I bet that most of you have heard today’s story of Jesus’ feeding the 5000 more than a few times in your church going lives. You have heard more than one or two ministers or a church-school teacher speculate on how 5 loaves of bread and two fish managed a miraculous expansion to feed all those people with left overs for another day. If you had your hearts set on that part of the story let me say upfront that you will get some of it. We’re going to start at the beginning where Matthew started. Matthew was intentional in his telling the story of Jesus’ life and ministry.



 We can’t probe the depth of the story without entering it through the context Matthew offers us in the previous verses: Jesus was rejected by those he looked up to in his home town and walked away for the last time, and is immediately confronted by the news of the death of John the Baptist. Matthew places today’s story in the context of a rough spot, or worse in Jesus’ ministry.

If you are able, take a deep breath and pause. Take yourselves to a time in your life when you felt abandoned by those whom you’d come to respect and love; family, mentors, friends. If that doesn’t work for you try this: a memory of a time when you learn that someone with whom you were close, a parent, a spouse, a child perhaps, a dear friend has died. Maybe you were present for their last breath. Maybe not. Maybe you had time to be ready. Maybe it was sudden and unexpected. Maybe you were not present and were told of the death by your closest friends. Maybe you learned from another family member in the midst of your day. Without warning the ground shifted beneath your feet. Jesus in a few short verses has been rejected at home and loses the one family member with whom he seems to be close.

Now, think fresh about the first sentence of today’s lesson, what Matthew says: “When Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”

When my wife died this past December, I sat in my living room looking around trying to grasp hold of the emptiness in me and the silence all around me. If it had not been December a lonely kayak paddle across Lewis Cove in solitude may have made sense. Tough stuff. And we’ve all been there in one way or another or certainly will be. It’s full stop. The way things were is not how things will be. Indeed, the ground has shifted beneath our feet.

John’s disciples come to Jesus after they had buried John the Baptist and told him of his cousin’s horrid and violent death at the hands of Rome’s client ruler, Herod. Jesus grieves. Jesus needs alone time. These past two weeks pastor Todd has been helping us wrestle with the creation story. If you were with us last week you may recall Todd helping us think about all the ways we are created in the image of God as Genesis One tells us. “I think, therefore I am.”. We create…sometimes for good, sometimes not. How about: we are in God’s image in the manner of our emotional lives, in the ways we feel compassion or hurt…how we are able to  reconsider and change our minds for the good…in the ways we find joy…and the ways we can descend into sorrow or grief. Jesus is described by our faith as the one who is for us the perfect image, the God/Man, the one faithful ones aspire to be like. Here, Jesus grieves. Jesus goes off alone in his deepest sorrow leaving behind his closest friends and the crowds who seek his touch. Remember Jesus in the garden in Gethsemane before his arrest and crucifixion? He prayed that the hour might pass, “if it is possible please let the cup pass,” then deeper in attentiveness to his call and mission says, “yet not what I want but what you want” but in deep emotional pain. His humanity pours forth in other texts that seem to have gotten past the “Jesus always acted perfectly” editors. Recall the story of the Syrophoneician woman in Mark’s Gospel. A woman pleads and begs on her knees in tears for Jesus to heal her daughter who was possessed of an unclean spirit. Jesus response is harsh. It’s dismissive: “Let the children be fed first (as in the children of Israel) for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” as in the Syrophonecian or Samaritan children, or fast forward to our day, the Palestinian children. She confronts Jesus still on her knees, “even dogs get to eat the crumbs from the master’s table.” It’s as if Jesus opens his eyes and instantly recognizes he’s been a cultural captive who has missed a beat in the mission of compassion and healing. He changes his mind and his response and tells her to go, her daughter is well, the demon vanquished.  Jesus grieves. Jesus prays to God to relieve him of the burden he is carrying. Jesus changes his mind. The one to be the image of perfection for us starts looking very familiar, perhaps a lot like us. We’d all be more perfect humans if we were humble enough now and then to change our minds.

With John’s violent death at the hands of an uncaring empire focused on keeping the rabble under control there is a rending of the fabric of Jesus’ deep and abiding relationship with his cousin. Remember the birth narratives in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus and John once danced together in their respective mother’s wombs. Later, John blest and emersed Jesus in the river Jordan and witnessed his cousin’s early ministry. Were they still close in their respective ministries. It seems so. Previously, John had sent his disciples to ask Jesus if he was, the One or should they await another.” They seem to have taken different paths to sound the alarms against their own religious leaders and the Roman occupiers of the land. We do know John’s death cut deep into the fabric of Jesus being, and just maybe that is all part of the being in God’s image…the capacity to feel pain deep for another human or a multitude of other humans.  

I suspect in that short row across the lake Jesus pondered afresh the immensity of the task before him…how could his solitary acts of compassion, his curing and healing, how could the humble offerings of one, or one with a few disciples begin a transformation of the human heart and soul? Had God made the task to birth a new way for humanity overwhelming and impossible?

The text takes us to the feeding of the 5000 without any clues regarding Jesus’ personal row to the other shore. Reading the Gospels is often akin to reading “Cliff Notes.” There is often far more going on between the lines if we stop and wonder about what we are being told. How does the Lord of life get back to the call in his soul?…and more importantly, how do any of us recover from our times of broken hearts and souls and broken spirits that are part of being human? How do we regain focus and purpose and trust to move forward again?

How do we come out the other side? I have a clue. You knew I wouldn’t have wandered down this path if I didn’t.

Leave Jesus aside for a couple of minutes while I tell you a story, a true story. I have a friend, more properly had a friend. We’ve lost contact over the past decade or so. She once shared a story from her life that may point to understanding the gap in the Gospel record of how Jesus, while rowing across to the other shore moved from the pain of grief, the questioning of his own calling to face and engage a vast crowd that we are told numbered, not 5000 but likely 10 or 15000 because the text tells us at the end that the 5000 was only the estimate of the men present (a way of counting that was the cultural norm for that day, and, sadly still is for much of the world). My friend’s story may also give us a clue to how that massive throng of humanity on a deserted hillside ate their fill.  

My friend had been raised in an abusive family and escaped into an equally or worse difficult and abusive marriage. It had taken her most of a decade before she felt sufficiently healed to enter and find trust in another relationship. So, here she was mountain climbing 8000 feet up in the Rockies with her new husband on, you get it, their honeymoon. They had just pledged to share their lives, and to trust…you know the line, “for better or worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health.” She didn’t imagine the “worse” part would come soon. They were both experienced climbers. But, as sometimes happens with the best climbers she found herself emotionally and physically frozen on a ledge. She couldn’t look up or sideways. She was staring only at the rock inches in front of her face. Her new spouse was less than a foot away on another ledge urging her to just take a small step with her right foot. She couldn’t move it. He said, “hold on with your left hand. Keep your feet planted on the ledge. Put out your right hand and lean toward my fingers. Slowly she amassed enough courage and trust and did what he was urging and leaned just enough. His fingers found hers, then her hand and a grasp of her arm that broke the spell that held her frozen. She stepped toward the next ledge. She then said to me, “I learned that day a lesson that will stay with me until I die. Learn to lean into those who love you. Learn in your heart and soul that leaning into another or others is trusting and the only way to build relationships and likely the only way to heal the planet.”

I hope you didn’t hear what I didn’t say. This was not a “guy saves his girl story.” They were both experienced climbers. It could easily have gone either way because it does to the most experienced climbers which is why most don’t climb alone. It’s a story about learning to trust again and how to move from the ledge where life has landed us  

Back to the Gospel text while I try to connect some dots. Jesus stepped off a boat and faced a crowd hungry for, what? Vengeance over the death of John the Baptist which certainly would have roused their rage. Hungry for one to tell them what to do and how to be? Because they were leaderless and needed direction. Hungry for compassion in their poverty because, they were the poorest of the poor and the disregarded even by their own religious leaders. Hungry for cures for the sicknesses that plagued them and their wives and the children among them? Hungry for food? Yes, all of those things…steeped in a world that offered no cause for hope. And the Lord was moved from his loss…moved to lean hard into their need, to lean hard into his calling and mission again, to offer compassion, and cures, and healing and then hear the cries for food.  

But there’s more isn’t there. And this part points at us. The disciples of Jesus were having none of it. It was late in the day and it was time to disperse the rabble. “Send them away to get their own food. We don’t have enough even for ourselves.” Jesus says to them, “No, you feed them.” No one knows what or how it happened. Did Jesus just wave his hands around and miraculously two fish and five loaves was more than enough for 10 or 15000 souls. Or, was there a greater miracle at work, Maybe they leaned too, leaned into each other. Maybe they shared what they had carried and all were fed.

Poet Amanda Gorman has book I keep by my bedside titled, “Call Us What We Carry. She writes, “Like a page, we are only legible when opened to one another. for what is a book If not foremost a body , waiting and wanting – yearning to be whole…”

Jesus turns our most humble offerings into more than we could have dreamed. Jesus calls on his disciples to dream bigger than they could imagine possible. Jesus didn’t say “Give me those fish and that bread and watch what I can do. I will feed them.” He invites his followers to change their ideas about their own power and the resources available to them to transform lives and heal the world. Think on this, “if we believe our baskets contain only enough for us…if we believe our resources are too limited to do anything for the other, when, in fact we have two fish and a few loaves, then Jesus has nothing with which to feed the hungry.

And this, Jesus didn’t feed how ever many it really was. Jesus gave the food to the disciples and told them, “you feed the people.” From this perspective Jesus’ alternative world is a deserted place where he serves the weak, asks his followers to give people what they need on the basis of compassion, and feeds more than any can imagine. This story is like a mustard seed that grows ,and like yeast that leavens. Serving the weak and feeding the hungry on the basis of need and compassion show the way things are when God rules our hearts and souls.

So,here we are. We are guests at the banquet of the Lord’s Table, we’ll take a bit of bread and, perhaps ½ ounce of juice. We are invited to receive it to remind us to embrace in our hearts afresh the call of the one who dares us to dream, to share not just from our abundance but from what we believe to be not enough. Come. Come to the table. Lean into each other in this community of faith, welcome, compassion and healing. What we have before us are gifts of God for the people of God.

Amen.