This scene follows directly after a Canaanite woman asked for crumbs from the children's table (15:21-28). Matthew lets her small answered prayer widen. A whole crowd now comes to Jesus, and Mark places this in the region of the Decapolis, Gentile country. The lame, the blind, the crippled, and the mute are laid at his feet, and he heals them for everyone to see. He does it on a mountain by the Sea of Galilee, sitting down as he sat to teach the Sermon, and the signs are the same ones he sent back to John in prison (Matthew 11:5), now given in Gentile country. Then Matthew records a phrase that only makes sense from outsiders. The crowd 31"glorified the God of Israel." They are outsiders watching a Jewish healer and concluding that the power in him belongs to Israel's own God.
Now the story turns to bread. Jesus says, 32"I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat." He adds that he is 32"unwilling to send them away hungry." The compassion begins with him, before anyone asks. He sees the need and names it. The people had come for healing and stayed three days, which says something about what they had found in him.
Then the disciples ask, 33"Where are we to get enough bread in such a desolate place?" It was only a chapter ago that Jesus fed five thousand with five loaves and two fish, and these same men carried the baskets afterward. They ask as though it never happened. Watching a miracle once is not the same as trusting that it will happen again.
Jesus asks the same question he asked before, "How many loaves do you have?" He takes the seven loaves and a few small fish, gives thanks, breaks them, and hands them through the disciples' own hands to the crowd. The method has not changed. What has changed is who is being fed. They 37"took up seven baskets full of the broken pieces left over."
Jesus raises the matter later, and gently. In the next chapter he asks them, "Do you not remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered?" (Matthew 16:9-10). He counts baskets because he wants them to count on him. Israel's bread was never the last bread he had to give, and there was more, ready on the far side of every line his own people assumed marked the edge of his mercy.
The next time a need in your life returns in a familiar shape, do what Jesus asks of these men. Remember what he has already done. Write the list down if you have to. Your own list of baskets is the reason to trust him again.
Prayer
Father, thank you that your compassion does not run dry once it has been spent, and that it crosses every border we assumed marked its edge. Thank you for the God of Israel who is also the God of every outsider who comes hungry and asks. Teach us to remember what you have done, so that we trust you again the next time the need returns. In Jesus' name, amen.