The other temptations: Matthew 14:13-21

I find it hard to believe that the Jesus of Matthew's Gospel could have fed the 5,000 in the wilderness without recalling his own temptation. The parallels are so striking: wilderness, hunger, a craving for bread. Of course, we cannot know whether Jesus saw the connections, much less the seeming contradiction between his refusal to turn stones into bread on the first occasion and his apparent miracle of multiplying five loaves into 5,000 on the other.

Nevertheless, for me at least, the story of the feeding of the 5,000 is very much a "temptation" narrative. True, there is no devil mentioned here. But if you look carefully, you can see many of the pitfalls that bedevil the lives of "spiritual people."

The first of these is the temptation to treat our spiritual regimens as inviolable. At the beginning of the story, Jesus has withdrawn from his ministry in order to "recharge his batteries." Then the crowd shows up with its hunger, spiritual at first and then physical. Their needs represent everything from which he is "in retreat." He does not turn them away.