What does Matthew 15:35 mean?
For the last three days, people from the mostly Gentile region of the Decapolis have received healing and miracles from Jesus. He has expressed His compassion for their hunger, saying He does not want to send them away only to faint on the way home. He has collected the tiny amount of food the disciples have with them: seven loaves and a few fish (Matthew 15:29–34). In this way, the miracle again emphasized how God can take what little we bring Him and make it into abundance: so much so that there's a considerable amount left over (Matthew 15:37).Now Jesus directs the people in the crowd to sit down on the ground. During the first miraculous feeding (Matthew 14:13–21), the people were made to sit in groups of 50 and 100, which would have made it easier to count them and to hand out the food in an orderly way. We're not told if that happened in this case, though it seems likely since Matthew has a count of the number of people present.
Matthew 15:32–39 describes another miraculous feeding, separate from an earlier event where Jesus provided as many as twenty thousand meals (Matthew 14:13–20). Jesus has compassion on the hungry crowd after three days with them. He does not want to send them away without feeding them. He takes the disciples' seven loaves and few fish and makes all the people sit down. He gives thanks and starts handing food to the disciples, who pass it out until everyone has eaten all they want, which includes four thousand men plus women and children. While the first miraculous feeding was for a mostly Jewish crowd, this assembly is almost all Gentiles. After they leave, the disciples return to Jewish territory on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Pharisees and scribes come from Jerusalem to challenge Jesus. They are offended that His disciples break the religious leaders' tradition about ritual handwashing before meals. Jesus turns that attack upside down, pointing out that His critics honor tradition above God's actual commands! He insists that nobody is defiled by what goes in the mouth—by the literal matter itself—but by the overflow of the spirit, such as the words that come out of the mouth. He and the disciples travel out of the country. Jesus casts a demon out of the daughter of a persistent Canaanite woman. They travel to the southeast side of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus feeds thousands of people from a few loaves and fishes. These last two events set up the eventual spread of the gospel beyond the people of Israel.
