<p>6:37<em> But he answered and said to them: You give them something to eat. And they said to him: Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give it to them to eat?</em><i><br /></i>- The Lord told the disciples to feed the crowd, when they had nothing to give them. He was actually quoting from 2 Kings 4:42, where the man of God told his servant to do the same. He gave what bread he had to the people, and miraculously it fed them. The disciples don't seem to have seen the point; otherwise, they would have realized that if they went ahead in faith, another such miracle would likely be wrought. We too are given Divine nudges towards seeing Biblical precedents for our situations; but we may not always grasp them. Familiarity with the Bible text through regular re-reading is a great help here. But it seems that God almost over-ruled them to make the response of the faithless servant of 2 Kings 4:43: &quot;Shall we... give them to eat?&quot;. They were almost 'made' to do this to make them later see the similarity with the 2 Kings 4 incident. If they had been more spiritually aware at the time, the Lord's quotation would have been a fillip for their faith.</p><p>If a labourer worked for a denarius a day during harvest season, we can conclude that their figure of 200 denarii was a year's wages for a working man. Like us so often, they focused on the size of the problem rather than on the Lord's ability to move absolutely any mountain.</p><p>According to Jn. 6:5, the Lord also asked: &ldquo;From whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?&rdquo;. Even if money was no issue, the village shops simply had nowhere near the amount of food required. So in &ldquo;You give them&hellip;&rdquo;, the stress was not only on the word &ldquo;you&rdquo;. Perhaps it was more so on the word and concept of &ldquo;give&rdquo;, standing as it does in contrast to the disciples&rsquo; unrealistic and harsh expectation that these poor people go to a village and&nbsp;<em>buy</em>&nbsp;food. Surely the Lord had in mind Is. 55:1,2: &ldquo;Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food&rdquo;. He intended the disciples to see the connection and to figure that He would even provide them with free food, because they were seeking His word. We are confirmed in this idea by the way that He appealed to the crowd in the same discourse: &ldquo;Labour not for the food which perishes&rdquo; (Jn. 6:27), which is surely an allusion to Is. 55:2. Perhaps the disciples got the point- perhaps not. Often the Lord sets us up with situations in which we are intended to have our minds sent back to a Biblical verse or precedent as encouragement and guidance for us in our decisions. Whether or not we grasp it is a matter partly of our familiarity with the text of Scripture, but more significantly, our openness to this kind of spiritual prompting, and the idea of God&rsquo;s word being part of a living, two-way dialogue between Him and ourselves.</p>