Transcription
He doesn’t raise a friend or a little girl from the dead. All he does is feed 5,000 people. Even saying, all he does, just seems like I’m diminishing this miracle.
And it can’t be diminished, because it’s one of those great things he does. So it’s kind of like what I would call a donut peach type miracle. Now, if you’ve ever had a donut peach, they don’t look like a normal peach.
They’re flat. They look like somebody took a peach, put them in an industrial press, and smashed them down. Now, this week at our farm share, we got donut peaches.
Barb looks at them and says, there’s something wrong with them. No, no, they’re just donut peaches. They taste just as sweet.
They are just as wonderful as a regular peach. They’re just flat. Barb wasn’t buying it until she took a bite.
And then she took another bite. Next thing you know, I’m getting handed the pit of the peach with the words, here, dad, take care of this for me, please. The thing is, this is not the lame gaining their legs.
But you ask those 5,000 people, those 5,000 people who were hungry, how great this miracle was. And I would challenge you to find one who didn’t think this was as spectacular as all the others. So let’s look at those pieces of the miracle.
Well, there’s the people or person who has a need. In this case, it’s the 5,000 of them plus women and children. So again, it’s not just 5,000 that got fed.
It’s 5,000 men that they counted. And we won’t go down that road right now. Now, there’s this need that they have.
Sometimes it’s a disease. Sometimes it’s a disability, an injury, or being possessed. You come to Jesus and you seek which you don’t have.
Think about the first miracle of Jesus when he turns water into wine. Now, if you’re that couple who are serving their wedding dinner and ran out of wine, you would have been in a panic until Jesus turns the water into wine. Because you would have been shamed your entire life.
And you can’t tell me that that couple, who would have faced an eternity of shame, rumor, innuendo, didn’t think that this was a great miracle. Sometimes in a miracle, there’s a helper, someone who brings something to the table. Sometimes it’s lowering your friend through the ceiling after you tore a hole in the roof.
With your bare hands. Sometimes it’s that friend that goes to Jesus and says, my friend needs help. My daughter needs help.
Can you come and help her? In this point, it’s not necessarily a named person. In the other tellings of this parable, it’s a little boy who brings the food. Needless to say, it’s whoever brought the food is helping Jesus here.
And then at center stage, the Son of God, undefeated champion, you can hear the crowd chanting and cheering. Jesus is the center of the miracle. And he meets the moment.
Now, when we meet the moment for Jesus, he’s not in a great space. John the Baptist has just been politically assassinated, murdered, however you want to classify it. But John is dead.
Now, we could speculate that there was a great relationship between Jesus and John. But what we do know is enough. John was the precursor to Jesus, the prophet who goes ahead of him.
And suddenly, whether they had a relationship or not doesn’t mean much because the prophet has been killed. The prophet who is going before, which means Jesus’ ministry is now center stage. Jesus is now the only one.
That means that the entire plan of God lies on the horizon. The entire plan, the cross, the grave, the resurrection, all of that lies ahead. And if you don’t think that’s a heavy weight to carry or a time to just take a breath, think about that.
Jesus goes off to be alone, to take a breath, to take a beat, to take a moment. But the crowd follows. How often has that ever happened to you? You needed that moment, you needed that break, and then next thing you know, a small person comes into the room and says, I need help.
I can’t seem to get this hook on my fishing line. Or some other small problem. Now, I hate to say it, Jesus is Jesus in this moment.
And we seldom are. Usually we tell the child, I’m really busy, can you come back in five minutes? We plead, we ask for a moment. Jesus, what does he do? Okay, bring me your sick.
Let me heal them. In his worst moment, in his lowest moment, Jesus is still Jesus. He’s still the Son of God.
He still heals. He still meets the people where they are, and he is meeting them, all 5,000 plus of them. But then there comes the greatest problem.
It’s late, and they haven’t eaten. Now, can you imagine 5,000 people descending on the closest towns, looking for dinner? Again, it’s late. Most restaurants or places where you can buy food from, what have they probably done by now with the food? It’s gone.
They’re not making huge amounts of food. They’re making enough to sell. And think about the crowd for a moment.
This is 5,000 people, enough to fill up the stadium where the Renegades play. That’s a large crowd descending. Imagine for a choke point idea, on the same day, the Mets, the Yankees, and either the Jets or Giants, all letting out at the same time from their games.
All three games. And maybe we could throw in a Knicks game or two, but that kind of gets rid of the baseball, although baseball is running later. So you have all of those letting out at the same time.
Yeah, try and get a seat at a restaurant in the city. Just try. The fact of the matter is, there’s a logistic nightmare.
And Jesus has grace, not just on the crowd, but on the towns that would be having to try and feed the inundated with these people. But the greater problem is the impossibility of the fish and the loaves. Think about how impossible that miracle looks.
Making the lame walk seems more possible than feeding 5,000 plus people with five loaves of bread and two fish. As I sat writing my sermon, I had to chuckle because I had this image of Peter with like an exacto knife trying to cut that fish small enough to try and get enough for everybody. There’s no way.
Even if the fish was like this big, you couldn’t feed that many people off of it. Even if the loaf of bread was one of those crazy loaves that restaurants bake to try and set a world record. You couldn’t chop it up small enough.
You couldn’t make it big enough. And yet, all Jesus does is bring them to me. Bring these items to me and I will make it happen.
I will meet my people where they are. I will feed my people. I will sustain them.
I will help them in their time of need. And he doesn’t just feed them till they’re full. He feeds them till they’re full and how many baskets are there left over? Twelve.
Twelve baskets. So, five fish and two loaves, two fish and five loaves. See, it’s not that easy of math.
Five loaves, two fish, feeding 5,000 plus people and you have twelve baskets left over? I would hate to have Jesus’ math be something they teach in schools because that doesn’t add up. I tried to think about how… Now, bear in mind, there are those who try and find a way to explain the miracle. The loaves were really big.
The fish were really big. Jesus handing out the food inspired those who were hoarding food to take the food out of their robes and give it. The reality is this is a miracle.
Stop trying to take the miracle out of it. Jesus feeds 5,000 people with just that little amount. But He does it with a level of grace and compassion to not just fill them till they have enough, but feeds them past that.
He doesn’t feed them a little. He feeds them in abundance. Oh, and let’s look at where He is.
He is not in the best of spaces and yet He has the grace, the compassion to do what has to be done anyway. The reality is Jesus doesn’t do little miracles. This is just as big of a miracle as any of them.
Just ask those in the crowd who were hungry how great a miracle this was. All those who were wondering where their meal was coming. All those fretting going to try and get food in the villages.
We don’t know anything about what the crowd’s makeup was, who could afford food, who couldn’t. But we do know the fear that food scarcity can bring for people. Even if it’s a short trip the reality is Jesus meets these people in this small space and feeds them.
The challenge for us though is to see miracles that don’t look like a regular peach. You see, this week Liam was on a mission trip and we joined them for worship on Wednesday. And at the start of worship they called a bunch of the kids forward and they talked about where and how they saw God that day.
Where they saw and how they saw God that day. And each time they came forward I thought of that donut peach and how each one saw a little act of God in their world that day. A small little miracle because someone did something that was different.
They showed compassion in a world where compassion is in short supply. They took joy in delivering meals to people. They did little things to show that God’s love exists.
And were they great moments? They were different moments that were just as sweet as this great miracle. Because God’s hands were all over it. The challenge for us is not to look for the big miracles in our world.
To look for those extraordinary the lame walk, the blind see moments. But to see those little moments of somebody helping someone else. Those little moments of compassion.
Those little miracles of love from God to humanity. They’re all around us. They’re all around like the feeding of the 5,000.
But the challenge for us is can we see them? Do we see them for what they are or are they just, oh that was a really sweet moment. No. That was a God moment.
Where God’s hand was in our world and in our lives. So brothers and sisters may we look for those moments and see them. And may we be our own little miracles in this world.
Amen. And now children of God let us respond to him through our offering.