Jesus suggests that the crowd were looking for Jesus because he had fed them, met their material needs, not because the miracle was a sign of who Jesus is. The two passages are linked with this theme of food, and misunderstanding or maybe a reluctance to engage more...

The feeding of the 5000 is described in all four gospels – the only one of Jesus’s miracles or signs that is. Each gospel writer focuses in slightly different ways – John tells us about the boy, about the green grass, and that the crowd wanted to make Jesus “king”....

Our readings Sunday are a rather ―mixed bag – or so they seem to me. Our gospel reading is a split with the middle section (the feeding of the 5000) taken out, because we will hear this when we move to John‘s gospel in a week or two. But it is strange to cut out the...