Feeding on the Word

As we’ve crisscrossed the country with Jesus over the past few weeks, we’ve found ourselves in a traveling classroom - walking with the Messiah in the school of the Kingdom. In the recent Gospel readings we’ve seen Jesus doing all sorts of teaching to all sorts of people. He intimately addresses his twelve disciples. He speaks to the large crowds who follow him. He even tries to teach his enemies.

His course of study is widely varied yet strangely focused. He lays out commands for discipleship – take up the cross and follow him. It will be a few chapters before we figure out just how hard this cross business is. Jesus tells us just who to fear –not the one who can kill the body but the one who can kill the soul. He announces that the people are to welcome the ones their leaders have historically rejected – the weak children and the worrisome prophets. And over the last three weeks Jesus has spent an awful lot of time trying to explain the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom, it turns out, is like a sower who extravagantly sows seed. It’s also like a mustard seed, and a treasure in a field. It’s a woman working a little leaven into a ton of flour, and a pearl of great price, a net that catches fish to be sorted later, and it’s somehow both weed and wheat.

But in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tries to leave the teaching behind. He’s actually trying to mourn – he’s deeply moved when he gets word that Herod had executed his friend and colleague in kingdom work - John the Baptist. Jesus flees the city and we find him way out in the country, miles away from anything but the Sea of Galilee. The crowds won’t let him get away, and like the prophets warned, descend upon him from the North, the South, the East and West. It’s late, well after dinner time. They’re hungry, and to make matters worse, they’re miles away from anywhere where somebody could get something to eat.

Jesus’ disciples, like that ornery housemate or annoying co-worker I imagine some of you might know about, are always the one who seem to catch the blame for everything. They are the ultimate scapegoats for those of us with more than two thousand years of history on our side. If I were with Jesus, we say, I wouldn’t doubt like Thomas. I wouldn’t deny like Peter. But this time, it seems, they just might get it right. They have taken all of Jesus’ wisdom from the teaching they have heard and have tried to apply it. They are, it appears, perfect students.

Using excellent common sense they turn to Jesus and say, “Look man, it’s way after dinnertime. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, and these people are hungry. We don’t have near enough to feed them, so let’s get them home before it gets too late.” The disciples would win a medal for crowd control, Christian hospitality, and good housekeeping. But Jesus doesn’t quite see it that way.

As he tends to do, he blows them and us away with a simple line –

“Don’t send them away. You feed them.”

You feed them.

But Jesus, we’ve got five loaves of bread and two fish, and there is no way we can satisfy this crowd. There’s five thousand men and at least a few thousand women and children here. If we don’t get them out of here, they might not eat and they just might turn on you, and more importantly, on me.

But Jesus, being Jesus, wouldn’t flee. Oh no, instead he began a pattern that we continue in the church today - He took food, bread and fish, thanked his Father for it, blessed it broke it, and fed more anywhere between 10 and 20,000 people if you dare to count women and children.

It was, as we say, a full-on miracle. Jesus took meager proportions and turned them into a meal that really fed a whole bunch of people. Jesus turned five loaves and two fishes into a meal that satisfied. The Gospel writers leave us no doubt that this was a feast to be remembered – the feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle story that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all write about. Nothing else caught their attention that much – not walking on water, not calming storms, not even healing a man born blind.

Like most miracles, the feeding of the five thousand leaves us with all sorts of questions. The one that I’ve been asking is this - Why were the disciples so surprised? What did they miss? They had been following Jesus for a real long time, they had seen him do all sorts of things before. They had seen him perform plenty of miracles and healings. He had exorcised demons and even gotten the best of the Pharisees. I mean, after all, as Jimmy told me last Friday at his house, anything’s possible with Jesus. Thousands of books have been written about the faults of these disciples, but I don’t think we need to read them all to figure out how the disciples messed up this time - they didn’t know their Bibles.

That’s because from the beginning of God’s saving work with his people to the present day, God has been in the business of miraculous feeding.

- Remember in Exodus - When the Israelites were wondering in the wilderness, hungry and desperate for food, God dropped Manna from the sky. Out of thin air, the God of Israel fed an entire nation.

- And remember Deuteronomy when we found out that God’s promise wasn’t only about milk and honey, but “a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity in which you will lack nothing.”[1]

- And remember how it isn’t just God who miraculously feeds, but those charged with doing God’s work. Elijah had the audacity to tell a starving widow and malnourished son preparing for their dying meal together to fix him some dinner. He promised that God would provide and God did, to the tune of food for days.

- And remember Elijah’s partner in prophetic miracles, Elisha, who took twenty loaves of barley and some fresh grain and made it into enough food to feed 100 hundred people with plenty left over.

Yes, in the feeding of the five thousand, we see that Jesus has gone beyond teaching. Jesus is revealing that he is not only a prophet of God, but is God himself. Elijah and Elisha miraculously fed people, but not to the magnitude that Jesus did. This is no mere prophet - This is the Messiah.

We won’t get Jesus’ full identity for a few more chapters, but we’re starting to see glimpses. Jesus feeds four thousand more in another miraculous feeding. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God, surrounded by the symbols of empire at Caesarea Philippi in chapter 16. He’ll manifest his glory in front of Peter, James, John, and of course Moses and Elijah, on the mount of transfiguration in chapter 17.

I’ve been here at Holy Comforter for just about two months now. Like many of you, I wasn’t sure quite what to make of the place when I first showed up and just what Father Mike, you all, and God had in store for me. But what I’ve found in visiting you in your homes, sharing coffee and getting a contact high on the Smoker’s Porch and making a joyful noise to the Lord in noon prayer (although I imagine God might be the only one who finds the noise that comes out of my mouth joyful) is what a whole lot of others have – that Jesus Christ is in the midst of us. Do you remember that time when Jesus told us how when two or three are gathered in his name he will be there? Well, he seems to show up in this place all the time.

Jesus also tells us that in the Gospel of John that he is the bread of life, that those who eat and drink of him will never die. Jesus sure did a lot of eating and a lot of feeding in his ministry. One of the worst charges directed at Jesus never seems to go away – the man ate with sinners. He joined them at table, and he also fed them – in miraculous feedings where he turned loaves and fishes, the ordinary meal of the First Century peasant, into food enough to feed a bundle.

His greatest feeding took place originally in an upper room, and he does it every Sunday in churches all over the world. Jesus took bread, he blessed it, gave thanks for it, and broke it, giving real bread to real people in real places. This is my body, broken for you. He ate with sinners, Judas was there after all.

He added wine this time and blessed it, poured it, gave it to his disciples, and told them to drink it. Real nourishment for men, women and children of all ages, stations and locations. This is my blood, the cup of the new covenant, poured out for you and for many. And we’ve been doing it for more than two thousand years.

I don’t know about you, but I’m never quite sure what to do when we’re invited to this table. It almost feels like too much – coming to eat at Jesus request. But if I’ve learned one thing from being fed again and again, it’s this - Jesus Christ is right here, right now. And he’s calling us forward, begging us to receive him and his life-giving bread. So, as we like to say at Holy Comforter – come on up, its time to eat. Thanks be to God.

In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.

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[1] Deut. 8:9-10

Matthew 14:13-21

14:13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns.

14:14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.

14:15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves."

14:16 Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat."

14:17 They replied, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish."

14:18 And he said, "Bring them here to me."

14:19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.

14:20 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.

14:21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.