Sharing food: Sharing food with one another is significant. Jesus makes sharing food on an equal footing with everyone one of the key points in his way of relating to the world. Just think of the groupings who will normally not eat together, but who sit down together here: men eating with women, those who are ritually pure with those who are unclean, Jews with Gentiles, peasants with those of a higher social order.
The Eucharist is essentially a meal, like the one that Jesus shares with the people in today’s miracle. It intends to bring together not only us with God, but us with one another. St. Thomas Aquinas said that the ultimate change that God sought in the Eucharist is not the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into Jesus’ body and blood, but the transformation of ourselves into Jesus’ presence. Our communion means that we receive the body of Christ in the Eucharist and perceive the body of Christ in our neighbor. We cannot share fruitfully in the first if we are unmindful of the second.