This sermon was preached at St Peter's Evangelical-Lutheran Church, Public Schools Club, Adelaide, 9am.
Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
How can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?
Prayer: May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
In our Gospel reading today, we read about where Jesus fed 4000 people. You might not have realised that in the Gospels we read about two different miracles: the feeding of the 5000 and the feeding of the 4000. They are not two accounts of the same miracle, but they actually record two different miracles. In both the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, both of these miracles are recorded.
When
it comes to the miracles of Jesus, the comfort we derive from them is always,
first of all, the fact that it happened. When we preach the Word of God in the
church, and we say that the bible is without errors, and inerrant, and
infallible, and all that kind of thing, we as pastors should always seek to
preach the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. When we study the
bible, we study the words, the grammar, the sentences, the cross references,
and all that sort of thing. But when we say in the church, that we preach the
word, or we preach the text, it doesn’t mean that we’re coming up here in the pulpit to preach a whole lot of words and grammar and things like that. The
most important thing is what the words in the bible actually say, and much of
the time, we’re also dealing with real things that actually happened in real
life in real time. So, when we preach this passage about the feeding of the
4000, the most important thing is not what nouns and verbs St Mark used, and
all that kind of thing, but the fact that at a particular time, at a particular
place, this thing happened, this miracle actually occurred, Jesus actually did
it.
Sometimes, there’s also a tendency when it comes to interpreting the bible, to always ask the question: “What’s the point of this passage?” What message is St Mark trying to portray here? Yes, that’s a good thing to some degree, but once again, if this miracle didn’t actually happen, then there is no point. It’s just as when St Paul is talking about the resurrection, and he says: If Christ had not been raised from the dead, my preaching is in vain. Your faith is in vain, you are still in your sins. There is a point to the resurrection, and that is that Jesus defeated death, that he won the victory over death, but if he didn’t actually rise from the dead, then there is no point. Also, in the feeding of the 4000 people in our Gospel reading today, if the miracle didn’t actually happen, then there is no point. So, we should always remember, with all these passages which speak about miracles in the Gospels, to spend some time in simple, reverent awe about the fact, that the same Jesus we read about here, who is also our Saviour through baptism and faith, actually did this thing in our Gospel, and actually fed 4000 people. And that, in itself, is an amazing, wonderful, divine thing, that is totally worthy of our awe, our reverence, our wonder, our complete amazement.
So let’s have a look at this passage in three parts: First of all, we have the people, the crowd. Secondly, we have the disciples of Jesus. And thirdly, we have Jesus, and what he says, and what he does.
In the previous chapter, chapter 7, of the Gospel of Mark, we read about Jesus giving a sermon, some teaching, about traditions and what defiles a person, and after that, we read about how the Syrophoenician woman came to him and asked him to cast a demon out of her daughter, and how Jesus also healed a man who could not speak or hear. Now, often when Jesus is teaching, or doing some healings, a crowd begins to gather, and people want to learn more, and they want to know what’s going on. And sometimes, they are so interested in what Jesus has to say, that they forget about providing themselves with food. Maybe they think: I’ll just listen to this one last teaching sermon, and then I’ll head home and have morning tea. But, you could imagine, if you were alive at that time, that what Jesus had to say must have been just so incredibly interesting, unlike anything that you’d ever heard before, and so the people just stay there, and listen.
We read at the beginning of the reading: In those days, when again a great crowd had gathered, and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples to him and said to them, “I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way. And some of them have come from far away.”
We learn here that sometimes those who follow Christ are sometimes led into a kind of wilderness. We read at the beginning of each of the Gospels, that after Jesus was baptised, the Holy Spirit drove him out into the wilderness to be tempted by the evil one. We read that Jesus fasted there for 40 days. Now, in the church year, we often commemorate this event and remember it particularly during the season of Lent, which is 40 days before Easter. And sometimes, Christians devote themselves to some kind of discipline or mortification, where they might fast, or give up some food, like coffee, or chocolate, or something like that, as a kind of way to remind themselves about Jesus’ fasting, and also his suffering and death for us on the cross.
However, apart from this season of Lent, where we might take up some self-chosen suffering, sometimes God leads us into our own personal Lent, our own personal time of cross-bearing, where he leads us into the desert, or into the wilderness for a while. At the beginning of time, Adam and Eve lived in a wonderful garden, but then because of the fall, were kicked out of Eden, and only then, did they first begin to experience the world as a kind of wilderness, with its thistles and thorns. Jesus, when he lived on this earth, often went out into the wilderness, because he wants to atone for the sins of the human race which forced them out of Eden. So, Jesus’ wilderness, his desert, is a garden, a paradise for us.
So, sometimes, we go through a time in our life, where we just feel so close to God, so many things in our life are going well, we feel like it’s just so easy to pray and speak with God, and praise him. And these times in our life can be of wonderful encouragement, but they are more like lunch and recess time at school. Often children at school love recess and lunch, but it’s not really why they’re there: it’s just the break, it’s not really school. And so, the times in our lives when things are hard, when there are many temptations, those are the times when Jesus really sends us to school, and those are the times when we really grow.
And so, what kinds of things does Jesus use to lead us into the desert, into the wilderness? Sometimes, we begin to feel a sense of loneliness from others around us. The people we know that we once enjoyed their company and friendship, now turn against us, and turn their backs on us. Or sometimes, in our homes, we find ourselves having a difficult time in our marriage or in our family, where the peace of the home just isn’t what it used to be. Or, sometimes, the things we enjoyed on an everyday basis, just in terms of our daily bread, the comforts of life, are no longer there like they used to be. We might enter into a time of financial hardship, or at least, financial uncertainty. Or, sometimes, our country, or our city, or whatever, takes a bit of a turn for the worst, and life becomes a bit harder for us. Or, sometimes, things might go inward: all of a sudden we start to realise that we’re not the good people we thought we were, and the Holy Spirit starts to reveal to us our sin, in this way, or in that way.
And all these kinds of things can compound and all come together, and we can be overwhelmed, or become depressed, and start to feel like we are in a kind of wilderness. God provides us for a time with our own personal Lent, and sometimes, it can feel like there is no Easter. We start to doubt God and question his motives, or we wonder where he is, or what he’s doing, and why he let this or that happen to us.
Whatever happens, we know that God is faithful. Jesus knows exactly what is going on, and he will alleviate whatever suffering we endure at the exact time when this suffering has been of whatever benefit it has needed to be for our soul. Jesus strips something away from us, to that we can look much more clearly and much more sharply to him for everything. Jesus takes away from us some earthly comfort and earthly joy so that he can strengthen us and encourage us with his heavenly comfort and heavenly joy. After all, this life is not all there is. This earthly life is just a breath, a puff of wind, a vanity, nothing. St Paul writes: I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
And so, in the meantime, Jesus leads us into the wilderness, and he teaches us all kinds of things that he knows and that we know, we really need to learn: patience under the cross, contentment with what God has given to us, humility under the mighty hand of God. St Paul writes: I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. If only we were all like Paul describes himself here! But what’s the secret to surviving the wilderness? How has St Paul learned to be content? He knows that he is not alone, but that Jesus is with him. He knows that he has a faithful Saviour. If he were by himself, he would only see his own weakness, his own helplessness, his own need. But because Jesus is with him, he can be strong, he can be content, he can do all things through him who strengthens him. And the same goes for us, and this is the reason why Jesus leads us with him into a wilderness. He wants to teach us to look to Him alone for everything. When we have taken him for granted, and forgotten that he is always with us, then he teaches us that he really is here, that he really does love us, that he really does look after us, that he really does forgive us, and that he really does provide for us.
Now, let’s have a look at the disciples. We read that they say to Jesus: How can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place? The funny thing about this, of course, is that that this feeding of the 4000 people happened after the feeding of the 5000. Jesus already had performed a miracle of feeding 5000 people, and then the disciples ask this question. Their memories have been so quickly plagued by doubt. Don’t they know that the answer to this question is standing right in front of them? Of course, normally if people ask themselves: “how can we feed so many people?” there really might not be an answer, because they don’t know, because normally people can’t feed so many people, if they don’t have enough food, or they are a long way from shops, or they don’t have any money. But when they’re with Jesus, the answer is completely different. All they need do is look to his hands. That’s where the answer is.
We learn from this question from the disciples that faith is no simple, straight-forward matter. We are always forgetting everything, are we are always needing to hear the Gospel and learn it again. The mould is always creeping into our hearts, the gunge, the creep, the darkness. And we are always in need of turning to God and letting him sweep out our hearts again with his Holy Spirit, and learn the faith again.
As a pastor, sometimes there is a temptation not to preach the Gospel, and not to lay the foundations about the Scripture, about how our hearts are constantly doing battle with sin, and how Jesus has suffered and died for us, and made a full atonement for us with his blood and his sacrifice. We pastors can often think that we don’t need to keep preaching these things, because we think: everyone knows that stuff—let’s go on to other stuff. But it’s not true. Even the greatest professor in the world of theology doesn’t know the Gospel from Sunday to Sunday. He still needs to hear it afresh. He still needs the Holy Spirit’s broom to sweep him clean again. The reason is that the Gospel is always new. Jesus is always new. We are always learning something new from him, and even we think we’re learning something we’ve already heard from him before, something we think is old, we often need to learn it in a new way, and in such a way that it needs to be applied to some part of us which it hasn’t touched. To think that the disciples had already seen Jesus feed 5000 people, and as soon as they end up in a similar—almost the same—situation again, they completely forget how the problem was solved last time. In fact, the problem was not really solved. There is no solution: there is only Jesus. Jesus is not simply a solution to our problems, he is a person, he is our shepherd, and doesn’t just want to solve things for us, and plug our gaps, he wants us to depend on him for everything. He wants himself to be our everything, our all, our complete and total sufficiency.
Luther taught a wonderful thing when he spoke about God’s school as made up of prayer, meditation, and temptation. We turn to God in prayer, we meditate on his word, that is, we think about it, and churn it over, and learn from it, and study it. But then, God plunges us into the wilderness again, and we experience temptation, spiritual attack. And this in turn throws us back into prayer and the Word. This is how Jesus makes us living Christians, and makes us walk in the narrow way, behind him, and following in his footsteps.
But also, we see something else in our reading about the disciples. When Jesus took the bread and the fish, he gave to his disciples to distribute to the people. So this means that the blessings we receive from Jesus—whether it is things like our daily bread, food, money, or whatever—or spiritual blessings, comfort, and consolation, it is given to us also for the blessing of other people too. Jesus doesn’t just give us things for ourselves, but for others. St Paul writes: The love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. We also read from the beginning of 2 Corinthians about how God comfort us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. So we see from the disciples, how they completely forgot the miracle of the feeding of the 5000, and how they needed to be strengthened in faith again, but also how they were then called to distribute the gifts which Christ gave them to others.
Now, let’s look at Jesus in our reading. First of all, we see his wonderful, compassionate, merciful, heart. He says: I have compassion on the crowd. And not only does he have a compassionate heart, but he is also almighty and powerful to do something about it. He takes the seven loaves and the few fish, and we read: having given thanks, he broke them and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and they set them before the crowd.
Don’t you think that if Christ was merciful to the people then, that he will not be merciful to you now in your life?
Sometimes we have many things that we are worried about. We worry because we do not have. Sometimes, he provides for us by giving us what we need, sometimes he simply takes away the worry, and we realise that we had what we needed all along. In our reading, Jesus does both. He gives the people what they needed, but they had what they needed—seven loaves and few small fish—they had what they needed all along. All it needed was Jesus’ blessing, and it became for them everything that they needed.
So, from this, we learn that Jesus is constantly feeding us with what we need. He gives to us our daily bread. He gives it to us Christians, and also to unbelievers, because he is merciful to them too. For us, he teaches us to receive our daily bread with thanks, because we realise that even if he hadn’t forgiven us our sin, he is still so merciful as to provide us with what we need.
But then, also, Jesus feeds us with spiritual food in this life. He feeds us with his word, just as he said when he was in the wilderness: Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word which proceeds from the mouth of God. He establishes us in his kingdom and sits us around his table through Holy Baptism, and he also gives us his body and blood to eat and drink in the Lord’s Supper.
But then, also, Jesus feeds us with eternal food. When we die, we will be taken on angels’ wings to feed on the heavenly pastures, and enjoy the rich treasures of God’s own house. Jesus won this great banquet for us, when he suffered and died on the cross, but he also opened the door for us when he rose from the dead. He even gives us a personal invitation through Holy Baptism, and strengthens us with the food of the Lord’s Supper all along the way, until we reach his heavenly eternal supper. This is a wonderful gift, and a wonderful promise. Jesus has compassion on us, he loves us, he has promised us the gift of eternal life, and he has the power and ability to act on his own promise and to fulfil it. So let’s put our trust not in the loaves and the fishes, but in Jesus who knows what to do with them! Amen.
The
peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds safe in
Christ Jesus. Amen.
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