jesus had been told about John the Baptist’s death (Matt. 14:12). As a result, Jesus sought out a place of solitude where he could pray, something made essentially impossible by the large crowds following him. This need to be alone tells us that Jesus is human and indicates another reason we seek the Father’s presence.

Death leaves a hole in our lives, but death’s hole is not shaped solely in the form of the person who has died; death’s hole is larger and more pervasive than that. I expected the two obvious holes that came as a result of my parent’s death in places such as church, work, in the yard, at dinner, and over the holidays, but I didn’t expect the holes their death produced in other relationships. The part of my brothers that my parents brought out, both good and bad, were now gone. In a sense, the death of one person is the partial death of everyone connected to the one who has died. Anyone who has experienced death has experienced the fact that nature abhors a vacuum, and in our emptiness, we seek to fill those holes with drink, food, and activity, and some fill the emptiness in even more extreme ways. But death’s vacuum cannot be filled by anything other than our Father in heaven. We seek to satisfy our emptiness with bread that does not fill, even though the Father offered his Son to us as the bread from heaven that does not decay.

It was no different for Jesus when he lost John the Baptist: there was a hole in his life that needed to be filled. Jesus knew the earth offered him no means of satisfying his grief, so he turned to the Father. But Jesus also knew his grief would not disappear in a day. Grief can hold onto us for years, even a lifetime. And while some might suggest time heals all wounds, I think Jesus knew that time can do nothing but move us further away from the pain. Distance is no medicine. The only medicine for grief is the daily presence of the Father.

Matthew begins this section on how to pray Give us this day our daily bread with Jesus’s grief so we will realize that the Father’s daily presence is the only way in which we can withstand the continual existential angst of being human. Even Quoleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, after experiencing the ultimate emptiness derived from attaining every material good and pleasure known to man says, “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccl. 12:13). Our daily bread comes not from gold, silver, or precious stones, nor does it come from sensuality; our daily bread comes from our heavenly Father.

However, even though Matthew begins this section with Jesus seeking a desolate place by himself where he could be fed by the Father, Jesus’s plans were interrupted. Matthew writes,

But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. 15 Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 But Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Matthew 14:13b-21

Jesus, instead of pushing the people away, chose to meet the needs of others instead of retreating into a silence of his own choosing. He was willing to put his own needs aside because his heart was filled with compassion for the crowd, the same crowd he previously called “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36). Most of us, I would guess, do not have it within us to reach out and meet the needs of others while we are aching from such pain as Jesus felt from John’s death. But Jesus obviously was. I don’t think we need to draw the conclusion that in the midst of grieving we are called to reach out and help others, but we do need to know that Jesus, our lord and saviour, was and is such a person. In this moment of grief, Jesus’s compassion for others helps us see the sort of person we should strive to be, the sort of person Jesus wants to make of us.

After healing the sick, Jesus realized the many people surrounding him were hungry. At this point, we often move straight to the miracle and miss the important dialogue between Jesus and the disciples. The disciples didn’t say they were hungry or they needed food, they said the crowd needed food. They had five loaves and two fish, but that was probably enough food to feed themselves and Jesus. But when Jesus said, “you give them something to eat, they looked at their meager portion and realized they couldn’t spare any if they themselves were going to eat.

I’m not suggesting Jesus was telling them to give their small pack lunch to the first group of people they encountered, but I am suggesting that we miss the fact that the disciples were more concerned about whether they had enough food than they were with how to feed the crowd, and Jesus knew this. Jesus, who was serving others instead of seeking his own solitude, wanted the disciples to learn how to give from their own poverty. He was teaching them how to place others’ needs before their own.

Jesus took the small amount of food from his disciples, told the crowds to sit down and then he blessed the food, broke it, and returned it to the disciples so they could give it to the crowds. Jesus wanted the disciples to feed the masses with the food they had saved for themselves so they could see how in giving, they would receive: when the crowds were completely satisfied, there were twelve baskets of food left over. Twelve baskets of food and twelve disciples. This math is too simple and too obvious to miss. Jesus wanted the disciples to see that even when they give away everything they had, their Father in heaven would provide for each of them — all twelve — with enough daily bread to satisfy their needs.

This petition, “give us this day our daily bread,” uses the word “our” instead of “my.” The disciples were thinking only of themselves, but Jesus wanted their eyes to be focused on others. In the same way, Jesus wants us to see not only how the Father supplies our every need but how the Father, through us, wants to supply every need of all of his other children. If the disciples had huddled up and eaten the five loaves and two fish on their own, their stomachs may have been satisfied, but they would have missed seeing that the Father blesses others and amply provides for them when they place the kingdom’s needs before their own.

Following this, Matthew writes,

22 Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds.

Matthew 14:22

It seems like there is something missing here. We are told the disciples were put on a boat to head home, but we aren’t told what happened to the twelve baskets of extra food. Somehow I don’t think the baskets of food were left on the grass to mold and decay. I think each of the twelve disciples boarded the boat with a basket of their own. I wonder if the disciples while eating and laughing and talking about what had just happened, realized the lesson Jesus was trying to teach them? Did they do the math? Can I do the math? Can I see the lesson Jesus teaches when he performs the same miracle today? Or do I still hold onto my meager possessions afraid of giving and unwilling to accept that God can multiply my gifts to supply the needs of others?

After Jesus meets the needs of the crowd and satisfies his disciples, Matthew writes,

23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray.

Matthew 14:23

Jesus’s pain as a result of the death of his cousin, John the Baptist, still existed. After providing bread for the 5,000 and bread for his disciples Jesus finally was able to seek bread from his Father. The daily bread for which we pray is not merely that which can be placed on a dinner table but also that food for which we long in the deepest recess of our soul. To pray “Give us this day our daily bread” is to pray that the Father will provide for us, it is to pray that the Father will use the little we have to help others, and it is to pray that the Father will satisfy our emptiness in a way that nothing else can. When Jesus placed his bereaved and mourning soul aside so he could provide bread for his disciples and for the masses he showed us how to be citizens of the Father’s kingdom and to do the Father’s will here on earth as it is in heaven, but he also showed us what it means to pray “Give us this day our daily bread.”

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