He commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass. — This, too, was done with a calm and orderly precision. They were to sit down in companies of fifty or a hundred each, and thus the number of those who were fed became a matter of easy calculation. St. Mark, with a vivid picturesqueness, describes them as presenting the appearance of so many beds of flowers in a well-ordered garden. The bright colours of Eastern dress probably made the resemblance more striking than it would be with a like multitude so arranged among ourselves.
Looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake. — The act was natural and simple enough, the “saying grace” (St. John uses the word, “giving thanks”) of the head of a Jewish household as he gathered his family around him. The formulæ in such cases were commonly short and simple, like our own, such e.g. as, “May God, the ever-blessed One, bless what He has given us.” Looking, however, to the teaching which followed the miracle, as in John 6, and to our Lord’s subsequent use at the Last Supper of the same words and acts, with others which gave them a new and higher meaning, we can hardly be wrong in thinking that as He now distributed the earthly bread to the hungering crowd, through the agency of His Apostles, there was present to His mind the thought that hereafter He would, through the same instrumentality, impart to souls that hungered after righteousness the gift of communion with Himself, that thus they might feed on the true Bread that cometh down from heaven.
It lies in the nature of the case, as a miracle of the highest order, that the process of multiplication is inconceivable in its details. Did each loaf, in succession, supply a thousand with food, and then come to an end, its place taken by another? Was the structure of the fishes, bone and skin and head, reproduced in each portion that was given to the guests at that great feast? We know not, and the Evangelists did not care to ask or to record. It was enough for them that the multitude “did all eat, and were filled.”