Lent Meditation: Day 23 - March 12, 2026

📖 Scripture Verse

Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled;…Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand.

—Mark 6:41-42,44

🕯️Meditation

At the core of human need is food and nourishment.  At the heart of human community is meal-fellowship.  At this point in Jesus’ ministry, he has been teaching the crowd, feeding them with spiritual wisdom (6:34).  Out of the scant loaves and fish available, Jesus miraculously tends to their physical needs too, and creates a community in the process.  This miraculous multiplication of loaves is the only miracle that occurs in all four gospels.  It is such a foundational memory of Jesus’ work that each gospel writer, even though each has their own theological story of Jesus they are trying to tell, incudes this story.

The disciples distribute the food, but Jesus is the host.  The actions of taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, and distributing it have been the shape of our Holy Communion meal ever since.  At each service, the priest holds the bread and cup, blesses them, breaks the bread, and shares it with the people.  In this story, ordinary food becomes eucharistic.

Our world is so rushed and frantic that we sometimes eat on the go.  We catch meals as we can, and families may not be able to eat and pray together very often. Something of God’s provisioning identity is obscured when we succumb to this pressure.  In 2003 I was in Rwanda with some Anglican seminarians.  It was a hot day and we had been walking a ways and so stopped at a roadside shop to get sodas.  We sat at the table and immediately one of the students began to say grace.  I would never have thought to stop to pray in gratitude for a pop, but we did—thanking God for the refreshment, for the gift of friendship and companionship, and in thanks for having the resources to buy a cold drink on a hot day.

While we may not stop to pray before every potato chip or sweet tea, what might happen in our inner lives if we restored some eucharistic spirituality, not just to Holy Communion, but to breakfast, snack, and the late night open refrigerator?

🙏 Prayer

Give us grateful hearts, our Father, for all thy mercies, and make us mindful of the needs of others; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 835)

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