There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two small
fish, but what are they among so many?
John 6:9 NKJV
When my friend, Anne, asked me to coauthor her children’s
sermon on the topic of unleavened bread, I started to read about barley because
I knew it to be the grain of the common (poor) people in the Bible. It was purely an economic decision on their
part because wheat was three times the price of barley.
The number of stories in the OT having barley at the heart
of them was surprising to me. I read several
of them and found that the destruction of the barley fields was part of the 7th
plague (Ex. 9:31-32); Ruth met Boaz because she and Naomi returned to Bethlehem
during barley harvest (Ruth 1:22); and it made me smile when I read that Gideon
interpreted the dream of a man who told of seeing a loaf of barley bread roll
down a hill and flatten a tent to mean that he would have victory in battle
against the Midianites (Judges 7:13).
But how does one find the hidden message in the miracle of
Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000? According
to one bible scholar you have to compare Elijah’s feeding of the poor widow and
her son by keeping her flour bin full after she had used her last handful of
flour to feed Elijah (1Kings 7:15-16) and Elisha’s feeding 100 men with 20
loaves of barley bread (2 Kings 4:42-44) to Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 with 5 loaves. The
people that Jesus was teaching thought Jesus to be a prophet. They would have known both Elijah’s and
Elisha’s stories. By comparison, when
Jesus fed the 5,000 with 5 loaves, He was showing Himself to be greater than
the prophets.
Without the prompting to make this comparison, I would have
completely missed that hidden message! Did you miss it, too?
Prayer: Thank You,
Father, for the scriptures which reveal the glory of Your Son, Jesus’, miracles
and for showing us that sometimes we just need to read between the lines to get
Your message. In Jesus’ name we
pray. Amen
Judy Welch
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