Matthew 14:13-21 (Pentecost 10)
St. John, Galveston 8/2/26
Rev. Alan Taylor

+ In Nomine Jesu +

Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

    Jesus knew what He planned to do, but the disciples couldn’t envision such a miracle, blind as they were to Divine Possibilities. Their reluctance to believe wasn’t because they hadn’t seen Jesus work miracles before. No, in fact, by this time, they had seen Him restore sight to the blind, heal the lame, cast out demons, and calm the seas. Why, at one point they even saw Him raise someone from the dead.        
 
    At this point though, they simply weren’t open to Divine Possibilities. All they could see was the problem before them, 5,000 hungry people set against their meager resources. We wonder sometimes, don’t we, about the disciples lack of faith? “Why didn’t they understand that Jesus would provide what was needed!?” “Why didn’t they accept the fact that Jesus could work miracles and simply believe that He was going to work a miracle again?” Sometimes we assume that, had we been there, had we seen Jesus work miracles in our midst, we would have trusted that He would provide for us in whatever we found ourselves. 
    At other times though, we understand the disciple’s reluctance to believe in the power and provision of God. Maybe it’s when we’re hashing out the church budget for another year, or when we are making decisions about what we can do to serve the people of our community through this little ministry at St. John’s. Or, maybe it’s when we are trying to make ends meet in our household budget, or when we are called, in some other situation, to lean heavily on our faith. In those times, I suspect that we simply acknowledge that the disciples were sensible, level-headed people. They were realists, bottom line type men. After-all, there were only twelve of them out in the field that day, and there were five thousand people scattered out across the hillside who needed to be fed. And that was counting just the men! The odds against the disciples being able to feed the multitudes were overwhelming. Even if they pooled their resources they could only come up with five loaves of bread and two small fish.    
 
    So, Jesus took what they had, the bread and the fish and, He gave thanks to His Father. And then, moved with compassion for the people, He fed every last one of them. And at the end of the meal there was food leftover. In fact, there was more leftover than the disciples had to start with. It was a miracle of epic proportions, one for the disciples to tuck away in their memory banks, so that, when a need arose again, they would say to one another, “do you remember when we were out on the hillside that day and we had all those people to feed and we only had five loaves of bread and two fish, how Jesus blessed us with His power and grace?”  
   
    In a much more immediate sense, that’s the disciples should of gathered from this miracle. But, let me ask you, having read about the miracle, having not seen it, what do you suppose Jesus expects us to gather from the feeding of the five thousand? Certainly, we can see that Jesus is God in human flesh and, as such, He has power over all things, even the forces of nature, and that “with Him all things (really) are possible.” 
 
    That being the case, as those who are so blessed to be called the children of God through our adoption into Christ Jesus, it would seem that sometimes our hopes and dreams are too small because we fail to consider “Divine Possibilities” in life. We are people of the living God whose power is unmatched and whose mercy and compassion are boundless. And, on top of that, God really does care about every aspect of our lives. The people out in the wilderness that day were not likely to starve to death by missing the evening meal. And yet, Jesus saw to their needs, both of body and soul.  The miracle then really takes us back to our confession regarding the first article of the apostle’s creed, namely, what it means for us to confess our faith in God, the Father Almighty. In the Small Catechism, Luther put it this way…
 
    “God has created me and all that exists; he has given me and still 
    sustains my body and soul, all my limbs and senses, my reason and all 
    the faculties of my mind, together with food and clothing, house and 
    home, family and property; he provides me daily and abundantly with 
    all the necessities of life, protects me from all danger, and preserves me 
    from all evil. All this he does out of his pure, fatherly, and divine 
    goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness on my part. For 
    all of this I am bound to thank, praise, serve, and obey him. This is 
    most certainly true.” 
 
    God has promised to give you everything you need to support your body and life. That promise, is part and parcel of the Gospel itself, the goodness of God toward His fallen creation. You can count on the promise of God’s provision, whether He chooses to provide for you in miraculous way, in through ordinary, day to day lives of other people. .  

    On the other hand, the fact that God promises to provide for you, does not give you license to put God to the test. Some, I fear, take this miracle, or any miracle for that matter, as a stamp of God’s approval for their own ill conceived plans and self-motivated schemes. A number of years ago, a well known TV preacher sent out the call to gather $1,000,000 per day for seven days and then put the burden squarely on the shoulders of Almighty God, invoking the Biblical truth that “with God all things are possible.” In a similar fashion, incredibly, one of the four men who assassinated Anwar Sadat way back in 1981 said in an interview, “We knew it would be difficult to pull off, but we believed in what we were doing, and ‘with God all things are possible.’”
 
    We are to resist every temptation to list our material and emotional desires and demands for happiness and wholeness and then believe that God must respond accordingly because “with Him all things are possible.” No wonder we are so often disappointed and even disillusioned in matters of faith when we don’t get what we want! Frankly, much of what we want and think we need is impossible for God to give us because He knows better than we do what we need for happiness and wholeness and for the sake of our faith.
                
    Another thing that shouldn’t be missed about this miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is that Jesus chose the disciples to do the work of feeding the people. It stands to reason that if He could multiply the bread and fish in such a miraculous fashion, He could have also distributed it in a miraculous fashion. But, He didn’t. The point being, God often employs us as instruments to dispense His grace.

    I believe that the parallel in the Gospel text with the Lord’s Supper is obvious. Jesus takes bread, He blesses it, and the disciples distribute it. Just as God provides us with bread for our stomachs, our bodies, so He gives us heavenly bread for our souls. We come to His table as people wandering in the wilderness, lips parched by the relentless accusation imposed on us by our sin. We are hungry and in great need. We take and eat and we’re satisfied, our sins are washed away in the crimson flow of Jesus’ blood.        
 
    Divine Possibilities are finally what draw us back here week after week to receive what God, in Christ, so desires to give us, for none of us can, “by our own reason or strength believe in Christ, our Lord, or come to Him, but, the Holy Spirit has called us by the Gospel, enlightened us with His gifts, sanctified and kept us in the one true faith.”
 
    Each one of us here this morning is, in fact, a walking miracle, a “Divine Possibility.” By God’s grace we have come to desire what only He can give. And by His grace we have been put into service to distribute what only He can give, namely, life and salvation in the blessed name of Jesus. We look out at the world, even this little community in which we live, and we are overwhelmed by the task at hand. Far too many people are hungry, not just for bread, but, for the food that will feed their souls for eternity. Like the twelve whose story unfolded on the hillside that day, so our story unfolds. Our resources are limited, and yet, as Jesus said to His disciples, so He says to us, “you give them something to eat.” 
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.

+ Soli Deo Gloria +