The Wednesday of the Second Week after Trinity

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sunday’s Gospel reading of the Parable of the Great Supper finds its complement in today’s Gospel of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Sunday’s parable taught how Christ provides the extraordinary food of Word and Sacrament to sustain us unto life everlasting. Today’s miracle teaches how Christ also provides the ordinary food of daily bread to sustain us unto life everlasting. And the fact that Christ is the source of this ordinary food is precisely the lesson the disciples needed to learn.

The great crowd had been with our Lord for the duration of the day. But now mealtime had arrived. And the disciples came to the Lord with a reasonable request:

“Send the multitude away, that they may go into the surrounding towns and country, and lodge and get provisions; for we are in a deserted place here” (Luke 9:12).

After all, this is where ordinary food comes from. It doesn’t appear out of thin air, as we all know. When dinner time is approaching, the faithful woman goes to the pantry, takes the necessary ingredients, and prepares dinner. When the pantry stock begins to run low, she goes to the grocery store to buy more food. And this is made possible by the family’s hard-earned money. But even this is not the end of the story. For the food doesn’t magically appear on the grocery store shelf either.

Even for a simple bowl of Cheerios to be set in front of you in the morning, quite a lot must happen. You need health to get out of bed and go to work to make the money to purchase the Cheerios. You need a working car and gasoline to drive to the store. The oil rigs and refineries across the world need to be functioning, and relative peace must exist for them to do so. The factories need to function, and peace must be maintained for workers to do their job. And then there are the farmers who grow the food, not to mention the necessary sunshine, rain, and seasons which facilitate seedtime and harvest. Luther is correct in the Small Catechism when he teaches us that daily bread includes everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body. For daily bread to reach your table, there are many ordinary things which must occur.

And yet, it is God who is the ultimate source and the final cause of our daily bread. He is the one who causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall. He makes seeds grow and bear fruit. He grants health and good weather, enabling all of the human-run processes of this world to function in their normal way. The trouble is that we often do not recognize this. Our default view is that of the disciples. We naturally see the ordinary processes which are the means of our daily bread, but we are not inclined to see God as the source of our daily bread.

This is what our Lord invites us to see through His miraculous Feeding of the Five Thousand. He is perfectly capable of working within the bounds of creation and the constraints of the laws of physics—He does so on a daily basis. But He is also capable of bypassing these ordinary means when He desires. The challenge, “You give them something to eat” (Luke 9:13), is an impossible challenge. Even if the disciples possessed the necessary bread to feed five thousand men plus women and children, or even if they possessed the necessary funding to purchase such bread, still they would never be able to truly give daily bread to anyone. All that they could do was follow our Lord’s instructions and give to others what they had received directly from Him. For as they saw in a miraculous way, God is the source of all daily bread.

So it is that Luther again teaches us in the Small 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.

Christ provided daily bread for every one of the many thousands of people gathered around Him in that deserted place. But the true blessing came to His disciples who not only ate and were filled, but who were more importantly given to see Christ as the source of this daily bread. Our Lord led them to realize this and to receive their daily bread with thanksgiving.

If Christ, indeed, is the source of all our daily bread as we have said, then we can rightly conclude that He gives us our daily bread for a reason—namely that we would join His Great Supper in the New Creation for all eternity. Christ has suffered, died, and risen again so that He might atone for the sins of the world and prepare the new creation for all who believe in Him. And though He is the Savior of the world, still He cares for you and provides you. He does this by not only providing all that you need spiritually for salvation. He also provides you with daily bread so that you might be sustained this body and life until that day comes.

And so, dear friends in Christ, let us strive to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving. Let us not eat like animals, who mindlessly devour our food without pausing to acknowledge where it comes from. And let us not be like the pagans who become hyper-fixated on having the most nutritious and/or delicious food possible. Let us strive, rather, to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving by pausing before each meal to thank the God who gives daily bread to us—not mindlessly reciting our prayers, but humbly receiving our food as a gift from God—regardless or now nutritious or delicious it may be. And He gives this food to us that we might be sustained for today until our Lord returns to make all things new and to take us to His glorious Supper, where we will eat and be filled for eternity.

God grant it.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.