We are continuing our study of the gospel of Matthew this morning moving on in chapter 14 to the feeding of the 5000. This particular miracle of the feeding of the 5000 is the only miracle other than the resurrection that was recorded by all four Gospel writers; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, showing us that there was something particularly special about it. When the Lord began his Galilean ministry he worked many public miracles and taught openly to the crowds in order to draws many people in as possible. He went through all of the cities and towns and worked tirelessly to demonstrate his power through mighty works while at the same time working to teach the crowds concerning the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven.
At this point in his ministry he was looking for those crowds, he taught on hillsides and by the shore where he could best be heard by as many people as possible. He was presenting himself as the king and offering membership in his kingdom. But as we have seen over the last couple of chapters there has been a growing rejection of him. Rejection by the religious leadership and even rising hostility amongst many of the people in the area.
As we come to this particular miracle in chapter 14, the popularity of Jesus has reached a pinnacle. At the end of this miracle, we will see the people of Galilee trying to take Jesus by force and make him king over them. They are so enamored with him, so fascinated by him, so ready to accept him as their version of the Messiah that they would make him that against his own wishes.
We see at the same time the beginning of the withdrawal of Jesus. Moving away from the crowds, separating himself and his disciples from the onlookers and thrill seekers who do not really care about the kingdom of God that Jesus has been presenting but merely want a political Messiah or the Messiah who is going to keep giving them free lunch. Caring nothing for the true spiritual food that he is offering, caring nothing for the kingdom of heaven.
This period the ministry of Jesus is kicked off by the news of the murder of John the Baptist reaching Jesus as we saw last week. So now there is not only religious hostility from the scribes and Pharisees as we saw in chapters 11 and 12 but now there is a political hostility as we saw Herod last week being willing to put to death anyone he sees as a threat to his kingdom or his happiness.
And so after this miracle, as he reached the pinnacle of his popularity, he at the same time begins to seek seclusion where you will see in the last year of his life Jesus spending the majority of his time with only the 12 disciples, preparing them for what would happen after his death and resurrection, preparing them for their role as apostles, how they were to function as the foundation for the building of Christ’s church on earth.
So with that, let us read our text for this morning Matthew 1314:13-23.
“Now when Jesus heard about John, He withdrew from there in a about to a secluded place by Himself; and when the people heard of this, they followed Him on foot from the cities. When He went ashore, He saw a large crowd, and felt compassion for them and healed their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to Him and said, ‘This place is desolate and the hour is already late; so send the crowds away, that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘They do not need to go away; you give them something to eat.’ They said to Him, ‘We have here only five loaves and two fish.’ And He said to them, ‘Bring them here to Me.’ Ordering the people to sit down on the grass, He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up toward heaven, He blessed the food, and breaking the loaves He gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds, and they all ate and were satisfied. They picked up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve full baskets. There were about five thousand men who ate, besides women and children. Immediately He made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead of Him to the other side, while He sent the crowds away. After He sent the crowds away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray; and it was evening, He was there alone.”
In the late 18th century and into the 19th a movement took root in Germany and from there spread across Europe. This movement had connections to the Reformation but instead of originating in the church it took hold in an academia that had begun to separate itself from religion. This movement became known as the Enlightenment and at its foundation was a claim that mankind no longer had need of the supernatural to help them understand the world. Science was progressing at an unprecedented rate and these Enlightenment philosophers and scientists began to claim that God was no longer necessary to explain the origin of the universe and life itself.
The Enlightenment thinkers did not have a unified mindset and out of this period came a number of different ideologies. The of the major competing ideologies that has had a tremendous impact on the world and the church became known as naturalism. At the core of this ideology is that all there is, all that exists is that which is found in nature, that there is no supernatural, no transcendent realm, nothing beyond what we can experience with our senses.
Many within the church became engrossed in this new ideology to the point where a whole new way of approaching Scripture developed, an anti-supernatural way of interpreting Scripture. These individuals did not want to lose the moral and cultural good that Christianity had done but wanted to get rid of all the miracles, all the supernatural elements, all the “myths” as they called them. And so they said about this desperate effort in the 19th century to reconstruct Christianity in a way that would make it compatible with naturalism. This gave birth to what is called liberal Christianity. This is not talking about political liberalism or economic liberalism, this is a theological liberalism that had a definite identity and a definite movement springing out of Germany and spreading throughout the rest of western culture and even permeating the United States.
They wanted to salvage the miracles, salvage what they could out of the Bible. And so they looked at miracles like the one we are studying this morning and tried to find some basis in reality, some underlying truth hitting behind the mythology that they could use. Some would go so far as to claim that Jesus secretly stored tons of bread and fish in one of the many caves that dotted this region of Galilee and when it was time for his so-called miracle, Jesus stood in front of the hidden entrance and had his disciples “miraculously” appear behind him with food.
Others, trying to keep Jesus as something a little bit better than a huckster or con artist, have tried to explain it away in different terms. Some have said that Jesus took the few loaves and broke them into minuscule pieces and had them passed out in some proto-communion event. Instead of everyone getting a full meal they each got a crumb, kind of like how we do communion now with each person getting not a full chunk of bread but just a little piece.
The most common interpretation of this event within liberal Christianity, the one you will most likely hear if you go to one of these churches is that this was not a supernatural miracle but an ethical miracle. Instead of creating bread and fish to feed the crowds of people from these five loaves and two fish, what Jesus did was highlight the kind and loving nature of the little boy brought by Andrew, pointing out that he was willing to share his lunch and therefore inspiring everyone in attendance who had the foresight to pack a meal to give a portion to those who had none. The haves giving to the have-nots. And instead of those who had the foresight to plan ahead being the only ones filled, they shared with the less fortunate so that everyone had something.
I point out all of this for two reasons, first to help you see how people can claim to be Christians, claim to believe the Bible, claim to believe in Jesus and yet reject all that the Bible truly stands for. Liberal Christianity has infected the church for centuries, stealing biblical language, appropriating biblical truth but stripping it of its power in order to create a kind of moralism that is palatable to those who want nothing to do with the true God and his gospel but want to continue to call themselves Christian in order to feel better about themselves. This is a Christianity that likes the ideas of kindness and love and charity, but wants nothing to do with the justice and obedience and submission to an all-powerful authority that we cannot feel or taste or touch. They see Jesus as a “good teacher” just like Buddha or Confucius or whoever, seeing no difference between any of these teachers and are only “Christian” because they were born in the West, that is what they grew up with.
Liberal Christianity allows them to reject anything about the Bible they do not like without any strain on their conscience. Of course the miracles are just myths, we know nothing like that happens, so we can toss those out. All of those specific laws like keeping sex for marriage, no homosexuality, biblically mandated roles for men and women in the church, those were all just for the culture and do not apply to us 2000 years later. As soon as you begin to reject one aspect of Scripture, it becomes very easy to compromise everywhere else making you the authority over the truth of Scripture rather than the other way around.
The second reason for pointing all of this out is to show you how the power and significance of a miracle like this can be squandered when it is turned into just a story about the importance of sharing. Should we teach our children to share? Absolutely, but why? Because a little boy shared his meal with Jesus and Jesus paid it forward? No, because God has commanded us to love others as we love ourselves, because Philippians 2 commands us “Do nothing from selfish or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than your selves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus.”
So, if the feeding of the 5000 is not just a lesson in the importance of sharing, then what are we to learn from it? Well to begin with, I think we need to see in this account an awesome display of the mercy and power of Christ. There are number of other lessons having to do with ministry that we can see here as well, and will take a look at those in a minute, but it is worth taking a few minutes just to think about the spectacle of this miracle and see what it reveals about Jesus himself.
There is a common theme that runs through all of the miracles of Jesus. The purpose of his miracles was to display his power and authority over both the natural and the supernatural. They were meant to show exactly who he is, to prove his credentials. But Jesus could have demonstrated God’s power in many ways. He could have moved mountains, he could have caused his followers to fly or he could have reshaped the stars in the sky but that is not the kind of miracle that Jesus did. His miracles were instigated by his compassion. We see that in verse 14, as we have seen it so many other times throughout the last couple chapters of Matthew. “He saw the large crowd, and felt compassion for them.”
We talked already about the Greek word that is translated “compassion” here. At its root is the word for bowels or gut, it could be literally translated “to feel it in the gut.” When an emotional reaction is so strong that you can feel your stomach tightening. When was the last time you felt something like that? When you saw a loved one lying in a hospital bed fighting for their life? That is the level of compassion that Jesus had for the multitude of people that were coming to see the show.
The majority of them were thrill seekers, they came not because they wanted to believe in him, to accept what he said, not because they wanted to worship and adore him, they came for the simple reason that he was healing diseases and they were fascinated by it. They were like the shallow soil, the Rocky or weedy soil in which there seemed to be some initial growth, but in the end is revealed to worthless. They were there because of curiosity, they were there for the show. But even in that, Jesus saw their suffering, the suffering of the sick and by the end of the day, he saw that they were hungry.
And so Jesus performed a miracle in order to alleviate their suffering. An astounding miracle when you think about the scale of it. In verse 21 we are told there were 5000 men besides women and children. The wording there is quite specific, there were 5000 men but an unnumbered amount of women and children. If you just average it out to one woman and say two children for each man you are looking at somewhere around 20,000. And that is on the conservative side, I would guess that there were probably far more women than men and I am sure they brought along all of their children. It would not surprise me to learn when we reach heaven that there were 30,000 or more. For perspective, the football stadium at South Dakota State University holds just over 19,000.
In the other Gospels we read that Jesus had his disciples split the crowd up into sections of about 50 with aisles in between to make moving amongst this massive group of people easier. He then took the five loaves and two fish offered up by the little boy brought to him by Andrew and prayed over them. And then we read that he gave it to the disciples. In Luke’s account it says he kept giving them to the disciples. I have often wondered what this actually looked like. How did the bread and the fish multiply?
Obviously, it was a divine act of creation, the multiplication of the bread and fish was completely unnatural but what did it look like? Were they hidden from view in a closed basket and Jesus kept reaching his hand in one of the time? This is 20,000 people, going one and a time wanted taken forever. Did he just tip the little picnic basket up into a bigger basket and the bread and fish just kept tumbling out and never stopped? What about the disciples handing them out? It had to have been something similar, just walking up to one of the groups of 50 and up ending their basket pouring bread and fish onto the ground for everybody and the basket never getting lighter, never emptying, just more bread and fish materializing at the bottom and pouring out into the hands of the hungry people.
And it did not end with everyone getting just a bite to eat. We read that all ate until they were satisfied. The word satisfied does not just mean they had a bite or two to stop their tummy rumbling, it is the idea of eating so much that you could not eat anymore. They were stuffed. Again, just think of the sheer size, the sheer amount of food. Imagine walking up and down the stairs and down the row of chairs at SDSU football stadium tipping out bread and fish and having it coming out continually until everyone in the stadium has food enough that they could not eat another bite. The cost of that, the monetary value of that would be staggering. No wonder they wanted to make Jesus king by force. Here the people have not only someone who can heal their diseases but can make food appear out of nothing. With somebody like that in the lead no army in the world could stop them. But that is not why Jesus came, he did not come just to heal the sick or to feed the hungry. He came to preach the truth.
Now with the time left I want to look at just a couple of lessons that we can take from this about how we should approach ministry. The first lesson is that ministry should have priority over “me time.”
Jesus had come to this spot on the shore of Galilee in order to get away from everyone, likely in order to mourn for the death of his cousin John the Baptist. In verse 13 it says “now when Jesus heard about John, he withdrew from there in a boat to a secluded place by himself.” Last week we read Matthew’s account of the ignoble death of the greatest man who ever lived. The forerunner of the Messiah, the prophet who came in the spirit of Elijah, and the cousin of Jesus. We do not know for sure how close Jesus and John were, but I can imagine that there was a bond between them and that was supernatural. Though Jesus fully knew that John the Baptist was in heaven and being greeted and rewarded by his heavenly Father, just as the physical death of a Lazarus caused him to weep just before he raised him from the dead, so the physical death of John would have affected him.
On top of that, Jesus had been going full throttle for nearly 2 years of ministry at this point. He was exhausted both physically and emotionally from healing the sick and teaching and having to deal with the rejection of the scribes and Pharisees and even the common people. He just wanted to be alone, he wanted some time to grieve, to pray, to recuperate but the people kept coming. In our culture, we are so focused on ourselves. We are so focused on making sure that we are taken care of, that we feel good, that we are getting our rest, our relaxation time. You even read this sort of thing in many so-called “Christian” books. I think it is especially true when it comes to women’s books. There is a mentality of “if this thing or this person is not adding to your life, making your life better in some way or enriching you, then you need to cut it out of your life.” If a person, a friend or relative is not adding to you in some way then they are a drain and need to be rejected.
I remember reading in several different books or studies growing up the idea that you need to take care of yourself first before you can take care of others. And that is simply not what Scripture demonstrates for us here. If anyone had the right to some alone time it was Jesus. And yet his compassion for the people, his drive to ministry was so strong that he could not place himself in front of others. It was not until after this event that Jesus was finally able to withdraw and have time to himself.
The second lesson that we can glean from this event is that we are to engage in ministry even when there is an apparent lack of resources. When we take all of the gospel accounts together, the picture facing the disciples was quite bleak when Jesus told them that they were going to feed this massive crowd of people. In verse 15 the disciples came to Jesus saying, “this place is desolate and the hour is already late; so send the crowds away, that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” We start out in a desolate place. I believe Jesus went there on purpose, initially to be alone but knowing that the crowds were going to follow. He planned for this location knowing that there was no way the people would be able to find food for themselves or that the apostles would be able to find food to feed them.
In John chapter 6 we also see that Philip recognized they did not have enough money to feed everyone. Toward the beginning of the day Jesus saw the crowds coming to him and asked Philip where they could buy bread for the people to eat. Philip was from that area of Galilee and so he knew that there was nothing nearby, no towns or villages that could support selling food to that many people and on top of that he says in verse seven, “200 denarii worth of bread is not sufficient for them, not even for everyone to receive a little.” The 200 denarii was likely all that Jesus and his 12 disciples had in their group purse, money that had been given to them by people who had been healed or heard the teaching of Jesus to support them in their travels. One denarii was worth about one days labor. There was no way that the limited amount of money especially in that desolate an area would be able to feed the massive crowd.
All that was required for the disciples then, and all that is required for us now to engage in ministry, even if the resources do not seem to be visible is that we trust in the power of God to provide. When Jesus asked them to feed the crowds the disciples said, “we do not have it, and we cannot get it.” We may be in the same boat, we do not have the finances, the ability to do some massive work of ministry, but that is not what God has called us to do, he is called us to trust in him and allow him to supply what we cannot come up with on our own.
All that is required is that we begin with what we have available. Andrew brought to Jesus a little boy who was willing to give what he did have. It was impossible with his lunch, five loaves of bread, and we say loaves but they were really crackers, five crackers and two little fish. But when we put those into God’s hands and we trust him completely God uses those small things. He uses the weak things of the world, he has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong so that no man may boast before God.
God is calling you to minister to the world. It means sacrificing of yourself, your time, your comfort, your sleep, your leisure time, your money. It means making available to him even what little you might have. You see after Jesus blessed the bread and the fish he gave it to his disciples to pass out to the people. They stood between him and the multitude and in the same way we are called to go out from him to the people of this world. Christ has commanded you to go to the world that is in need, and there is a vast spiritual need in every generation. The hungry crowd is always present, the lost who are in desperate need of the bread of life and God has chosen to use his people to reach them. We do not need to worry about the resources, we do not need to worry about how we might accomplish an impossible task, we just need to be willing to go, to be used.