Jesus's Hurting Heart

I think I owe you all a short apology, I realized as I was thinking about it this week that I never explained my thought process behind what I’m preaching on. As you’ll recall we looked a number of weeks back when I supply preached at Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, and we were able to see His mission, then two weeks ago we looked at the Beatitudes and saw His heart for hurting people, and then last week we looked at 4 stories of people who Relied on different things for fulfillment, and saw how Jesus fulfills. These have been part of sermon series that in my notes I’ve been calling “Knowing Christ”, and I plan to continue it for the next several weeks until Easter.

So far all of the passages we’ve looked at have been in the early part of Jesus’s, this week we’re going to be going a little further into the story, and going to about the halfway mark in his ministry. But before we read the passage for today, I think we need a little bit of context to catch us up to speed. And for that I think we need to go all the way back to Jesus’s birth.

So the Christmas story… in the gospel of Luke, Luke does something interesting, He begins with a birth but not Jesus’s birth, instead he begins with the birth of Jesus’s cousin: John the Baptist, Mary and Elizabeth were pregnant with Jesus and John at the same time, and John was born just ever so slightly before Jesus so that he could go before Jesus and prepare the way for Him. And as they grow up that’s exactly what happens, John becomes what the prophet Isaiah had called: “a voice in the wilderness preparing the way of the Lord”. Keep that in your mind, we’ll come back to that in a minute.

If you recall, after Jesus’s birth, He had wisemen come and bring Him gifts, but they accidentally tipped off an evil king named Herod to Jesus’s birth and Herod got so mad that there was a new King born that he had all boys 2 years and younger, from the region Jesus was living in, killed. But Mary and Joseph escaped to Egypt for a number of years, until it was safe to return, and then they raised Jesus as a child in Galilee, He grows up and we don’t know much about His childhood but by the time He’s about 30 He’s ready to begin His ministry, and as He begins there’s John acting as that voice in the wilderness preparing people for Jesus.

It’s John that introduces the first of the twelve disciples, it’s John that baptized Jesus allowing Jesus to public ally declare His readiness to do His mission, it’s John that’s there baptizing and declaring the gospel of repentance beside Jesus after Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus, and John continues to fulfill this role of preparing the way for Jesus, and John even takes this a step further, John fearlessly preaches against the evil that He sees in the culture around him, and that leads to John’s arrest by Herod, not the same one who tried to kill Jesus as a baby, this Herod was the son of that one, we’ll come back to that in a second.

Anyways, John is arrested, but Jesus continues preaching, He knows His mission and He continues to go around healing and preaching and sharing the gospel of repentance, and His fame spreads, and crowds are following Him everywhere He goes, and so He also starts to become someone that political figures like Herod are concerned about, and that’s where we are as we begin todays passage.

Matthew 14:1–12 ESV

At that time Herod the tetrarch heard about the fame of Jesus, and he said to his servants, “This is John the Baptist. He has been raised from the dead; that is why these miraculous powers are at work in him.” For Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” And though he wanted to put him to death, he feared the people, because they held him to be a prophet. But when Herod’s birthday came, the daughter of Herodias danced before the company and pleased Herod, so that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter.” And the king was sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he commanded it to be given. He sent and had John beheaded in the prison, and his head was brought on a platter and given to the girl, and she brought it to her mother. And his disciples came and took the body and buried it, and they went and told Jesus.

So Jesus has become famous, Herod hears and He gets concerned because He thinks that Jesus is acting the same as John the Baptist who He had just killed.

As the passage lays out, news came to Jesus that some time prior Herod had killed John, and we see the reason for it.

Herod had stolen his brother’s wife and had married her, which is obviously bad, this caused a massive scandal, as you would imagine, and a bit of a civil war. John saw how wrong this was and went to preach about it, and Herod arrested him. But didn’t really want to kill him because he was popular with the people. But Herod’s new wife had other ideas, she didn’t want more uproar around her scandalous actions, and so she asked for John to be killed, and Herod, likely drunk, at his party granted her her wish.

So this has all happened, and word comes to Jesus that is cousin is dead, and He’s grieved. Look at the next verse: Matthew 14:13-14

Matthew 14:13–14 ESV

Now when Jesus heard this, 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.

Jesus just wanted to get away, to grieve peacefully by Himself, but the crowds still follow Him. They want to hear another sermon, they want to be healed, they want to be a part of everything Jesus has already been doing. And Jesus does something incredible, He lays aside His own grief and selflessly takes care of the sick, the hurting, the disabled, and the broken people that are all swarming Him.

Now this next part is likely familiar… it’s the feeding of the 5000. And when I’ve heard it taught or preached before the message is often: “Jesus is amazing, He has God’s power, and He has the ability to provide” and that’s 100% true, but I was challenged this week through the teachings of a bible teacher named Tim Mackine on this passage, and I want to challenge you this morning to look at the passage with a new set of eyes and to try and see it in context, and understand some of the details that maybe you’ve missed up until this point.

Matthew 14:15–22 ESV

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. Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds.

Ok so Jesus is grieving, He’s trying to get to be by Himself to pray, and likely to weep over the news that His cousin, one of His close companions, is dead. And these crowds just keep following Him, He would have had every right to shoe them away, to just take time to process, but He doesn’t, even in His grief Jesus looks to the needs of others, the passage says, He had compassion on them and healed them. And what do we see in verse 15? He does it all day, they’ve been coming to Him all day, and He just keeps healing them one after another after another.

And then it says that “the disciples came to Him”. What do we mean by disciples here? We mean the twelve.

Who were the twelve?

Matthew 10:2-4 “The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.”

So who do we have in this mix, we have this ragtag group that includes fishermen, some ex-disciples of John the baptist, a tax collector (which was a massive deal at the time, like these guys essentially had betrayed their entire nation), and a zealot (essentially an extremely conservative religious terrorist). So just by being a part of this group and working with the other people in this group, means that each of them have already begun to learn what it means to lay yourself aside and love sacrificially like Jesus.

So the disciples have heard the news, and they know that Jesus is grieving, just like several of them are, but they’re watching Him heal people, and put others before Himself, and then we see that Jesus’s self-less love penetrates their hearts and they start to try and think like Him, to try and take care of these people, and to try to take care of Him.

They come to Him and they’re like ok, this crowd is hungry we need to send them to go get food, and Jesus wanted to be by Himself so let’s try and get Him that time. So they suggest to Jesus that they send the crowds away, but Jesus says no, you give them something to eat.

Now Matthew’s gospel does something interesting here, in a couple of the parallel passages, this story appears in all 4 gospels, the bread and the fish belong to a young boy, but here they seem to appear to the disciples. Read Matthew 14:17 “They said to him, ‘We have only five loaves here and two fish.’” The bread and fish are theirs, they had brought just enough to make the twelve of them supper, and Jesus asks them to give the little bit of food that they have to the crowds. And they’re likely bewildered by this, but they sacrificially give to Jesus and the crowds the little bit that they have, not knowing whether or not they’ll see a return on their gift. And Jesus blesses it, and He performs a miracle.

And then He gets the disciples to do the hardwork of handing out the food to the massive crowd. And just imagine the thoughts of the disciples, especially the fishermen as they watch Jesus miraculously provide food just like He did when He called them and they had the miraculous catch of fish. And just like God provide manna for the Israelites in the wilderness during the time of Moses. Jesus is using the power of God on behalf of the crowds, and they get to be a part of it.

And it’s only after Jesus has used His power to help the crowds that He sends them back home, and then the disciples leave and Jesus finally gets the time He needs to be by Himself and grieve and pray.

And I think that it’s here that we really get a lesson. A lesson on how to deal with grief, both when we’re greiving and when a close friend is grieving.

Jesus shows us an example of how to grieve well. Often when people are grieving they’ll shut people out, Jesus invites people in.

It’s easy when we’re grieving to isolate ourselves from the people who care about us, or the people that normally rely on us. But Jesus shows us the opposite how he interacts with the crowds and with the disciples. He pushes past His own grief to care for the crowds, He shows that He is more concerned with their problems than with His own.

And He let’s His disciples in, He allows them to take on some of His load and to be the primary agents in distributing the food to the people.

The other thing that Jesus shows is the importance of solitude. Handling our grief can feel like we’re walking on a tightrope, we know we need to let people in, but we also need to spend time dealing with our pain and loss and processing it.

Jesus knew He needed time alone, but He balanced that with the needs of others. When the crowds came to Him when He was initially trying to be alone He doesn’t turn them aside, He ministers to them. But after He has taken care of their needs, He also finally spends the time alone that He needs.

There’s also a lot we can learn from the disciples in this passage. The first, is that grief is felt by a community. Jesus likely felt the death of John the most intensely, given that they were related. But Jesus wasn’t the only one in the group that knew John. John 1:40 says that two of John the Baptist’s disciples became Jesus’s disciples, were told that one of these men was Andrew the brother of Simon Peter. The second were not told, but different scholars have suggested both Phillip and John the son of Zebedee as potentially options. These men, being friends of John the Baptist would have also felt the grief of His death, even if not as directly as Jesus.

To further explain this I want to tell you a story from my own life. At New Minas Baptist there is a Sunday School class during the second service for high schoolers and young adults. And for several years it was taught by a couple named John and Colleen Delong, who are the parents of one my best friends. I was in this class all through high school and I spent every week learning from them, and there were several times that I hung out at their house, and during the class we would talk and I just grew really close to them and their family. John was crazy smart, he was easily one of the smartest men I have ever met and I loved getting to learn from Him each week. But in my grade 12 year he was diagnosed with cancer, and the following year he died.

And I remember entering the funeral, and seeing the slideshow of his life, and missing him and just feeling so much pain because of the loss that I was feeling. But then I remember the family came in and my focus shifted. I remember praying during the funeral for my friend Mike and for his brother Sean and for his sisters, and for his mother. And I remember after the funeral going through the procession and just getting to talk to them for a while. And even though I was greiving the loss of John, they were greiving him even more, and so my focus was on them instead of myself.

But the other thing that I noticed was just the strength of their family in spite of losing him. They led the funeral, leading the congregation in worship, and prayer, and in remembrance and celebration of John’s life. And I remember being in that procession line and despite their immense loss there were smiles on their faces as they greeted each person who had come, and they had genuine concern for everyone else who was missing John.

And what I’ve noticed this past week as I’ve recalled these memories, and also examined this passage was that Jesus and his disciples demonstrated the exact same strength. They took care of the crowds before themselves, and then both Jesus and the disciples were concerned about each other before themselves.

And this is the hard lesson we learn from Jesus, that even in our weakest moments we are still called to carry out the mission of the kingdom, to minister to broken people, and to forge ahead as the hands and feet of God even when we feel broken ourselves.

We also see that Jesus pressed on, His grief didn’t cripple Him, because He knew that death was not the end. What did we hear in the Beatitudes? Matthew 5:11-12 ““Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

John the Baptist suffered for the sake of righteousness because of the sins of Herod. But once he died then there was only joy waiting him because his reward was great in heaven.

My friend and mentor John suffered because of the sake of sin in the world. In his book A Fourfold Salvation A.W. Pink describes the affects of sin and how Christ fixes all of it. These four are Pleasure, Penalty, Power, and Presence.

The pleasure of sin is that sin often seems really good and tempting to us, Herod and Herodias were lured by the pleasure of sin when they killed John the Baptist because it fixed their problems.

The penalty of sin is what is taught in Romans, the penalty of all sin is death, and because all of sinned, all deserve to die but the very reason Jesus came down was to show how he was mending this. He gave his own life as the penalty on our behalf and I think the feeding of the 5000 points to that. Think about it, Jesus here breaks bread and then provides for everyone. When else does he do this? The last supper that we remember every time we take communion, that he blessed the bread, and broke it teaching that it was broken on behalf of everyone who believes in Him. Symbolizing how he takes care of the penalty of sin.

The power of sin is the unfortunate reality that sin still has power over our actions even as Christians, and that’s why we still struggle to deal with our world in the right ways even once we’re saved. We’re not perfect, but when we get to heaven, and when Christ comes a second time we will finally be rid of the power of sin in our lives.

The presence of sin is the idea that sin in the world causes all sorts of problems, it’s the cause of the diseases and disabilities that the people comng to Jesus had, not because they had caused their problems with their own sin, but that the whole earth, even nature, has been tainted and corrupted by sin. It’s why natural disasters happen, it’s why people go hungry, and it’s why people like John Delong die of cancer.

But Jesus saves us from all of it. Jesus didn’t teach that we would live easy lives, He himself didn’t live an easy life. He had people He loved die while He was on earth, He himself was persecuted and viciously murdered, but He lived perfectly, and died in our place so we could be free from this massive problem sin causes.

And it’s Him that we cling to in our grief.

When we feel the pleasure of sin, and we’re tempted to sin and react harshly to the world out of the bitter emotion we feel, it’s Him that teaches us how to sacrificially put others before ourselves.

When we recognize the necessary penalty of our sin, we cling to Jesus knowing that it’s only in His sacrifice that we have hope for life after death, both for us and for those we’re grieving.

When we understand the power of sin in our lives, it’s Jesus we can cling to and ask to change us from the inside out, it’s He who works in and through us to love those that we don’t feel we have the capacity to love in our state of grief.

And when we see this hurting broken world around us, and we see people hurt, sick, poor, hungry, broken, and dying from every single one of the nasty things this world can throw at them, it’s Jesus that we cling to knowing that we have a perfect world and life waiting for us if we endure this hard world and cling to Him.

And by clinging to Jesus and His example we get two very practical tips for how we deal with grief in our lives.

First: we share grief in community. We allow those around us who are also hurting and who love us to speak into our lives, to remind us of our hope in Christ, and to share our burdens with us.

Second: we must go to God in prayer and in solitude, Jesus showed that even He spent time in prayer alone with God the Father, and it’s because just as we need fellowship with our communities, we need fellowship with God, who is the only one who can completely ease our burden. Because as Christ says: Matthew 11:28-30 “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.””

John Delong once said something that has shaped the way I view life, grief and suffering, and it’s this: “the Christian worldview is one of optimistic realism”.

And this is what He meant, this world is very broken and it has a lot to throw at us, but even in the darkest moments we have an unshakable hope in Jesus, and that hope that we share with all other believers provides us with community, which is the Church, and fellowship with Christ. We cling to both of these knowing that Jesus has felt the same pain as us, but He endured. And our hop is in His endurance, that through it we have a life free from sin, free from grief, free from suffering, and free from death. We have hope in eternal life with Him, in heaven, forever. Praise God. Let’s pray.