“More Than Enough”

Matthew 14:13-21

During the late nineteenth century there arose a school of Biblical interpretation that sought to demythologize biblical passages like today’s text. The miraculous feeding of the multitude was explained away by the notion, that as the disciples shared their meager resources, others in the crowd were moved to share theirs, and thus there ended up being way more food than they needed.

That’s a nice sort of sentimental tale of human goodness, the kindness of one human being toward another on a massive scale. But Jesus didn’t do sentimentality. He came to proclaim, teach, and model the living will of God. He used God’s power in miraculous ways to heal and help those in distress. We don’t know the details of what happened with those five loaves and two dried fishes. Somehow though, by the very power of God, Jesus multiplied them into a marvelous feast. Not only did he more than adequately feed everybody, he sent them all home with leftovers.

Those people had followed him to his planned place of respite. He responded to them with compassion. He taught them. He healed them. He fed them. He took their needs, their hurts, their fears, and their sorrows seriously enough to minister to them.

Why? As it says in verse 14, “… he had compassion for them.” He didn’t just feel sorry for them. His response went way beyond pity. He had compassion – a deep down in the heart, gut, and soul reaction to human pain and suffering. This was more than just some ooey-gooey feeling, some sort of passive empathy. He didn’t just “feel their pain.” His compassion burned within him as an energizing, motivating, overwhelming, and urgent need to fix the broken, heal the hurt, welcome the lonely, teach the ignorant, and feed the hungry.

He had compassion. Part of that compassion was a righteous anger that burned within him, an anger at all the wrongs that sin had imposed on these people who stood before him. This righteously angry compassion of Jesus was a driving force that moved him to exert the very power of God.

There’s nothing sentimental about that. When the compassion of God combines with the power of God to impose God’s will on a sinful world, what happens cannot be explained away with some intellectual exercise that tells us that it was only a sentimental myth. To interpret today’s text as a story about human niceness and goodness is to rob it of its awesome portrayal of God’s power. Such an interpretation closes God up in some humanly defined box. It turns Jesus into just one more nice guy, maybe much nicer than average, but nowhere near to being God’s very own Son and Messiah.

Such an interpretation robs those disciples of their rightful place in the text. They weren’t just twelve nice subordinates to a super-friendly boss. They were the people Jesus was grooming to do his work once he had ascended back to heaven. That day when Jesus fed all those people, the disciples generously shared what they had. That was nice. But it had nothing to do with being nice. They did what they did at the behest of and under the authority of the Messiah.

They had their doubts. They had their questions. But they obeyed Jesus’ command to feed those people. Trusting Jesus to be Jesus and having faith in the unlimited power of God they did what Jesus told them to do despite all their doubts and questions. They turned their meager resources over to him, trusting that his power would turn their meagerness into a wondrous bounty. They didn’t know how it was going to happen. They simply trusted that it would.

We proclaim Jesus to be the Christ – the Messiah. We profess to trust him as our only Lord and Savior. We are the twenty-first century successors to those original disciples. We have answered our Lord’s call to continue his healing, saving work. Not a call to be nice. Not a call to wallow in sweet sentimentality. Not a call to gather the human race up in a circle and sing “Kum-by-Yah,” or some silly song about wishing that we could give everybody a Coke and thus bring about peace and harmony.

The harsh reality is that we live and do ministry in a world besieged by sin, death, and evil. We are surrounded by people drowning in a sea of iniquity, much of it self-inflicted. Ours is a culture of ruthless self-centeredness. Anything goes, as long as it’s profitable, efficient, feels good, or puts us one-up on somebody else. If this culture has any sense of Jesus at all, it is of some meek and mild nice guy who lived a long time ago. God is a nice old man with a long white beard living somewhere up there in a place called heaven. The Ten Commandments and Beatitudes are nice but overly optimistic ideals that don’t work in the real world.

We who are Jesus’ disciples are often looked down on with contempt. How can we be so naïve? How can we believe that blather about the grace, mercy, and love of God? It’s fine with the world if we go hide in our churches, hang out with one another, read our little bibles, sing our simple hymns, and leave the world to those who really do know how to run it.

We, however, are called to imitate Christ, and Christ never, ever hid behind a mask of sweetness and light. Nor did he ever kowtow to the powers that be. Jesus took on the world. He confronted sin. He successfully and powerfully battled demons and disease. He told the devil where to stick it. He didn’t hide from evil. He didn’t run from death. He spoke God’s truth, modeled God’s amazing love, and used God’s power to set right the wrongs of a sin-driven world.

Yes, he was gentle, even enough for babies. Yes, he was kind. Yes, he was good. And as God was nice so was he. He never set out to intentionally offend anyone. He didn’t misuse or abuse his power. Even when he fed the multitude he didn’t do so out of any other motive than compassion. He wasn’t looking for popularity. He wasn’t trying to put together some kind of political coalition. He was simply doing what his Father had called him to do.

If people were offended by the truth of the Gospel, so be it. If his behavior wasn’t always considered kosher by the religious elite, it couldn’t be helped. It didn’t matter to him that feeding 15,000 people with five loaves and two fishes was supposed to be impossible. He just did it. Just like he healed the sick and raised the dead. The compassion of God that burned within him would allow him to do no less.

Such compassion must also burn deep within those of us who would follow him. The work of the devil should righteously enrage us. The horrible effects of sin, death, and evil should set a fire burning in our bellies. The sick need to be healed and comforted, the physically hungry given bread, the spiritually starving fed on God’s Word, the lonely befriended, the alienated welcomed, and the lost showed the way home. Like those first disciples we may be overwhelmed by the need around us. We may believe that our numbers are too few, our resources too limited, and our strength too little.

But as Jesus showed compassion, so must we. We must not let what we lack dictate the amount and kind of ministry that can be done. Our compassion must drive us as it drove Jesus. If we will trust him to be Lord of Lords and King of Kings, he will provide. If by faith we claim him as our Messiah, he can take even nothing and from it bring something. If Jesus is our Emmanuel, if we truly do trust him to be God-with-us, then from our scarcity he can bring plenty, of our little he can make much.

He will take whatever we have, even if it’s limited to the modern equivalent of five loaves and two fishes, and use it to accomplish his Father’s will. I’ve quoted this old hymn before, and now I’m quoting it again: “Little is much if God is in it.” Or as William Barclay puts it, “Little is always much in the hands of Christ.”

With Jesus there are no such things as too little and too late. Again quoting Dr. Barclay, “… when Christ is there, the weary find rest and the hungry soul is fed.” Or to use the words of Clair Crissey, “… whatever our needs may be, God has more than adequate resources to meet them.” Not as a matter of niceness. Not as some sweet, sentimental gesture. But as an act of compassion. Compassion: the fire of grace, mercy, love and divinely righteous anger that burns with a hot holiness deep in the heart of God. Amen.