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The Gospel for this Sunday presents us with one of Christ’s miracles of feeding, multiplying five loaves and two fish so that they might feed more than 5,000 people.

When considering these miracle stories, it can be easy to get caught up in the miracle itself, the demonstration of divine power as support to our faith. With this miracle, however it is absolutely essential that we do not miss the details preceding the multiplication of the loaves and fishes if we want to understand what the Lord is doing.

There are two details that can illuminate the heart of this miracle for us. First, King Herod has just put John the Baptist to death. Christ, having lost his friend and cousin, responds to the news by going away “to a deserted place by himself.” While Christ is God and is therefore always with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he is also really a man. The death of John hurts him, and he wants to be alone to pray in his grief.

At the same time, when the crowds follow Christ out into that deserted place, his heart goes out to them. He delights in their presence with him. We can see this in the fact that he does not want them sent away to find food. The distances between the towns around the Sea of Galilee and the place where tradition holds that Christ worked this miracle are not great. It would not be a tremendous hardship for the people to disperse and go look for something to eat. Christ works the miracle because he does not want them to go away. He wants them to remain close to him, even as he grieves the loss of John.

So then, we already have a privileged look into the heart of Jesus even before the miracle happens. Though he is God, he is also a real human being, and he takes comfort in being with his disciples. His people console his heart. They are certainly not living perfect lives yet, their faith is not yet completely alive, and they do not understand Christ or his teachings very clearly. But Christ still does not want them to go away and is willing to work a miracle to keep them near him.

This insight continues to illuminate the multiplication of the loaves for us when we consider that the miracle is a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. The Gospel tells us that the Lord takes, blesses, breaks and then gives the loaves to the crowds; these are the same verbs used at the Last Supper as well as at the Mass. Christ is foreshadowing with this miracle the mystery by which he will give his very self to the people as their food.

In this miracle, he simply feeds the physical hunger of the crowd. In the Eucharist itself, he not only provides us with spiritual sustenance, feeding our spiritual hunger, but he brings us into union with himself.

Just as he wanted the crowds to be close to him, just as his heart took consolation from their presence, so now he longs for us to be with him where he is, and he delights in our being close to him by holy Communion. While it is obviously important that we be prepared to receive the Eucharist well, without mortal sin and in good standing with the church, it is also true that Christ delights in our union with him long before we ourselves live or understand perfectly.

With this in mind, we can see in the sacrament of the Lord’s body, his heart standing open and longing to embrace us.