Daily Devotion – July 31, 2020 – Dr. Pat Taylor Ellison
Matthew 14:13-21
14:13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns.
14:14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.
14:15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”
14:16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
14:17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”
14:18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.”
14:19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.
14:20 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.
14:21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
Jesus’s feeding of 5000 men plus the women and children who were with them is no small feat. I mean, even on free hot dog day at a ball park, we marvel at the sheer number of hot dogs and buns that would take.
Jesus has just tried to get away from human need for his ministry and his words. And what does he find after making his escape? A huge crowd pressing him further. He has compassion on them. For who else would be healing them out there in the barren places? So he heals – probably for a few hours. As it gets late, the disciples are thinking in practical terms about the crowd and trying to come up with ways to dismiss them so that they won’t have to go hungry and without shelter. But the crowd just won’t leave.
Phillip (in some Gospel accounts) raises the question to Jesus, and Jesus turns it back to the disciples. Jesus asks what they’ve got, and he starts with that. God never starts with nothing at all. God always starts with some concrete thing. Jesus asks God to bless the food they have, and then the disciples begin distributing it. All the Jesus movies do it a little differently, trying to put into images how this miracle worked. In the end every family and individual, rich/poor, good/naughty, beautiful/ugly, sick/well, is seated and eating, and then in the end twelve basketsful of torn bread arrive back at Jesus’s feet.
This is a miracle of abundance, and of abundance of the mundane. This is about God’s providing for us when it looks as though nothing will be available. This is about 5000 pieces of bread for people who have come out to see Jesus, as skeptics, as devotees, as beset or as fully competent and serene. Everybody gets fed, with enough to pass around again. God is generous. More than generous – astonishingly generous. People for 2000 years have taken it as a miracle that this feeding of 5000 happened, that more than 5000 people were fed that evening. But an equally miraculous thing is that God is astonishingly generous to the good, the bad, and the ugly. We’d be wise to appreciate that.
Dear God of generosity, help us not to forget that the rain and your blessings fall upon the just and the unjust. Help us not to be so smug. You are the judge, not us, and you feed everyone. Amen
