Feeding the Multitude
Comparative commentary by Mercedes Cerón
Feeding your guests is an act of hospitality. A good host ensures that food is not just sufficient, but plentiful, and that guests are comfortable, sheltered from the wind and the sun. The Bible includes a number of feeding stories in which the motif of the banquet has been read as prefiguring the institution of the Eucharist. Breaking and sharing bread appears in them as a symbol of physical and spiritual nourishment.
The Feeding of the Five Thousand can be found in all four canonical Gospels (Matthew 14:13–21; Mark 6:32–44; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–15), and the Feeding of the Four Thousand in two (Mark 8:1–10; Matthew 15:29–39). The miracle emphasizes Christ’s caring concern and compassion, but also his hospitality and his generosity as a host.
The story has precedents and parallels in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, such as Elisha’s feeding of the one hundred (2 Kings 4:42–44). It also—like the Elisha episode—lends itself to being read in Christian tradition as an allegory or foreshadowing of the Eucharist. All but one of the Gospel accounts of this Feeding refer to the four key actions of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving bread, around which the Eucharist is sacramentally structured. John is the only evangelist who omits the breaking of the bread in his account of the miracle, possibly because he regarded this gesture as too obvious to need mentioning.
John also differs from the three other evangelists in his mention of the young boy who shared his own food and made the miracle possible (John 6:8–9). The Gospel of Mark focuses on the relationships between Christ, his concerned disciples, and the hungry followers, eager to be taught and inspired. In Mark’s version, the apostles appear worried but also helpful, and they follow Jesus’s instructions without fully understanding them (Mark 6:37). The reader is thus invited to identify with them and to trust Jesus, even when his words seem incomprehensible.
In all three paintings in this exhibition, the central motif is Christ’s gesture of blessing and the baskets in which food will be distributed and leftovers collected. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo follows John’s version of the miracle, while Lambert Lombard’s interpretation is a more complex blending of narratives, and Francisco de Goya’s sources are less clear. Their approaches to the representation of the crowds are also different. Traditionally, Jesus’s followers are depicted either as a gathering of individuals whose diversity provides the painter with an opportunity to display his originality and skills, or as an undefined multitude.
Artists like Lombard suggest the breadth and universality of God’s message by showing its recipients as individuals of varying ages, genders, status, and ethnicities. In Murillo’s and Goya’s works, lack of definition turns these individuals into a mass, which evinces the magnitude of Christ’s following and the extent of his miraculous powers. Both Lombard and Murillo divide the crowd into small groups: Luke refers to ‘groups of about fifty each’ (9:14–15), while in the Gospel of Mark ‘they sat down in groups, by hundreds and by fifties’ (6:40). The wide sweep of Murillo’s landscape is populated by a large, expectant congregation, which in Goya’s interpretation becomes a barely sketched crowd agitated by a threatening, simmering sense of unrest.
Three evangelists—Matthew, Mark, and John—mention Jesus’s travel by boat with his disciples to flee the crowds (Matthew 14:13; Mark 6:32–33; John 6:1–3). They sailed across the Sea of Galilee in their failed search for solitude. The background of Lombard’s painting includes a seascape, where a shepherd looking after his flock near the beach recalls Jesus’s comparison of the crowds with ‘sheep without a shepherd’ (Mark 6:34). The landscape is dotted with cottages, farms, villages, and towns where the apostles suggested sending Christ’s hungry followers as the day advanced. The mountains and the lake mentioned by the evangelists still contextualise Murillo’s depiction of the miracle, while Goya entirely dispenses with them to focus on the behaviour of the crowds.
Although the biblical texts only refer to the number of men fed by Jesus and his apostles, women and children are included in the foreground of Lombard’s and Murillo’s paintings, and in the background of Goya’s. Mothers holding their infants could recall traditional representations of Charity. Even in Goya’s depiction of a largely undefined crowd, the diversity of Christ’s followers is celebrated, and a bearded man in a turban and a silk cloak stands next to a figure in a brightly coloured striped shawl, similar to the fabrics worn by Spanish street-sellers.
Everybody is included and anyone is welcome.
References
Adams, Sean A. 2011. ‘Luke’s Framing of the Feeding of the Five Thousand and an Evaluation of Possible Old Testament Allusions’, Irish Biblical Studies, 29.4: 152–69
Bassler, J. M. 1986. ‘The Parable of the Loaves’, The Journal of Religion, 66.2:157–72
Carroll, John T. 2012. Luke: A Commentary (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press)
Collins, Adela Yarbro. 2007. Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press)
Davies, W. D. and C. Dale. 2005. Matthew: A Shorter Commentary (London: Bloomsbury Publishing)
Keener, Craig S. 2003. The Gospel of John. A Commentary (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers)
______. 1999. A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub.)
