Matthew 14:13-21 You Give Them Something to Eat

Matthew 14:13-21 (Evangelical Heritage Version)

13When Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place to be alone. When the crowds heard this, they followed him on foot from the towns.

14When Jesus got out of the boat, he saw a large crowd. He had compassion on them and healed their sick. 15When evening came, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place and the hour is already late. Send the crowds away, so that they can go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”

16But Jesus said to them, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

17They told him, “We have here only five loaves and two fish.”

18“Bring them here to me,” he replied. 19Then he instructed the people to sit down on the grass. He took the five loaves and the two fish. After looking up to heaven, he blessed them. He broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples. The disciples gave the food to the people. 20They all ate and were filled. They picked up twelve basketfuls of what was left over from the broken pieces. 21Those who ate were about five thousand men, not even counting women and children.

You Give Them Something to Eat

I.

It had been quite the day. It started with Jesus going off to be alone for just a little while. That didn’t work out all that well. The crowds had heard about him leaving in a boat and followed him. Jesus wasn’t One to complain about it when people wanted to come and see him and hear him. Even those who might have limped out to the hillsides to listen to him were not ignored—he healed them.

Now, the sun was beginning to sink lower on the horizon. Everyone was tired—the disciples, the people, probably even Jesus. The people who had been listening to Jesus and had been healed by him were spread out there on the hillside. About 5,000 men, Matthew reports, but that wasn’t counting the women and children. Probably more than 8,000 people were there in total.

None of the disciples had an advanced degree in math, but this math was elementary. They knew they didn’t have substantial and plentiful supplies with them—really they had none. One look at the people sprawled out there made them run the numbers and give the best advice they could think of to Jesus: “This is a deserted place and the hour is already late. Send the crowds away, so that they can go into the villages and buy food for themselves” (Matthew 14:15, EHV). This was the compassionate thing to do; this was the thing that made the most sense. This was the only thing that made sense.

But not to Jesus. He told them: “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat” (Matthew 14:16, EHV). Math class just got more complicated. It was one of those word problems students always hate. You have x-number of people and no food; how much money would it take to feed them? Matthew doesn’t include this little snippet, but John writes what Philip had to say about Jesus’ plan: “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to have just a little” (John 6:7, EHV). A denarius was a day’s wages; in today’s dollars, about $200. So Philip’s back-of-the-napkin answer for the word problem was 200 people’s wages times $200 = $40,000. $40,000 would only get a few bites for each person there.

The Twelve wanted to show that they had taken everything possible into consideration. They said to Jesus: “We have here only five loaves and two fish” (Matthew 14:17, EHV). Scouring the crowd had come up with exactly one sack lunch. They looked at the crowd. They looked at the one lunch they had scrounged up. Even a little lunch-able snack amount wouldn’t work. The math was impossible.

The math problem of the disciples isn’t so different from the math our congregation uses every time we’re asked to trust the children of our school—the little lambs of Jesus—to another sinner. Today we will install a new teacher in our school. In the back of our minds some of us might be doing the disciples’ arithmetic. One young lady. A handful of years of training. A salary a public school teacher would laugh at. In front of her will be the eternal souls of our children—their faith, their whole future, their eternity. The numbers don’t add up in that situation either.

$40,000 wouldn’t have worked to feed 8.000 people, nor would the sack lunch of five loaves and two fish. One called worker is not sufficient to feed the lambs in front of her in our school.

That’s not being harsh about Leah, who will be installed in a few minutes. It’s the truth about every one of us who has ever been called by Christ to serve his people in whatever position—pastor, teacher, parent, grandparent, any person who stands between a child and the temptations of the world.

So what’s the answer? The disciples’ math didn’t add up. Nor does ours. We are not enough. We were never going to be enough.

II.

Notice what Jesus does not do for the hungry crowd. He doesn’t wave a magic wand, or even his hand, over the crowd. He is God; he could have done something like the manna in the wilderness. But he didn’t cause bread to appear out of thin air and give the instruction to the people to pick up what they wanted and eat it. Instead, he does something much stranger: “‘Bring them here to me,’ he replied” (Matthew 14:18, EHV). Bring the loaves and the fish.

He told the people to sit down. “He took the five loaves and the two fish. After looking up to heaven, he blessed them” (Matthew 14:19, EHV). “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha'olam...” Ok, I can’t really do the whole blessing in Hebrew: “Blessed are you, LORD our God, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”

Here is God saying the traditional blessing over bread to God. The blessing is striking because it thanks God not merely for giving bread, but for bringing it forth from the earth. The whole process—from planting the seed to the rains and the growing season, to harvest, to milling the flour, to baking the bread—all of it was part of God’s providing hand.

The next part we sometimes pass over too quickly. “He broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples. The disciples gave the food to the people” (Matthew 14:19, EHV). Jesus handed the loaves back to the disciples. The miracle doesn’t happen in the open air where everyone can clearly and plainly see it. It happens in 12 pairs of ordinary, unremarkable hands. Over and over they keep passing out bread and fish.

God used a similar mathematical solution for Elijah in today’s Old Testament Reading. He didn’t send Elijah to a warehouse of provisions to survive the drought. “The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and in the evening, and he drank from the stream” (1 Kings 17:6, EHV). Scavenger birds were the providers God sent to a man crouched beside a slowly shrinking brook. It’s an almost embarrassing way to provide for a prophet of the Lord. But it was exactly enough—every single day, as long as the Lord required it to be that way for Elijah. God always seems to prefer this method—means so small and ordinary that we would hesitate—or even refuse—to trust such means on our own. When it comes, we know it was God and not us who provided.

III.

For the Twelve, basket after basket, the food never ran out. Jesus blessed it. Jesus multiplied it. But he chose to deliver it through the very disciples who, ten minutes earlier, wanted to offload the whole math problem to each individual person in the crowd.

That’s important for us to notice. Jesus doesn’t multiply gifts around his people. He multiplies his gifts through his people—through our hands. Five loaves and two fish were never the real supply. Jesus was the supply—his blessing. The disciples were simply the means he chose to use.

The same is true of the teacher, Leah, we install this morning. Her years of training, her patience with children—none of that is the real supply, either. She is simply the loaf Jesus has chosen to bless and use to feed his lambs—the lambs he loves more than any of us do.

“They all ate and were filled. They picked up twelve basketfuls of what was left over from the broken pieces” (Matthew 14:20, EHV). Bread and fish were never the point of this miracle of Jesus. Thousands of people walked away from that hillside with a full stomach, but none walked away wealthy. The bread ran out the next morning, as it always does.

The deeper hunger Jesus came to feed, of course, was never in anyone’s stomach. It was in their souls.

After they had eaten and their stomachs were filled, the crowd did notice the food. John reports: “They intended to come and take him by force to make him king” (John 6:15, EHV). They wanted Jesus to keep the free meals coming. They wanted a Messiah who solved their grocery bills.

Paul said in today’s Second Reading: “In him we also have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins...” (Ephesians 1:7, EHV). The crowd of people with full stomachs could see Jesus standing right in front of them. They had a Messiah that was much more than a bread king. They had the very Son of God, who would let his own body be broken so that the real famine—the famine of sin—could finally be ended for ever.

Paul took it further. “In him we also have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in keeping with the riches of his grace, 8which he lavished on us in all wisdom and insight” (Ephesians 1:7-8, EHV). Forgiveness in Jesus is the bread that really satisfies. The forgiveness he won never spoils, it never has to be rationed for fear that it might run out. His forgiveness is not measured out carefully, as if the Twelve had to count the loaves as they handed out provisions. It is poured out without calculation, because his supply of mercy cannot run low or be exhausted by an unexpected crowd.

We sang a summary of the Psalm of the Day today. In each verse we sang: “Your mercy lives forever.” Take a look at the words of the Psalm itself sometime. Every single verse ends: “For his mercy endures forever” (Psalm 136, EHV). 26 times that refrain is repeated: “For his mercy endures forever.” It’s true. Verse after verse, generation after generation, forever and ever.

God’s mercy endures forever. It satisfied the hunger of the many who sat on a hillside in Galilee that day, eating the food Jesus supplied. It provided the mercy that fed the real hunger of those souls, too; and it is what feeds your soul still today.

IV.

You give them something to eat. That was Jesus’ answer to twelve men who thought the only sensible plan was to send the problem away. It’s still his answer to us.

To you parents: it means, don’t hand your children’s souls over to the world and hope someone else feeds them the Bread of Life. Bring them here: to this altar, to God’s Word, to this school, where Christ does the multiplying.

To this congregation: for the whole existence of Holy Trinity you have supported a school. Keep offering your five loaves—your gifts, your prayers, your support of this school and this teacher—not because you’ve calculated that it’s finally enough, but because Christ has never once needed it to be enough on its own.

To you, Leah, about to be installed this morning: your hands will feel too small for this task on more days than you would like. Good. They are. They were always going to be. Jesus isn’t asking you to be the loaves. He’s only asking you to be the hands he blesses and breaks, and the hands that distribute the Bread of Life to lambs he loves—to lambs whose forgiveness was never in question and whose Savior has already done everything necessary to feed them forever.

You give them something to eat. Not because you can. Because he already has—his own body, broken for you, and for every small hand he still chooses to work through. His mercy endures forever. Go. Feed his lambs. Amen.