Every year for the feast of St. Lucy, my family makes arancini, which are balls of rice mixed with cheese and egg that we fill with a meat sauce, cover with breadcrumbs and egg, and fry. One year, it turned out that I was making the arancini too big and we wouldn’t have enough for everybody. I quickly pivoted and started taking rice from the bigger arancini I had already made and made smaller ones. My uncle was amazed, and he kept telling people about how I seemed to make more arancini appear out of nowhere.

Clearly, what I did wasn’t a miracle. And unfortunately, some people interpret Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand in a similar way. They say that all the people in the crowd had brought some food with them and shared it, so that it was really a “miracle of sharing.” But why would we want to turn what is clearly a miracle into something mundane?

On the spiritual level, it’s because, as Michelle Benzinger says, we believe the lie that our God is a god of scarcity. But He is a God of abundance! The miracle of today’s Gospel shows it. Yet often we still live in the lie of scarcity.

To some extent, it makes sense. The Gospel begins with five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand men. That clearly is not enough. But Jesus does not want us to remain in that place. So He takes the bread, gives thanks, and gives it to the five thousand, and there are twelve wicker baskets full of leftover fragments!

Maybe we wonder why Jesus doesn’t feed everyone this way. In a way, what we’re really saying is, “Why doesn’t God do this for me?” But it’s not about the food. It’s about the fact that Jesus will provide us with more than enough.

We see this above all in the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, Jesus continues to feed us, not just with bodily food, but with His own Body and Blood. And even as we go to Mass every week, we might be tempted to give into the lie of scarcity. But God is giving us Himself; there is nothing more that He can give us.

The Gospel tells us that Jesus performs the miracle to test His disciples. They could have refused to follow Jesus’ command, but they obey, and through their faith, a miracle takes place. At every Mass, a greater miracle than the feeding of the five thousand takes place. It’s up to us to receive it.

When I was making the arancini, all I did was redistribute the rice that was already there, but God works true miracles of abundance in our lives. He will not abandon us because a situation is too difficult, though the way He come through might be in a way we might not expect, whether through five barley loaves and two fish or a little bit of bread and wine.

Father Frank