THANK YOU **** THANK YOU VERY, VERY MUCH

John, the Evangelist, tells us that ‘Jesus gave thanks to the Father’. Some might rightly ask, ‘What need does Christ have of such thanksgiving, of ceremonies? Jesus IS God, He needs no permission to act, to perform miracles, so He is not bound to thank anyone. He spoke and things were made, people were cured, the sea calmed down and the winds obeyed His word. Why then, does He not simply command that the loaves be multiplied, and so be it?’

Jesus never needed to say a single word. He could have multiplied the loaves, without uttering a single syllable; it was enough ‘to will it’. Yet, Christ wanted to thank God the Father, and so He did. Consequently, a reason there must be. Christ thought it good to make use of the local ceremonies, to follow the Jewish rites, it was a formal practice, to let the crowd know that He was not teaching, addressing some other god, but the One, True Creator of heaven and earth.

More important still; He performed miracles not by trickery, through some magic formula, but by the power of the One and True God. Quack doctors abounded in great numbers, in the days of Jesus, to the detriment of the sick. And this is the message Christ wanted to pass over to the people. We nowhere read in the Gospel that a single sick person ever approached the Lord ‘In faith’, and was turned away, or remained without being healed.

We do not have on record all the miracles performed by Jesus. To date only about thirty-five miracles are mentioned in the Gospel, but Saint John tells us that if every act done by Christ, every word spoken, every deed performed, every miracle worked … the world would not hold the great number of books.

Christ wanted to teach the value of ‘thanksgiving’, and the power contained therein, in the fact that someone simply gives thanks for a good turn. In the process of His ‘Thanksgiving’ the five loaves and two fishes were blessed … increased and multiplied to such an extent that five thousand men were fed generously. Nowadays it is calculated that, including the women and children, the number must have been over nine thousand. We have to mention the twelve baskets collected from the left-overs.

Christ gave thanks to God the Father and thus multiplied a few loaves, in order to teach us that we do not normally experience multiplications in our daily affairs unless we first ‘thank God’ for the few or little things and use them, or share them with others, with gratitude.

Was the number ‘FIVE’ (loaves), and the ‘TWO’ (fishes), purely incidental? Some Biblical Scholars see a hidden message in the FIVE and TWO. As the thousands were fed with the five loaves and two fishes, we are spiritually fed … and saved, by the FIVE wounds of Jesus. The TWO has various suggestions; it can either be the TWO natures of Christ; the Divine Nature and the human nature. And it is worth remembering that FISH is ICHTHUS in Greek, which is a word made up of the first letters of the statement: Jesus Christ, Son of God Saviour.