Jesus had just handed the problem back to the disciples. In the Greek He says "Give" and adds the pronoun "you" (hymeis), so the command lands squarely on them. Their question does the math out loud: feeding this crowd would take two hundred pennyworth of bread, and they were in a desert place. Gill reports the conjecture of Grotius and others that the sum "might be just the sum of money they now had in the bag," and says Jesus spoke "to try their faith, and make way for the following miracle." Matthew Henry is less gentle: "through the weakness of their faith, instead of waiting for directions from Christ, they perplex the cause with projects of their own." John records that Jesus put a similar question to Philip "to prove him: for he himself knew what he would do" (John 6:5-6).

Jesus answered with a question of His own: "How many loaves have ye? go and see" (Mark 6:38). They came back with "Five, and two fishes." He had the people sit "by companies upon the green grass," looked up to heaven, blessed, broke the loaves, and "gave them to his disciples to set before them" (Mark 6:39-41). "They did all eat, and were filled," twelve baskets of fragments were taken up, and about five thousand men had eaten (Mark 6:42-44).

"Pennyworth" translates the Greek denarion, the denarius, which Thayer describes as a Roman silver coin. In Jesus' parable of the labourers, a householder agrees to pay his workers "a penny a day" (Matthew 20:2), so two hundred pence was roughly two hundred days of a labourer's pay at that rate. Barnes, writing in the 1800s, valued it at "about twenty-eight dollars" in his day (Barnes on Matthew 14:16).

Gill adds Dr. Lightfoot's observation that two hundred pence was "a noted and celebrated sum among the Jews, and frequently mentioned by them." John's Gospel gives the same figure from Philip: "Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little" (John 6:7).

This question sits inside a story about the compassion of Jesus. Before any talk of bread, Mark says Jesus "was moved with compassion" because the people "were as sheep not having a shepherd" (Mark 6:34). Barnes explains that they had no one to teach and guide them, because the religious leaders "despised the common people and neglected them." Jesus first fed them with teaching, then with bread.

"Give ye them to eat" was not a trick. In the end the disciples did exactly that, but with bread that came from His hands: He "gave them to his disciples to set before them" (Mark 6:41). Matthew Henry says this miracle shows that Christ came "to be the great feeder as well as the great healer," and that "none are sent empty away from Christ, but those that come to him full of themselves." Later Jesus would ask the disciples to remember the twelve baskets from this day (Mark 8:19).