25. THE MIRACULOUS FEEDING OF FOUR THOUSAND

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MATT. XV. 32-39; MARK viii. 1–9.

LMOST all which might be said upon this miracle, the preceding one in the same kind (Matt. xiv. 15) has anticipated already; to which therefore the reader is referred.' Whether this was wrought nearly in the same region, namely, in the desert country belonging to Bethsaida,2 and not rather on the western, as the former on the eastern, side of the lake, has been sometimes debated. On the whole it is most probable that the scene of it was almost the same; for thither the narrative of St. Mark appears to have brought the Lord. Leaving the coasts of Tyre and Sidon after the healing of the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman, He is reported to have again reached the sea of Galilee, and this through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis (vii. 31). But all the cities of the Decapolis save one lay beyond Jordan, and on the eastern side of the lake; this notice therefore places Him on the same side also. The fact that immediately after the miracle He took ship and came to the region of Magdala (Matt. xv. 39), points the same way; since Magdala was certainly on the western

1 Augustine (De Cons. Evang. ii. 50) observes well that if this miracle had been recorded by Evangelists who had not recorded the similar miracle preceding, and by no other, there would inevitably have been some who, assuming the several narratives to be records of one and the same event, would have found here more discrepancies than one between the several Gospels; and he takes occasion hereupon to lay down an important canon of Scripture interpretation; see Archdeacon Lee, Inspiration of Holy Scripture, 3rd edit. p. 394.

2 Not Bethsaida, 'the city of Andrew and Peter,' but the Bethsaida already mentioned, p. 279.

side, and He more probably took ship to cross the lake than to coast along its shores.1

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With many points of likeness, there are also somet points of unlikeness in the two miracles. Here the people had continued with the Lord three days, while on the former occasion nothing of the kind is noted; the provision too is somewhat larger, seven loaves and a few little fishes,' instead of five loaves and two fishes; while the number fed is somewhat smaller, four thousand now instead of the five thousand then; and the remaining fragments in this case fill but seven baskets, while in the former they had filled twelve. It does not need to observe

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1 St. Mark, who for Magdala substitutes Dalmanutha, does not help us here, as there are no further traces of this place. That it was on the western side of the lake we conclude from the fact that Christ's leaving it and crossing the lake is described as a departing is rò méρav, an expression in the New Testament applied almost exclusively to the country east of the lake and of Jordan. In some maps, in Lightfoot's for instance, Magdala is placed at the S.E. of the lake; but this is a mistake, passages which he himself quotes from Jewish writers (Chorograph. 76), showing plainly that it was close to Tiberias. It is most probably the modern El-Madschdel, lying on the S. W. of the lake, and in the neighbourhood of the city just named. So Greswell, Dissert. vol. ii. p. 324; Winer, Realwörterbuch, s. v. Magdala; Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. iii. p. 278.

2 All four Evangelists, in narrating the first miracle, describe the baskets which were filled with the remaining fragments as Koḍivove, while the two who relate the second no less agree in using there the term orvpidas. That this variation was not accidental is clear from our Lord's after words; when referring to the two miracles, He preserves the distinction, asking his disciples how many koqirovg on the first occasion they gathered up; how many avoidas on the second (Matt. xvi. 9, 10; Mark viii. 19, 20). What the distinction was, is more difficult to say. The derivation of κόμινος from κόπτω (=ἀγγεῖον πλεκτόν, Suidas), and σπυρίς from sipa, does not help us, as each points to the baskets being of wicker-work; see, however, another derivation of σvɔig in Greswell (Dissert. vol. ii. p. 358), and the distinction which he seeks to draw from it. Why the Apostles should have been provided with the one or the other has been variously explained. Some say, to carry their own provisions with them, while they were travelling through a polluted land, such as Samaria. Greswell rather supposes, that they might sleep in them, so long as they were compelled to lodge sub dio; and quotes Juvenal (Sat. iii. 13): Judæis, quorum cophinus foenumque supellex; cf. Martial (Epigr. v. 7), who mockingly calls the Jews cistiferos. It appears from Acts ix. 25 that the ovpis might be of size sufficient to contain a man: compare Blunt, Undesigned Coincidences, 1847, p. 271.

that these trivial differences do not in the slightest measure affect the miraculous element in this work of power.

At first it excites some surprise that the disciples, with that other miracle fresh in their memories, should on this second occasion have been as seriously perplexed how the multitude should be fed as they were on the first. Yet this surprise rises out of our ignorance of man's heart, of our own heart, and of the deep root of unbelief which is there. It is evermore thus in times of difficulty and distress. All former deliverances are in danger of being forgotten; the mighty interpositions of God's hand in former passages of men's lives fall out of their remembrance; each new difficulty appears as one from which there is no extrication; at each recurring necessity it seems as though the wonders of God's grace were exhausted and have come utterly to an end. He may have divided the Red Sea for his people, yet no sooner are they on the other side, than because there is no water to drink, they murmur against Moses, and count that they must perish for thirst, crying, 'Is the Lord among us, or not' (Exod. xvii. 1-7)? or, to adduce a still nearer parallel, He who opens his hand and fills all things living with plenteousness may have once already covered the camp with quails (Exod. xvi. 13), yet for all this even Moses himself cannot believe that He will provide flesh for all that multitude (Num. xi. 21, 22). It is only the man of a full-formed faith, of a faith which Apostles themselves at this time did not possess, who argues from the past to the future, and truly derives confidence from God's former dealings of faithfulness and love (cf. 1 Sam. xvii. 34-37; 2 Chron. xvi. 7, 8). Nothing then but a strange unacquaintance with the heart of man could have led any to argue that the disciples, with their previous experience of one miracle of this kind, could not

1 Calvin: Quia autem similis quotidie nobis obrepit torpor, eo magis cavendum est ne unquam distrahantur mentes nostræ a reputandis Dei beneficiis, ut præteriti temporis experientia in futurum idem nos sperare doceat, quod jam semel vel sæpius largitus est Deus.

a a second similar occasion have been perplexed how the wants of the multitude should be supplied; that we have therefore here an illustration of the general inaccuracy which prevails in the records of our Lord's life, of a loose tradition, which has told the same event twice over.

Moreover this perplexity of theirs is capable of another explanation. Could it not easily have happened that the disciples, perfectly remembering how their Master had once spread a table in the wilderness, and fully persuaded that He could do it again, might still doubt whether He would choose a second time to put forth his creative might; -whether there was in these present multitudes that spiritual hunger, which was worthy of being met and rewarded by such an interposition of divine power; whether they too were seeking the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness, and might thus claim to have all other things, those also which pertain to this lower life, added unto them? But such earnest seekers, for the time at least, they were; and as others had faith to be healed, so these had faith to be fed; and the same bounteous hand which fed the five thousand before, fed the four thousand

now.

1 It is at least an ingenious allegory which Augustine proposes, namely that these two miracles severally set forth Christ's communication of Himself to the Jew and to the Gentile; that as the first is a parable of the Jewish people finding in Him the satisfaction of their spiritual need, so this second, in which the people came from far, even from the far country of idols, is a parable of the Gentile world. The details of his application may be of no very great value; but the perplexity of the Apostles here concerning the supply of the new needs, notwithstanding all that they had already witnessed, will then exactly answer to the slowness with which they, as the ministers of the new Kingdom, recognized that Christ was as freely given to, and was as truly the portion of, the Gentile as the Jew. This sermon the Benedictine Edd. relegate to the Appendix (Serm. lxxxi.), but the passage about Eutyches may easily be, indeed evidently is, an interpolation; and the rest is so entirely in Augustine's manner, that I have not hesitated to refer to it as his. Hilary had before him suggested the same: Sicut autem illa turba quam prius pavit, Judaicæ credentium convenit turbæ, ita hæc populc gentium comparatur.

26. THE OPENING THE EYES OF ONE BLIND AT

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BETHSAIDA.

MARK Viii. 22-26.

MIRACLE peculiar to St. Mark, and in many of its circumstances closely resembling another, which he has recorded a little while before (vii. 31-37), and which also is exclusively his. It thus in its most important features has been treated of already. As the Lord took that other sufferer, of whom the same Evangelist alone keeps a record, aside from the multitude' (vii. 33), even so He took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town;' and with the same moisture from his own mouth wrought his cure. The Lord, as was so often his custom, veiling more or less the miraculous in the miracle, links on his power to means already in use among men; working through these means something higher than they could themselves have produced, and clothing the supernatural in the forms of the natural. Thus did He, for example, when He bade his disciples to anoint the sick with oil,-one of the most esteemed helps for healing in the East (Mark vi. 13; cf. Jam. v. 14). Not the oil, but his word, should heal; yet without the oil the disciples might have found it too hard to believe in the power which they were exerting,—those who could only be healed through their faith, to believe in the power which should heal them. So the figs laid on Hezekiah's boil were indeed

1 Bengel: Cæco visum recuperanti lætior erat aspectus cæli et operum divinorum in naturâ, quam operum humanorum in pago.