Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God the Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!
I saw this funny Internet meme this past week that says “Nobody noticed that Jesus Christ, talking to 5,000 people without a microphone is a Miracle. We just focus on bread.” All the audio and sound tech people are saying “exactly!” It’s a whole new take on the feeding of the 5000, isn’t it?! This is truly a familiar and well loved miracle of our Lord that we have before us today. Five loaves and two fish in the Gospel reading miraculously multiplied to feed the multitude. And this lines up with our Old Testament reading about the Manna and the Quail. Both of these miraculous accounts in the scriptures work at highlighting the same idea: God Provides. He provides for His people abundantly. And both of these accounts take place in a similar location too. Desert in our Exodus reading and a desolate place in our Gospel reading. The desert is probably the last place you’d expect to find an abundance of food, right?! All there is in the desert is sand and a bunch of stuff that wants to kill you from scorpions to cactus to sweltering heat! To this day I still can’t understand the winter snowbird fascination with going there!
But lets dig through these readings and see what we can find. A month after the Passover, the angel of death, the parting of the Red Sea, and all the other amazing and incredible evidences of God’s power, protection and provision for His people, the Israelites face a great big test. The camping supplies they brought with them from Egypt have run dangerously low. In fact, they are all used up. And, they are smack dab in the middle of the desolate desert. Upon seeing that the larder is lacking they begin to do what people do so well. They grumble. They complain. They whinge to Moses and Aaron. And this is only after a month and a half after gettin’ out of Dodge! They start to have a case of Stockholm Syndrome in that they long to be back in slavery and oppression in Egypt! Despite all that God had done for them to deliver and redeem them from that oppression, now they want to go back. Why would anyone want that?! Oh, there’s the reason in verse 3: “we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full,…you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (16:3). Meat and bread. For meat and bread, they would readily go back into slavery. Their eyes were blind to what their God had recently demonstrated to them: the Lord provides for His people.
But God’s provision and the way He provides is often counter-intuitive to the way we naturally expect things to be. It’s like the Blues Brothers say: “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” And as He does, He invites the Israelites to trust. He invites His people to trust Him. Because there, in that desert place, the Lord will provide. Bread from Heaven. This strange flake-like thing, like frost on the desert sand was the “what is it” bread of the wilderness. Every day it was there, except on Friday when there was double. This allowed them to keep the Sabbath day of rest because they had enough from the day before. Truly this miraculous provision was their “daily bread” - a testament to God’s faithfulness to His doubting, grumbling and complaining people. Every day the Lord provided for His people. Bread in the morning and quail in the evening. Abundance from nothing. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
No wonder then that our Lord builds this story from Exodus right into the Lord’s Prayer. The 4th petition - “Give us this day our daily bread.” What does Luther say about this in the catechism? “God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people, but we pray in this petition that God would lead us to realize this and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.” Everything we need to live. Every good thing that we have in our lives comes from our God Who so graciously provides. The heart of this nugget from the catechism is that we do not need to worry but rather to trust that God will be there for us and provide for us, just as He has always done. Food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, employment, money, goods, family, friends, peace, you name it. The Lord provides abundantly. When we come to embrace this by faith, then away goes our grumbling and complaining. Instead, we receive God’s gifts and seek to share them with others who have needs.
Truly it is no wonder then that our Lord’s miracle of feeding the 5,000 parallels our Exodus reading. It’s driving home the same point. The Disciples were worrying, trying to figure out how to provide food for this enormous crowd. They wanted to send them away to fend for themselves but Jesus tests them, just as the Israelites were tested in the wilderness. He says “You give them something to eat” (6:37). Say what, Jesus?! Not even Martha Stuart could pull off a catering feat like this! They’re in the middle of nowhere, walking through the valley of the shadow of no food, where are they possibly going to get the vittles for this capacity crowd? It’s impossible … with man. But what is impossible with man is more than possible with God. The point was that God provides. After feeding their souls by “teaching them many things” as we heard last Sunday, our Lord now feeds their bodies with bread and fish.
And we are much like the Disciples and the grumbling Israelites. We don’t often see the solution that God has in mind for us. The sickness, the disease, the loss, the struggles of our lives, they all often seem overwhelming. But Jesus speaks. He has a plan. Even if we can’t quite connect the dots to see the picture of what He is doing, regardless, He acts. We do well to listen to Him and do what He tells us. Likewise we think of the cross. What a weird way to deal with sin, death and the devil. The Son of Man innocently bleeding and dying on the instrument of Roman torture. This is how God provided for our greatest need of forgiveness, life and salvation. And if He can do that, then certainly He can provide for our earthly needs. St. Paul emphasizes this very point this morning too: “He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness” (2Cor 9:10).
This becomes the goal and mission of the daily bread. That just as Abraham was blessed to be a blessing, we too as God’s people are similarly blessed that we may sow the seeds of God’s Kingdom into the wilderness of our desolate world. For people who haven’t heard of God’s promises of provision, they need the blessings God has richly given to you. For people who have no food, they need a portion of what God has provided. And, we are reminded that every miracle in the bible began on the platform of a problem. Hunger, thirst, forgiveness, whatever the blessing, it began with a problem. Every problem is an opportunity for God to show us His amazing grace. So don’t despise the problem, seek God’s solutions. You never know, their might just be a miracle waiting there for us. Blessed be our God of abundant provision. Amen!
תגובות