Matthew 15:1-20; Mark 7:1-23;
Matthew 15:21-31; Mark 7:24-37;
Matthew 15:32-39; Mark 8:1-10
Then Jesus called His disciples to Him and said, “I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with Me now three days and have nothing to eat. And I am unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.” And the disciples said to Him, “Where are we to get enough bread in such a desolate place to feed so great a crowd?”
Matthew 15:32-33
What a dumb question, right?! The disciples previously witnessed Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000, so how can they possibly wonder where they can get enough bread? And so we chuckle to ourselves, thinking what numbskulls the disciples must be. But don’t we act the same way? Don’t we look around at our circumstances, virtually every day, and fail to factor Jesus into the equation?
In defense of the disciples, we do not know how much time has transpired between the feeding of the 5,000 and the feeding of the 4,000. It is at least several days, probably weeks, perhaps months. In that time Jesus has presumably given them no hint of a repeat performance. It is not like He opened up a side business of a daily all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, complete with a water-to-wine beverage upgrade option. The disciples are surely instead quite reaccustomed to getting their meals in the usual way, buying their food in the marketplace like the rest of us. And besides, this is all new to them. These guys did not grow up reading the Gospels in Sunday School.
We, on the other hand, know these stories already, or at least we have the opportunity to know them. And we know (or can know) the rest of the story, too. And yet we, like the disciples, grow so used to doing things “the usual way” — the steady, practical, tried-and-true, daily-grind kind of way — that we forget that Jesus is here at hand. OK, maybe you don’t, but I do. So I, for one, have no business laughing at the disciples for their “dumb” questions.
See also: