"You open wide your hand, O Lord, and grant our desires."
The psalm for Sunday’s Mass unlocks the Gospel of the feeding of the five thousand: John says Jesus feeds the crowd from his own hand, not through the hands of the apostles, as Matthew, Mark and Luke recorded.
Perhaps Jesus fed some of the crowd directly and the apostles looked after the rest - there is no need to assume a contradiction between the evangelists - but John is emphasising Jesus’s direct role.
He also includes an unmistakable echo of the Eucharist through the detail of Jesus "giving thanks", a verb that occurs in all the accounts of the Last Supper.
