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10 Of Loaves and Fishes

Still on this question of self-reliant struggle, with the belief that God helps only the self-reliant, many Filipino peasants love to tell the Biblical story of the five loaves and two fishes.

At one time, Mang Enteng relates as a peasant meeting, the Bible tells of a big problem of hunger affecting more than 5,000 people in the desert who had been following Christ to hear Him. The latter’s disciples did not know where to get food for so many who had been hungry for three consecutive days.

We could perhaps say, Mang Enteng muses, that because Christ is God, He had the power to let bread and viand rain down from heaven in quantities even exceeding the needs of the many hungry. But this Christ did not do.

He first asked His apostles if they had any food at all. His apostles answered that they only had five loaves and two fishes. Of what value were these considering such a big problem of hunger with which they were confronted?

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But Christ told them anyway: “Produce your five loaves and two fishes; bring them out.” This they did. Christ then blessed the loaves and fishes, and had them distributed to all the people present. Not only was there enough food for everybody; there was still some surplus.

In our present condition of mass hunger, Mang Enteng continues, many people are thinking as those hungry people in the desert did: Where can we get the food, how can we solve our problem? Don’t we peasants often ask: What can we do since we are so poor? As a result, so many are just awaiting God’s miracle to solve the social question, the problem of mass hunger. But if we consider it carefully, we know the miracle is not forthcoming. There will be no rain of bread and fish from heaven.

Rather, Mang Enteng emphasizes, the first thing we need to do to solve our problem is to produce, to bring out what we have no matter how meager, to share our five loaves and two fishes. We are endowed with brain and heart and muscle and a little money, perhaps, and the spirit of tenacity – these are some of the loaves we can gather together through organization which God will bless. Then many surprising things can happen.

Again, Mang Enteng reminds his friends, we often quote the Bible: “Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find, knock and it shall be opened to you." We need to struggle, to demand, to search, to knock before we can receive and have

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doors opened to us. This should be obvious, or what kind of world do we think it is wherein doors just, open without anyone knocking at all – a world of magic, perhaps, and not the real world. God wants to give in response to our; asking.