10th Sunday after Pentecost

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000 is the only miracle reported in all four gospel accounts. Additionally, Matthew and Mark report another such feeding, that one of 4,000 people. This must have been a really famous, popular, meaningful story in New Testament times. Judging by the frequency with which it is used in Vacation Bible School materials, it still is.

With this miracle being so beloved and widely told, it is surprising just how little we learn about the miracle itself. What we learn about it from Matthew today is this: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, Jesus looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowd.” That’s it.

From this brevity, I deduce that the “how” of the miracle was not what made this story famous; it was rather the “why”, the “what does it say about Jesus”, and the “what do we learn about the character of God”.

With this in mind, I took some time this week to study the details of the story. I tried to picture what took place that day, in order to gain the full message and the full blessing of this story.

Here are some of the details I discovered:

One: This whole episode took place in a really deserted place. Jesus had sought some alone-time, but the crowds found out where he was heading and beat him to the place. They are not near any villages or towns, but in a very remote corner. In fact, the Greek word Matthew uses here describes actual desert or wilderness.

Two: This gathering with Jesus, the disciples, and the crowd lasted all day. I had always thought the people came to Jesus, he preached a sermon, and then everybody ate and went home. However, Jesus doesn’t preach. Jesus heals. He cured their sick, we read. And the next sentence begins with “when it was evening”. Jesus spent hours healing people. A sermon isn’t mentioned at all. This is a healing event. Jesus heals one person after another until suddenly, it is evening.

Three: There were children there that day! Children are so rarely mentioned in the Bible, it deserves to be noted that Matthew specifically says women and children were in the crowd. People of all ages, whole families, it seems, flocked to Jesus for healing.

Four: Jesus doesn’t give the food to the people – the disciples do. Jesus enlists the help, the work, the resources of the disciples in this miraculous feeding: he uses their meager provisions of five loaves of bread and two fish, and he uses their initially rather doubtful and reluctant hands. Jesus blesses what they have and do, and that in turn blesses thousands of people.

Five: Jesus has compassion. When he gets to the deserted place where he hopes to have some peace and quiet, a crowd awaits him. A needy crowd, no less. Yet Jesus doesn’t turn the boat around to head somewhere else. Jesus has compassion. Matthew writes, “Jesus saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them”. This is more than just pity, more than just feeling sorry for these poor folks. This compassion Matthew writes about is a feeling in your inner organs, what we would describe as “gut-wrenching”. Jesus sees the needy, desperate crowd, and he almost doubles over at the sight of it, so deeply does he feel their pain.

Here, then, is the picture that emerges: Jesus longs for some quiet time away from it all. When he arrives on shore, he is met by a crowd so desperate his heart breaks for them. So he spends all day with them, ministering to them, healing them, loving them.

Before anyone notices, evening is falling. The people are hungry. They are far away from any villages where food might be purchased; they might not have had the money to buy food, anyway.

Jesus invites the disciples to offer what they have: five loaves of bread and two fish. He blesses these gifts, gives them back, and has the disciples hand them out. And lo and behold, thousands of people get to eat their fill, and on top of that there are leftovers. Amazing.

It is even more amazing in light of the sixth detail I had not noticed before. Matthew’s first line in today’s story is this: “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.” What was it that Jesus had just heard?

On Sunday mornings, we read the gospel in segments that often skip verses, thus we don’t get to read the context in which the events take place. What Matthew tells us immediately prior to the Feeding of the 5,000 is the terrible story of the beheading of John the Baptist.

John was Jesus’ cousin. John was the prophet in the wilderness who announced the coming of the Messiah and thus prepared Jesus’ ministry. John baptized Jesus. John preached against many of the same abuses and injustices Jesus fought. They were kin and engaged in the same struggle of making God’s will shape the lives of individual believers and of society as a whole.

Now John was dead. He had been in jail because of his fervent preaching, including his criticism of King Herod and his marriage to his former sister-in-law. At his birthday party, the king wanted to show off his stepdaughter’s dancing skills. So enamored was he by her dancing that he promised her whatever she wanted, even half his kingdom. Her mother egged her on to ask for the head of John the Baptist. And that’s what she got.

What a terrible deed of senseless brutality and injustice.

Jesus’ heart must have been broken. He gets into a boat to find time alone to grieve his cousin, this fierce prophet of the Lord. Jesus needs time to pray, seeking guidance for his own ministry after such a shock. And Jesus might have wanted to be safe for a bit while he figured all this out; if John could be beheaded, so could Jesus.

Jesus is seeking respite and time to grieve. What he finds instead is 5,000 plus needy people. Poor Jesus.

These words of one commentator moved me: “Have we ever pondered how Jesus addresses the hurts of the people from right out of the middle of his own deep hurt? Maybe a fresh way to approach this exceedingly familiar story is not to picture – or proclaim – Jesus as the one who is serenely above it all, pulling the necessary levers behind the scenes to generate an abundance of bread and fish. Maybe we need to see Jesus as the one with red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks and whose hands are trembling for the sorrow of it all.  And yet out of his own scarcity, out of his own emotional trainwreck, he manages to bring forth an abundance of life and joy.”

What an image, right? Jesus hurting and grieving his personal loss, and yet also moved by gut-wrenching compassion to minister to God’s hurting children. This is so moving, so powerful.

This image of Jesus fits well with his birth as a son of a young, poor couple in a barn. It fits with Jesus as a baby having to escape to Egypt for safety and living there as a refugee. It fits with Jesus calling simple fishermen as his first disciples, with Jesus hanging out with outsiders and rejects, with Jesus dying on a cross between two criminals and being buried in a borrowed tomb.

Jesus came to be one of us. He fully entered our lives with their joys and celebrations, as well as their sorrows and heartbreaks.

Our salvation comes not from a remote God flexing divine muscles, but from a God who shares our poverty and weakness, who identifies with us, who suffers with us and for us.

That is exactly the God I need right now. I am growing so weary. I am exhausted by the wars going on in so many places, by images of refugees longing for a safe haven, by the climate crisis and the heat and wildfires it seems to cause, by the lines of hungry families at our local food pantry.

I am depressed by the political landscape. Will we ever overcome the deep divisions between right and left? Will we have open and fair elections this fall? Will our elected leaders place the common good before their own benefit?

It is so soothing and uplifting to hear today of Jesus feeling the pain of the desperate crowd. The people before him are just as weary. They are exploited by the Romans and their exorbitant taxes. They are being hung out to dry by their own king who has sold out to the Romans and won’t fight for them. They are being either ignored or reprimanded by the religious leadership that worries only about everyone paying their temple taxes and obeying the laws, but cares not at all about the plight of the farmers and day-laborers, 80% of the population, who can’t feed their families.

Jesus sees the injustice and pain of it all, and it makes him double over in agony. And then he spends the day with these poor, exhausted, hurting people. He heals them. And he feeds them. And he loves them. And he treats them like the beloved children of God they are. It is this love and care that is so meaningful to the people that they keep telling the story of this amazing day in the desert.

We are gathered to spend time with Jesus. We are the hurting crowd, and Jesus comes and soothes our woes. Jesus feeds us. Jesus heals our bodies and our spirits. Jesus loves us. Jesus assures us that we are beloved children of God.

And Jesus invites us into this work. He blesses what we have to offer, even if it seems little and insignificant to us. He blesses it and calls us to hand it out in faith and love. He promises that our love will be multiplied in miraculous ways and touch people’s lives and bring hope and healing to the world.

The last time I preached on this text was six years ago, when we were in the middle of COVID, when we all certainly were quite weary. Here is what I shared at that time:

“One of our church members was to have a scary surgery on her pituitary gland this past week. She was really scared. Last Sunday, she came to our parking lot service. At the end of the service, a group of us went to her car. We all wore masks. We all kept 6 feet distance. The member stayed in her car. We stood in a circle around her car, and we prayed for her and we blessed her.

“Jesus’ presence was powerfully felt by all. We cried and we smiled at the same time, comforted to know that our Savior felt our pain and had compassion, and that this same Savior will accompany our sister in the hospital where we are not allowed to go.“

In the midst of all our weariness and hurts and fears, Jesus is willing to come and spend time with us and touch us with love and healing and hope. And he allows us to participate in this ministry of compassion and to experience such moments of divine presence and care, moments that feed us in spirit and soul.

Thanks be to God for sending us his Son, our compassionate Redeemer. Amen.