Podcast of "Bread alone"
Genesis 32:22-31
Psalm 17:1-7, 15
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
I want to take us back briefly to the first Sunday in Lent and the temptations of Christ. The Lord has just been in the wilderness forty days and forty nights. He is famished and he is ragged. This is when the tempter comes and says “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus is not one to be taken by such an obvious ruse. He answers, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Now, it is a little more than four months later and now Jesus tells his disciples, “You give them something to eat.” In a bit more than a season we move from Jesus being tempted to make bread from stone to Jesus telling his disciples they’re going to make bread out of nothing at all.
Of course there’s a difference, there’s always a difference. It could be as easy as this; we don’t live by bread alone. We need bread, but we need more than bread. In Matthew 4 Jesus says we live on every word that comes from the mouth of God, and with these words from Matthew 14, Jesus affirms that bread is still important.
In 1943, Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation” in the journal “Psychological Review.”[1] This paper’s basic concept, a standard for business students for generations, later became the basis of his book “Motivation and Personality.” Maslow separates needs into a hierarchy. His stages of needs are physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. He considered this a hierarchy because he believed the lower level needs needed to be met before the higher ones. In a way, he says that it’s impossible to dream about being all you can be when you don’t have a roof over your head. As Maslow would say it, without having physiological needs met, self-actualization is impossible.
Maslow would then agree with Jesus, bread alone isn’t enough, but bread itself is still necessary. We need more than bread, so what more do we need?
“When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.” The happening that Jesus had just heard was the beheading of his cousin John the Baptist. Jesus had just heard the gory details of a little girl who had capriciously taken the head of the prophet at the whim of her mother. It was normal for Jesus to take time alone to rest and recover from the daily grind; but between grief for his cousin and fear that he may be the next target, I imagine Jesus withdrew with a sense of urgency.
This gives us our first lesson, we need to pull back from time to time. We need to rest and we need to recover. This is the purpose of Sabbath. Sabbath is a time to rest and recover. It is a time to give thanks for life and worship the one who gives life. Often in this world, we burn the candle at both ends, Jesus teaches that we need to snuff out the wicks, cool down, and preserve ourselves. When we do this, we are open to renewal from the Spirit.
As we read though, this is one of those times when the crowd won’t let the Lord be. He knew that the needs of the people were greater than his own at this moment. He landed at a secluded place. He saw the crowd. He saw the sick and the infirm. He saw the grieving and the heartbroken. He saw people who had lost everything they had and he saw people who were losing hope. They prayed he was their hope. He knew that he was their one true hope. He came to them and had compassion on them.
Here’s a wild thought, in this use, to have compassion is a verb. It’s a combination of having pity and having sympathy that leads the person who feels these things to do something about it. It’s one thing to have sympathy or empathy or any one of a dozen other feelings, but without following up with action, there’s nothing more.
Jesus had compassion on them and healed their sick.
At this point, I imagine the disciples like the staff of a powerful politician or business leader; maybe even a rock star. In this case, I imagine the staff needing to get their leader to an important vote or meeting or show; or in the case of Jesus, his disciples were getting their leader away from the craziness of Galilee for a quick vacation. There’s a time and a place for everything and now was time to get out of Dodge. Fortunately for them, they were able to couple their want to get away and start their vacation by saying “it was getting late, they were in the boondocks, and people had to get somewhere to get some dinner.” Since both are true, you always go with the one that sounds better.
Here’s the turning point, Jesus says “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.” The quick inventory showed that Mother Hubbard was better able to feed so many children than they were to feed the masses. They had five loaves of bread and two fishes and that was all she wrote.
Not to be discouraged, Jesus asked for the meager meal they provided; he looked up, gave thanks and broke the bread. Then he directed the disciples to feed the masses. In the end, all were satisfied. What a wonderful phrase, “all were satisfied.” And from the meager beginnings of five loaves and two fishes there were twelve basketfuls of pieces left over.
As I have been going on lately, this is the time in the story when we decide who we are. Jesus is God, of course. Our second lesson answers the question “So who is represented by the disciples and who is represented by the crowd?” Let me give you everybody’s least favorite answer, it depends. It depends because there are times when we are the crowd being discipled and there are times when we are the disciples doing the work.
Let’s begin with the crowd, there’s no talk of these people having a covert agenda. They truly wanted to be in the presence of the Lord, the one who has compassion and heals the sick. There is no mention of a scribe or Pharisee waiting to jump out of the bushes and quiz Jesus on theology or polity. There is no mention of Romans or other gentiles who would not know what these signs meant to the faith. There is no mention of anybody who was dragged along when they wanted to stay home and play video games.
On top of that, everyone who was there had a reason to need the compassion of the Lord. These are people who needed a miracle in their lives. They knew where to find a miracle too, this is why they followed the Lord.
One of the great truths of our life is that we all need a miracle from time to time. For some the miracles are things like health, food, and shelter; things that are basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy. Needs that left unmet lead to anguish and misery. Needs that left unmet lead into a spiral of despair and danger. From time to time we all need a miracle. These are the sorts of miracles Jesus was performing when he came ashore. He healed and just as important, he showed compassion.
The people who followed Jesus were for the most part the dregs of society. This is because the rich and powerful didn’t want anything to do with him. He told the rich young man to sell everything and give it to the poor then he will be able to have riches in the kingdom of heaven. The rich and the powerful behaved like they didn’t need Jesus because they could take care of their own needs. The poor knew they needed Jesus in their lives. The poor knew better, and Jesus had compassion for them.
As there are times when we are the crowd, needing healing and compassion, there are times when we are the disciples too. Now, I don’t think there are times when we are supposed to tell the Lord our God that he’s late for a very important date. Jesus will keep his own time. There are times though when we will be handed a small chunk of bread and told to feed more people with it than we can imagine.
There isn’t an organization on earth that hasn’t screamed “we can’t do that, we don’t have” this or that or the other thing. When I worked at the University of Arkansas Arkansas
She said “This is Arkansas University of Arkansas will never be the Oxford
When a church says “we can’t do that” there is only one holy reason to come to that conclusion. The only suitable reason to say “we can’t do that” is that we aren’t called to do that.
The disciples were probably thinking of themselves “We don’t have the power, we don’t have the resources to do this.” Thanks be to God that the Lord did have the power and made them able to distribute enough bread that everyone was satisfied. It is by God alone that the disciples could do anything. Nothing is impossible with the Lord God. Because the disciples were obedient; doubtful maybe, curious surely; but because they were obedient they were able to do God’s work in the world for people who needed it.
There is one more character in the story, the bread. I won’t go into how psychologists and theologians and physics experts say the bread multiplied. Honestly, stories abound and I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that God’s grace, God’s power, and God’s bounty are far beyond what we can imagine. Our way of thinking about the loaves and fishes says the food Jesus started with might feed a few families. It wouldn’t feed a clan. It wouldn’t even begin to feed the masses. Yet it did. This is the power of God’s glory, a bounty of love that overflows in ways that meet all of our needs. Ways that make it so all are satisfied.
Again, isn’t that a great phrase? All were satisfied.
“Satisfied” is wonderful. It can mean two things, it can mean that they were filled with food or it can mean that they felt a sense of inward satisfaction. It is quite probable that the people were filled both physically with bread and eternally with the Spirit of God.
Man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. How’s that for glory, in this case bread is not bread alone, it is the word of God. Wouldn’t that surprise ol’ Maslow? Actualization comes from the source of the living God who provides for the physiological needs. The source that fulfills the first level of needs is the same as the source that fulfills the pinnacle of needs. And he does it all with five loaves of bread and two fish.
We need bread in our lives. We need to keep our bodies strong and healthy. But we do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God, this is the joy of the Lord’s Supper, when Word becomes God and with simple bread God feeds the people until all are satisifed.
Connecting ourselves to the narrative, there are days when we are the people. There are days we need to be fed because we are not able. There are also days when as the church we are called to be the disciples who share God’s bread with the crowds. There’s nothing wrong with being one or the other. From day to day or moment to moment we can move seamlessly from crowd to disciple and back again. That’s just the way of life.
What is important is that there are no days when God is not God; when Jesus is not Lord; when the Spirit does not empower; and when we live by bread alone. Thanks be to God.
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