Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the 14th chapter:
Now when Jesus heard [about the death of John], he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” But Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
Because I always sin, I always need the medicine. I can’t remember which of the church fathers actually said that but it's a good quote nonetheless. Of course, there they're talking about the Lord's Supper, what has commonly been called the medicine of immortality. For in the Lord's Supper, we find that we have life eternal. It's really a blessing to have it and even now to have it every week as we gather together. There really is nothing better than that, for no matter what else happens, I would say, our Lord comes to you in this Sacrament and feeds you his body and his blood that you may have life forever in him.
It's kind of nice that way; it relieves the pressure of the preacher. My words don't matter half as much, it seems, at least not from me. But, is that really what our text is talking about today? Was this the Lord's Supper here? No. No, it's not the Lord's Supper when Jesus feeds the 5000; it's not. But in this text we can find many truths about the Lord's Supper. It's not the Lord's Supper here, but it gives us a doctrine about it. It informs us as to who Jesus is and what he's doing as he feeds us. So let's take a look, shall we?
It starts with Jesus getting some bad news: his cousin, John, has just been beheaded. If you know the tale, it's pretty salacious. But just to kind of cut it short here, John is preaching the truth about Herod taking his brother's wife to himself and his wife is not very happy about that. So, she schemes with her daughter, Salome, to have John murdered. And so he is. The last prophet of the Old Testament, the last prophet to point to the coming Messiah, is now dead.
And the time of the Messiah is now nigh. And Jesus, I think, realizing, not just the loss of his cousin, which, indeed, was great and profound, but also now realizing the weight of the mission as it's getting closer to its completion, Jesus goes off to a desolate place to be by himself. I think we can all identify with that. Can't we? The idea of going off and being alone to sit with our emotions and our feelings and to process whatever it is that we're thinking about? We buried my dad last week, finally, after five and a half months of him being in a refrigerator. And it was a hard week. It still is. I’d be lying if I said it was easy. And there are a lot of days and there still are days where I just need to be by myself. I understand that impulse. I think that you all do, too, and then, Jesus being human, of course, he would need the same.
It's hard. It's hard work to be Jesus. You're constantly being chased down by people. You're constantly giving of yourself to all those who would come to you. And Jesus just needs a minute to think. It doesn't say whether the apostles went with him or not. My guess is they didn’t. So Jesus rode across the lake by himself in a boat and you can just kind of see, as Jesus is going, the crowds are following along the shore looking for him. Because after all this is the messiah. This is the one who has been long promised to save people and more than that. He heals them and he does miracles. It's really fun to be around him.
So Jesus, when he lands, sees the crowds, and instead of getting his minute to himself, he does what any good Messiah would do and he goes about his work. He goes about healing them. He goes about having compassion on them. And I love that word, “compassion” in the Greek, the word comes from the word splaxna. It’s an onomatopoeia. Do you remember the old Batman TV series? Bam, pow, whap. In Greek, it's an onomatopoeia, splaxna, because that's the sound that your guts make if your belly's cut open and your intestines drop on the ground. That's what Jesus is feeling, that compassion, that deep compassion, so much that everything is spilling out of you. Jesus feel such compassion for these people who would chase him down that he does what he needs to do for them and he does it all day long.
Now how many people were there? Well, at least 5,000; probably closer to 10,000, maybe 15 or 20 thousand people, chasing after Jesus. He's working hard all day long. I mean, as much as he is also divine, as much as he is also God, he is also man, and how do you feel after a long hard day of work? You feel tired. You’re wiped out. And yet Jesus still has compassion on these people.
But now it becomes evening. There's nothing around; it's a desolate place. In fact, this should bring back for you the remembrance of the Israelites wandering in the desert, and we heard in our Introit today. As they're wandering out in this desert, there’s nothing around. The only one to provide for them is God. And this reading today should remind us of that, that in this desolate place that Jesus has taken these people, these crowds, there's nothing around. And it's time to eat.
The little ones are begging for food and for sleep, the men are tired after chasing after Jesus, trying to get their families up to him, the women are tired after minding the children. It's been a hard day for everybody. And the apostles say Jesus, come on, man. It's been a long hard day. You're done. You've put in too much. We're worried about you. Send all these people home. Let them go get something to eat in the villages. Let them go find a place to sleep. Let them go do what they need to do. Let's get you to have your minute. Jesus says they don't need to go away.
They don’t, they don't need to go away because God provides. He says to the apostles kind of a funny little thing, you give them something to eat, and we sit there and we think with the apostles, what in the world are you talking about? We've been with you. We don't have any food. I don't have the power to make things come out of nothing. I don't have ]a backpack full of Power Bars to give to everybody, and even if I did, it wouldn't feed 20,000. I've got no power in myself to do this. But if they'd only asked.
Jesus had already given them the authority to feed the people. But they did not yet have faith to ask. Jesus told them specifically, you feed them. Do you think if they had said, okay, let's feed them, thatGod would have let them down, that God would not have provided when Jesus gave the command? And yet out of a lack of faith, they said we've only got five loaves of bread and two fish.
I don't know about you. I mean, I can usually eat a pizza in a sitting, maybe two sittings, but five loaves, two fish, that might get maybe two and a half, three meals for me. Now multiply that by thousands.
But Jesus knows what he's up to. He says bring them to me. Now presumably, I think he's talking about the loaves and the fishes, but could he also be talking about the people here? Bring them to me and I will feed them.
So he ordered the crowds to sit down in the grass, wherever it may be. He took all the food and he gave a blessing, said a prayer. He broke the loaves (and again, we should start maybe thinking a little bit about the Lord's Supper. Again, this is not the Lord's Supper, but has some qualities to it). And he gave them to the disciples for the disciples to give out to the crowds. And they never ran out. In fact, once they distributed the food, everybody had more than enough to eat. And so they went back and they took up the food, which is a pretty common practice, because you would take out the leftovers and either save them for yourself if you're in your family, or, if you're in a group, you might save those for the poor who can't afford food. Now, the apostles who had no food to give, they couldn't have expected that there was anything left, right? And yet they took up twelve baskets full, and we're not talking little tiny baskets, we’re talking baskets full of broken pieces left over.
What does this have to do with the Lord's Supper? Our hymns today have been all about the Lord's Supper. They've all been about how great this is, how wonderful this meal is. And it is. From the text, first, know that our Lord has compassion on you. He sees you and your pitiable state. He sees you in your sin. He sees you as you deal with things in your life. He sees you as you struggle, maybe, to make ends meet, or as you struggle to make sure that you've got all the right motivations behind what you do, or that you make the right choices during the day. He sees you. And he has compassion for you, his guts spill out for you, that deep-seated feeling when you just can't help but be moved to action. And in that compassion our Lord came to this earth to become like one of you and to die.
He came into this place that he might forgive your sins through the shedding of his blood and the brokenness of his body. That's all well and good. But the crucifixion happened 2,000 years ago. In the system that has been instituted by God since, really, time began, at least since the fall into sin, blood has been very important. The shedding of blood is necessary for the forgiveness of sins. But it doesn't just happen out there somewhere. It's not as if Adam and Eve could have been there in the Garden of Eden being cast out and God took the first lamb and killed it far far away. It wouldn't work. They had to be there with the blood.
And the people, as they made their sacrifices for the forgiveness of their sins, to thank God for all that He's done for them, it's not like they could just send their sacrifices off to Jerusalem and they stay over in Bethlehem or up in Nazareth. They had to be there. And the reason for that is because the blood of the thing that is slaughtered has to be spread on top of you, has to be put on you. You must be covered in the blood. It's always been the way that God has worked.
Well, the crucifixion then should be no different for us. Now, I know that some of us may be a bit older than others, but I'm hazarding a guess that none of us is 2,000 years old. None of us were there at the crucifixion, right? So how does the blood of Jesus gets spread on you? Through wishful thinking? No, because the way that forgiveness would come to you is only when the blood of the crucifixion is put on you. But we weren't there. Only a few can claim to have been there: John, the Marys, the thief on the cross, on them the blood was shed. When the soldier pierced Jesus’ side, the blood flowed out. One of the depictions of the crucifixion, I think it was a TV movie once upon a time, had this amazing image of the wind taking the blood and spraying it on the people around. Those people there could claim that the blood was on them. 11 of the Apostles couldn’t. Tough luck for them, right?
But God has always shed his blood on his people to forgive their sins. So he must be doing something different here. He must have a way to bring the crucifixion to you. See now, Jesus has put his body and his blood in the bread and in the wine. Do we understand how? No, and it's probably not wise to try to figure it out for the scriptures are silent on that. They usually are when it comes to the way that God works as he does his miracles. But it is a miracle, that through the word of God with the bread and with the wine, Jesus’ body and blood are present there. And there the blood does come to you.
You receive his broken body, you receive his blood, and it's put on you in such a way that it is indelible. It's no longer even on your skin, something that you could wipe off as you leave the temple, but it is now in you and it's something that you cannot get rid of. Jesus said to the apostles when they needed something, these people don't need to go away. And neither do you. There is no other place for you to go to receive the blood of Jesus, that forgiving cleansing flood of the blood, than this place.
The Scriptures mention many times, especially in the Psalms, that they would desire to to stay in the house of the Lord forever. So should our hearts be, that we might receive our Lord forever, that we might receive the benefit of his sacrifice on the cross for us forever. And yet Jesus does not keep the people there. He brings them in. He feeds them. He gives them exactly what it is that they need. And you know what? That night, they went home to their beds and they slept full, perhaps, for some, the first time in many, many years. But they slept full, they slept happy.
And so it is for you: that as you receive our Lord's body and blood, as you bring him into yourself, as he gives himself to you, you might also go out from this place and be satisfied, full of the forgiveness of sins, sometimes maybe even for the first time in many many years. But it's there that you might receive it and it's there every time that you need it. That is why it is such a blessing to have it now every single time that we gather together in this way, for if I am always sick with sin, I always need the medicine.
Our Jesus does not turn you away from this table, but welcomes you in every time we gather, that he might strengthen you once more and preserve you unto life everlasting. Jesus is good in this way. And he reminds us through this passage today that he will give himself to you every time that you ask, every time that you're seeking from him something that you need. He knows what it is you really need. You might be dealing with the stresses and the challenges of life, things in your marriages might be difficult things, things in your workplace might be hard. It certainly has been stressful these last six months, has it not? And yet we come to Jesus and he relieves us of all the anxiety that we feel, for this medicine is life immortal, a life that is promised to be better than anything we could find here in this life. The life which Jesus gives us in His supper is more complete than life in this world, and it is a life that points us to the greater life to come, a life that is without sin, a life in which we will not need the forgiveness of sins anymore but we shall be given life eternal.
Back in the garden, the tree of life was there for Adam and Eve to eat from. And they ate from it and they could live forever as long as they kept eating. They would live forever. But they were cast out of the garden for their sin and the tree of life was taken away from them. But in Jesus, the tree of life is given to you in the cross. And that cross then is put into this cup and into the bread. That cross is for you. That tree of life is for you. As long as you eat of it you shall live. And there always be more. There will always be more, no matter how often you seek it.
I do think it's interesting that Jesus decides to put himself into Bread and Wine. He doesn't put himself into cheese and biscuits. He doesn't put himself into Coca-Cola and steak. He puts himself in bread and wine, two things that will never disappear from this Earth. No matter what else we might lack, bread and wine will be found in abundance. And so it is that we have Jesus always in abundance. There is no end to this Holy supper. There will always be more for you and for all who will come after you. There will always be more, for our Lord has indeed have compassion on you, to put his blood into you that you might be forgiven, even from the outside in, in a way that you will have life forever.
This text is not the Lord’s Supper, but we would miss much if we do not see our Lord working in the Supper today the same miraculous power of this feeding, through His compassion and his abundance. He comes to you and gives it to you, that you may be full of the free gift of Jesus in His body and blood, for the forgiveness of sins and the strengthening of faith. It is yours, and He is yours now and forever. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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