Jesus Miracle of Multiplication. Jesus Miracle of Multiplication

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Elaine Harrison
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1 T. B. Maston Foundation e-newsletter Summer 2015 Originally presented as sermon at Second Baptist Church, March 11, 2012, as part of the Lent 2012 Vital Signs series Jason Edwards Senior Pastor, Second Baptist Church, Liberty, Missouri John 6: 1-15 In the 6 th chapter of John, we find Jesus disciples dealing with an expectant crowd of over 5,000 hungry people. By this time, Jesus fame has spread far and wide, and crowds of people are now willing to drop what they re doing and follow him across the sea, just to be near him. They ve begun to think that somehow, someway, if they just keep following after him, their lives will change for the better. They want to hear what he has to say. They want to see what he is going to do next. John tells us that they followed because they had seen the signs. They d seen Jesus transform lives. They d seen Jesus heal the sick. And now, after following him across land and sea, they were hoping to see something else. It seems that what they were hoping to see first, was lunch. You see, these people had brought nothing to eat and were hungry. Jesus disciples had no idea how to solve this problem. Conventional thinking wouldn t work here. There are 5,000 hungry men, plus women and children. These people are probably not just hungry like you and I are when we have to wait until 2 o clock for our lunch break. Theirs is a deep, persistent, gnawing hunger. How do we know this? The kind of bread the boy brings to Jesus is a pretty good tip-off. 1

2 Barley was a poor person s bread. The historian Philo once said that barley was a bread of little merit reserved for animals and men who were stuck in unhappy circumstances. It s possible that many of these people didn t bring bread because they didn t have any to bring. These people were probably experiencing severe hunger. And when people are experiencing that kind of hunger, there s no telling what they ll do to satisfy it. I was thinking about this last week as I read the popular book, The Hunger Games. Essentially, The Hunger Games is a story about the future of North America. It takes place in a country called Panem, which is formed after the destruction of North America. Panem has a wealthy city known as Capitol and 12 districts that surround it. Many of the people in Panem are poor and hungry. At some point in the history of the country, these destitute people rose up against the powers-that-be the people who were hoarding wealth and resources and attempted to overthrow them. But they failed, and they are now required, so they will never forget who their masters are, to participate in the annual Hunger Games. Combatants in the Hunger Games are engaged in a fight to the death. Two teenagers one boy and one girl from each of the 12 districts are randomly selected to represent their district in the games. Those selected are forced to participate... they have no choice. Twenty-four enter, but only one escapes alive. The people of the survivor s district will be given all of the food they need for the coming year. People in the other districts will be left to fend for themselves. Even before we get to the games, we get a glimpse into the lives and thoughts of these hungry people; and we re invited to wonder, what would we do for ourselves and our families just to have enough to eat? How would we feel about people who lived within reach of us who knew what we were going through, who had more than enough to help us, and yet chose not to? More than that, how would we feel about a God who did that? How would we feel about a God who we believed had the power to feed us and yet sat idly by while we starved to death? Would we be angry? 2

3 Resentful? Would we continue to put our faith in a God like that? I know this is something that my wife, Christy, wrestled with during her time in Africa. For two years, she served as a missionary among some of the poorest people in the world. She watched people live and die in extreme poverty. She went there with a simple understanding of who God is and how God cares for us. But she came out of that experience with a lot of questions. I imagine the people on that mountain had a lot of questions for Jesus, too. And, most likely, somewhere near the top of the list was, Can you feed us? Will you feed us? The disciples had no idea how to answer this question. But they did know what to do. And the simplicity of what they did ought to serve as a reminder to us. They took it to Jesus. When we take things to Jesus, we never know what he s going to do. But we tend to hope and even expect that it will be something new and creative. Something we ve never seen before. Something that might point us to a hope that is larger than ourselves. That s exactly what we see here. Verse 11 tells us that he took the bread... and, when he had given thanks for it, he distributed it to those who were seated there with him. (Now doesn t that sound familiar?) After Jesus distributed the bread, the people had as much bread and fish as they could possibly want. In fact, they had more than enough. There were 12 baskets left over. So, in this situation, Jesus does seem to care about the poor and the hungry. Jesus wants to feed them. Jesus wants to offer them far more than they need. Or so it would seem. At least in this situation. But what about other situations? What about the people all over the world who know that hunger is anything but a game? What might Jesus be saying to them? What might Jesus do for them? Perhaps the answer lies a little further on in the chapter. If we keep reading, we see that Jesus used this little picnic to prepare us for something we re supposed to learn about him. Jesus doesn t just give the bread. Jesus is the bread. This is exactly what he says: I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry and he who believes in me will never go thirsty. 3

4 Jesus is the bread they ve been looking for. Jesus is the one who satisfies. But that seems both satisfying and, at the same time, incredibly unsatisfying. Because selfishly, right or wrong, I want to know the same thing that the crowds wanted to know. That when you follow Jesus you re going to find good news. Good news deep down in the depths of your soul and good news deep down in the depths of your stomach. This is something people all over our world want to know. Our church has decided to focus significant mission efforts in the country of Haiti. I ve invited everyone in our church to participate in this mission in some way. I recently read a story about two Baptist aid workers in Haiti. They re known as the hunger hunters. These two men drove motorcycles up a mountain to a place that was too steep for mules. There, in a foggy clearing high above the Haitian capital, they found two glassy-eyed boys standing beside a wood-and-mud hut. From their appearance, it was obvious that they had been hungry for a long time. Severely underweight, they seemed years younger than their real ages. Yet their grey and patchy hair made them look old, even elderly. The hunger hunters described the two boys as looking like they were ready to die. This is an all-too-common reality in Haiti. Long before the earthquake, Haiti had struggled with malnutrition. UNICEF says that malnutrition is responsible for about 60% of all deaths of people under 18 in Haiti. An estimated 30 percent of Haitian children are chronically malnourished. 1 So what can the gospel of Jesus Christ do for them? Can the gospel transform their lives, satisfy their needs, and minister to both their souls and their stomachs right now? I believe it can. How? I think that John shows us how right here in this story. We often preach a gospel that has a hole in it, but I believe that if we would embrace the whole gospel of Jesus, then the whole world would find themselves with more than enough. And I believe this because there already is more than enough. 1 From the Huffington Post Article Fighting Hunger in Rural Haiti. 4

5 However, the tragic truth is that the world really is set up like Panem the country in The Hunger Games. There are people who have, and there are people who have not. And the people who have not are sitting outside the city of abundance, waiting for someone to open the gate and invite them to sit at the table. And we are not those people. Let me be clear we are not the people sitting outside of the gate. It s not that we don t have needs. It s not that there isn t a longing for more in our lives more love, more grace, more money, more resources, more help, more of God s presence. No, it s not that we don t long for more. It s just that most of us whether we realize it or not already have so much. We know that for a fact when we consider the scores of people around our world who are living and dying just like those two Haitian boys. They don t just want more, they need more. They need more to survive. They need more so that their lives will stop feeling so much like death. They need more. And we have it. That s the crazy thing about how our world is set up. God has put enough in this world for everyone to have more than enough. But then God decided to trust us with it. And we began to stake our claims and build our kingdoms and hold our resources close. In the great land-grab of creation, some ended up with way more than enough. And others ended up hungry. There s more than enough. It s just that some of us have our hands on the goods, and we won t let go. But what if we did let go? What if hungering and thirsting after Jesus meant that we truly tried to live and love as Jesus lived and loved? What if we are supposed to be God s response to hunger in this world? What if we saw the crowds of people who are starving to death all around us, and we truly wanted to feed them? What if we put our heads together and couldn t come up with any reasonable way to solve the hunger problems in front of us? What if we looked at what we had and knew it wasn t enough? That s exactly what happened in John s gospel. The difference is that 5

6 this group of Jesus disciples did something most of us aren t quite willing to do. They took what they had, and they gave it to Jesus. And then they waited. Because they knew that Jesus was going to take the little they had given and do something with it that was new and creative and life-giving. This is the beautiful and incredible thing about this miracle. This wasn t a miracle of manufacturing. It was a miracle of multiplication. Jesus didn t see their hunger and then decide to manufacture food out of thin air. No, instead he waited on his followers to bring what they had to him. And then Jesus took the little they had and multiplied a miracle out of it. And guess what? If we ll open up our hearts and our hands, Jesus can do that with us, too. 6

Harvest time is amazing, isn t it? The fields and trees and hedgerows are full of

Harvest time is amazing, isn t it? The fields and trees and hedgerows are full of These three talks could be combined into one longer talk, or be used as part of a Harvest Festival with a structure like the one below: Welcome All Things Bright and Beautiful Talk 1 Our God Is A Great