We can feed the crowds of the hungry....

Matthew 14:  13-22; Mark 6: 30-46; Luke 9: 10-17; John 6: 1- 15

Mark 6:30

30 The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught…..

What kind of Jesus is it that we follow and why would we choose to follow Him? Through reading the scriptures I have come to realise that I have an in-built tendency to choose the wrong thing. Left to my own devices I will meet my needs my own way. It’s not a matter of will power it’s a matter of poor judgement; no matter how hard I try; it’s not a matter of effort it’s a matter of ability. I am powerless to do what is right; I need help. I need to see myself and the world in a radically different way.  In our story today we read about Jesus feeding 5000 men not counting women and children. It’s a record contained in all four gospels; obviously it is seen by all writers as providing some essential answers to our questions about following Jesus. This is a story that reveals the messiah that people desired to have and the actual authentic messiah revealed in Jesus. The story tells us that the fickle crowd follow because of their curiosity regarding the signs or miracles they have heard about or seen. They follow Jesus unprepared for the journey and they have no food or apparently no or little means of getting any. They follow out of a self-centred fascination and getting caught up in the crowd. They appear to Jesus to be vulnerable, leaderless and in a desperate need that they don’t recognise. This moves Jesus; He recognises that these are the ones he has come to liberate from the forces that rage against them; their inbuilt tendency to choose the wrong answer to the questions of their life. The masses are hungry what will Jesus do? Jesus feeds them; He takes a few bread biscuits and some fish paste and he makes food out of nothing. Bread and fish multiply in abundance that results in more, much more than enough being provided. Jesus of the Nazareth sermon physically feeds the hungry and the masses identify Him as the Prophet that was promised by God in Deuteronomy 18:15. This is the point where we see the messiah, the King that the crowds are seeking and they want to make Him King now!. The Kingdom of the crowd makes only a physical assessment and provision for their holistic need. They have drawn the conclusion that their only issue is that of physical need. They understand that their messiah will meet their physical need.  Let’s be clear, they do have physical needs and Jesus does meet them. But they have much more complex need than that! They want a King that will feed them and cure their illness and that’s fine but their need run much deeper. Jesus refuses the offer to be made their King. But I thought that’s why He came?  Jesus’s Kingdom meets much more than physical needs.  Jesus also meets the social, psychological, environmental and spiritual needs of people; they cannot be left unmet. If they are, it will be impossible to meet physical need in the long term. We see this every day in the news. We supply aid to the hungry and so we should; Jesus did in our story. But the people will be hungry again and again because of the refusal to address the other needs of what it means to be a human being. We have to meet all our needs the way God desires if we are to have Him as our King. The people in the story, you and I have to see our needs through the teachings of Jesus; we may not like what we see but we have to repent from meeting our needs our own way and turn and accept Jesus as King as He is revealed in scripture if we are to be transformed by participation in the Kingdom of God. This is why Jesus told His disciples to feed the crowd; they are just back from teaching about the Kingdom; they could teach the people before them what it really means to follow Jesus and the holistic transformation that following Him brings. Read the story again and hear the words of Jesus in Matthew 14: 16 ‘16Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’’