I’m So Needy
There are a lot of differing opinions on sermon length. Depending on what church you grew up in you may think 20 min is perfect. . .that’s often the case in many of the Anglican churches I’ve been to. BUT if you are from a Baptist or Pentecostal background you might think 20 min is when the preacher is just warming up. It’s not a sermon unless it’s 45 min or longer. Well, I tend to hit what I think is the Goldilocks zone of 25-30 min mark. . . just right. Of course I’m biased toward my own preferences:) The funny thing is that you’ve never heard a preacher go as long as Jesus. Jesus preached a little too long a couple times in his ministry, and when I say a little too long the first time was for the whole day (this past Sunday’s gospel reading: Matthew 14 and Luke 9) and the second time was for three days (Matthew 15 and Mark 8)! And the lesson we learn from Jesus is that if you preach too long you end up having to feed everyone. The first time he had to feed 5000, and the second time he had to feed 4000. So, it just gives a little context whenever you think your preacher is going a bit long:).
I also want to point out that Jesus always gets short-changed on this miracle. One of the many, many pitfalls with misogynic cultures of the ancient near east was that they only counted the men…they always say he fed 5000 with this miracle. But if you count the women and children, which I assure you all churches do today …in fact during the quarantine a few years ago while you worshipped at home we counted your pets too. . .gotta keep those attendance numbers up. . .there’s always a silver lining. But if you counted the woman and children, the crowd Jesus fed was much larger…some scholars even estimate it was 4 times the number of men…closer to 20,000. I just want to make sure Jesus gets all the credit he’s due.
But what is this miracle really about? It’s an important one to be sure. We know this because this is the only miracle apart from the resurrection itself that is recounted by all four gospel writers. It obviously made a big impact on the early church to where they all wanted to be sure to include it. On one level it affirms that Jesus was the guy to invite to your parties. This miracle along with the wedding at Cana prove that when you had Jesus over you never had to worry about having enough wine or food when the party really got going. He was like a walking Costco. Aside from that amazing thought…what does this miracle really say to us?
One of the definitions of stress that I have heard is: stress is what you feel when you think your needs will not be met. Stress is what you feel when you think your needs will not be met. I think it’s safe to say that on a global scale we have been under a lot of stress. There are so many things that have been thrown into question recently: the war in Iran, the war in Ukraine, Gaza, gas prices, fires in Europe, heat domes, food prices, immigration, racism, A.I., China, Russia, North Korea, etc., etc., etc. Very often in these past couple years I found myself asking, “How are these needs going to be met?” Stress.
The big idea of this passage is one that is seen throughout Scripture from the very beginning to the very end. God repeats it again and again and again because it is one that we forget again and again and again. We start to believe the circumstances around us instead of the promises of God. And we begin to fear that our needs will not be met…we begin to stress out. Another word for this is unbelief. We forget God’s promises…and we forget Journey’s epic anthem from 1981: where they told us “Don’t stop believing! Hold onto to that feeling!” But we do stop. We forget and it usually is because we lose that feeling. Things start to feel tight. We can’t see our way ahead and so we worry. And usually we do exactly what the disciples do in response to a problem…a need that they can’t possibly fulfill…and that is we try to problem solve. You preached too long Jesus. Time to start sending these people away so that they can get something to eat and find a place to stay. Reasonable thinking. BUT Jesus won’t send them away. He has not forgotten God’s promises to his people, in fact he is the fulfillment of all God’s promises to his people in the flesh, and he wants to remind them all again right now. AND he wants his disciples to know the truth that God in Christ will provide for all that they need. That is the big idea here.
To do that Jesus says to his disciples, “YOU give them something to eat.” That’s a strange thing to say if he’s going to show how he provides for our needs. This strange direction of his accomplishes two things. First, it continues to build on what he had just done with the disciples before this passage. He sent them out to minister. They had just returned from their first mission where they had preached and healed many. Here Jesus continues to foreshadow his plan to send them and all of his followers to be his messengers of God’s grace to the world, to proclaim the good news of forgiveness in God’s kingdom and to make disciple of all nations. The problem here is that the disciples didn’t have anything to give. This is the second thing Jesus does…He highlights the need even more. He’s being consistent with God throughout scripture where he loves to come through for his people when things look really impossible (think Noah, Moses and the Red Sea, or Gideon, or David and Goliath, Daniel, etc., etc.). Matthew gives us the abbreviated version here. From the other gospels we learn that the five loaves and two fish didn’t even belong to the disciples…they belonged to a boy in the crowd. And the other gospels point out that it would take a fortune to buy enough food for everyone, and the disciples didn’t have that either. There was no way they would be able to feed this crowd. Now Jesus has everyone primed and ready. It would take a miracle to feed this crowd, and that’s just what he does. He multiplies the meager offerings that the disciples had from the boy and everyone is satisfied and they have 12 baskets of food left over. He doesn’t just meet our need he exceeds them.
It’s an awesome display of his power and his compassion for those in need. And it is an encouragement to the disciples that he is the one who supplies all they need to go out and bless the world with the gospel. And I want you to hear today how this story actually meets us in our uncertainty…in our greatest need: to be saved from death. We cannot stop death for ourselves and we cannot stop death for others. We cannot meet this need. . .stress. We are confronted with our powerlessness when we are faced with death. It reminds me of the amazing hymn “Rock of Ages”: “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling; naked, come to Thee for dress, helpless, look to Thee for grace: foul, I to the fountain fly, wash me, Savior, or I die.”
When it comes down to it all of the other things we stress about that I mentioned earlier all boil down to being afraid to die. War is an obvious one, as are the fires and destructive forces beyond us. But there’s the existential questions over A.I. What if it does become sentient and goes the way of literally every movie we’ve ever made about it? Or what if I lose my job because of A.I.? Or what if some illegal alien somehow takes my job (as the fear-based immigration policy narrative goes) then I can’t afford to buy food and won’t be able to feed myself and/or my family and we could go hungry. We could die. It’s important to remember the other side of that equation too. People are trying to leave their countries and go to more prosperous ones for the exact same reason. . .wanting to provide for themselves and their families. All of our stress ultimately comes back to our fear of not being able to stop death. How can the Lord meet that need? Don’t be mistaken this is exactly what he sent his disciples out to deal with and all of us too…to deal with our ultimate problem with death.
Can you hear him give that same direction here? YOU feed them. YOU stop death. But what do we have to offer? What do we bring? Like the disciples I’m confronted with my powerlessness. I’ve got nothing but sin and doubt. That’s what we have to offer. And the amazing thing is that we see Jesus take even that, especially that, and use it to feed others, to meet them in the face of death. That sounds like a crazy statement. How does that work?
We love to talk about transformation in the church…that Jesus brings transformation… and he certainly does. But, when we think of that word in our humanness we often like to think of transformation in the sense of improvement. Getting better all the time type of thinking. But this miracle here points to an even greater kind of transformation that Jesus works in us and for us. He takes our very sin, those very things that Satan points to in our lives and uses to shame us. Those things we’ve thought and done that the accuser comes and says, “I can’t believe you did that! Look how terrible you are. You deserve to be rejected for that. You deserve to die for that.” Jesus takes those things and he transforms them into a blessing for others.
How? How can the sin that I have committed, that has hurt others be transformed into a blessing for others? I’ll tell you. It’s because Jesus forgives you. He forgives your sin and transforms it into your testimony. That very place of shame becomes the place where you know the power of God’s grace. It is the place in your life where the rubber meets the road. Jesus comes right to that place where you feel nothing but condemnation and fear, where you want to hide or run away, where you feel the stress of your powerlessness and he says to you right there: You are forgiven. He takes it from you in fact. He takes this nothing offering of yours, and makes it his. He replaces it with life…his life. In John’s gospel Jesus declares to the crowd and his disciples after this miracle, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” (6:35-40)
He is the God who creates life out of nothing. He does that with our brokenness and our sin. He makes that the very place that you boast in him. You point to him there! Jesus saved me there. Jesus forgave me there...and he is glorified as the One who came to save sinners, to give life to the dead. He has come for the sick and the needy, for those who cannot feed themselves. For those who cannot meet their own needs nor the needs of others…those under such great stress. Your forgiveness now carries the message that Jesus Christ saves! There is no greater hope. There is no greater blessing that you could give to anyone on this earth. This is the greatest news there is, and you are living evidence of it. Your basket is full with the bread of life himself, with Christ. When you hear this truth you won’t be able to help yourself when you see someone else in need. . .you will tell them about the One met your needs. . .the One who saves. Amen.
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