By Quin Hillyer at PJ Media;
Two years ago on my own little website I wrote a short reflection on today’s Gospel reading (or John’s version thereof) about Jesus’ famous “feeding of the 5,000” with merely five loaves and two fish. John’s version (unlike the others) had mentioned that the fish were provided by a young-ish boy….
[Later in the column]….
It occurred to me this week to see what others far wiser have written about this miracle — the only miracle (so says the literature) recounted in all four Gospels. Naturally, I turned to my favorite Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis. I quickly found one passage, not at all an extensive one but still insightful.
The passage came in a book of essays collectively sold under the title The Grand Miracle. One major point of the first essay, “Miracles,” is that all of life as we know it is a miracle of God’s creation, not fully explicable without a creative and ordering power. The miracles done by Jesus, or God incarnate, have as “one of their chief purposes” the intent that “men, having seen a thing done by [Jesus’] personal power on a small scale, may recognize, when they see the thing done on a large scale, that the power behind [the large-scale thing] is also personal…. The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”….
[Still later in the column]…. For John’s Gospel to recognize that the fish was caught and offered by a small boy — and thus, as I theorized two years ago, to show that a small and seemingly unimportant act of our own kindness can be transformed by Christ into “something miraculously grace-filled and salvific” — is to recognize that God wants us to join Him, even in our own tiny ways, in his loving, creative, miraculous Genius. It is a Genius that keeps creating the everyday miracles of daily life, all around us, if we only will acknowledge it, and the miracles, as such…..
