With both the feeding of the 5,000 and the feeding of the
4,000 Jesus commands his disciples to give the thousands of people gathered
together something to eat. I think it is
important for us to consider what this must have been like for the
disciples. Jesus asked them to do
something that was impossible for them to do.
The disciples are quite right when they said to him that the better part
of a year’s wages wouldn’t be enough to buy the amount required just to give
each of them a little snack. We’re talking
tens of thousands of dollars here in today’s money.
Suppose I told you to feed just this congregation that is
gathered together this morning. Let’s
pretend the kitchen is off limits. All
that’s available is what you have with you right now as you sit in the pew. “Feed them,” I say. What are you going to do? There’s nothing that can be done. You don’t have any food. How are you supposed to feed people without
any food? This is what the disciples say
to Jesus. He must have been insistent
though. “I don’t care that you don’t
have any food. Feed them!”
I think this is the atmosphere within which you have to
understand Andrew’s answer to Jesus.
This is an answer of desperation.
It should really just be rejected out of hand as silly. He says, “There’s a boy here who has five
loaves of bread and two fish.” That
is like one of you answering my demands to feed us all by saying, “I have half
a thing of tic-tacs.” What are we
supposed to make a meal out of tic-tacs?
Each person gets one tic-tac and that’s the meal? That is about how far five loaves of bread
and two fish would go among 5,000 men.
Five loaves of bread among five thousand people means that a thousand
people have to share one loaf. Fifty
people would have to split up one slice.
If you split up a slice of bread into fifty pieces you are going to end
up with a tic-tac sized piece of bread.
I don’t even want to think about splitting up two fish into 5,000
pieces. That would be their meal. And so I want you to see that Andrew’s answer
was stupid. It was an insult to our
reason.
But you know how the story goes. Jesus takes the food at hand, gives thanks,
and gives it to the people. I think we
would all like to know what that looked like.
How was it that there was more bread and fish than what they started
with? One way that it is possible to
make sense of what Jesus did with our reason is that the itsy bitsy pieces of
food were given out but they were miraculously satisfying and filling. But that can’t be the case because of the
many baskets of leftovers that were gathered afterwards. Somehow there ended up being a great deal
more bread than what they started out with.
There have been some rationalists who have tried their hand
at interpreting what is going on here.
Rationalists do not think that anything supernatural is possible, and so
all miracles have to be explained away. What
they say here is that the people were spurred on by the boy’s example of
generosity to pull out the loaves of bread they all had hidden in their luggage
to share with one another. This is the
kind of interpretation you will get from a mainline protestant church these
days. But this interpretation also must
be ruled out by the reports from the Evangelists. The people knew exactly who it was who gave
them their fill of bread and fish. They
thought this Jesus was an alright guy.
In fact, they liked him so much that they were ready to march on
Jerusalem and make him king.
We are left in the dark as to the mechanics of how Jesus made the five loaves and two fish feed so
many people. All that we are told is
that he did. He started out with this
much. They ended up with that much. Our mind’s eye would like to know what it
looked like and how it came about, but the evangelists are absolutely silent
about that even though they record for us many other details about these two
feedings.
What I’d like to do now is apply what we have seen with the
feeding of the five thousand to our justification before God. Justification is a big word and we don’t use
it all that often. At its root it has
the word “justice” or “just.” That has
to do with what is right, good and proper.
And so another word that is practically interchangeable with
justification is righteousness. Here’s
the question to be asked of every single person: “Are you just before God? Are you righteous before him? When he judges you will he commend you so that
you are rewarded with the goodness of heaven?
Or when he judges you will he sentence you to punishment in hell? These are the kinds of questions we are
dealing with when it comes to our justification before God.
There is a normal way for people to be justified, just as
there is a normal way to feed people.
The normal way to be considered just and righteous is to not do those
things that you aren’t supposed to do, and to do those things that you are
supposed to do. If you follow the rules,
then you will be approved when you are judged.
And we are judged all the time. We were judged by our parents and accordingly
were either praised or condemned. We are
judged by our peers as to whether we measure up to them. We are judged by our bosses. We might be judged by a judge in the
courthouse. We also judge ourselves—and
that is quite important. We feel like
garbage when we are not doing what we’d like to be doing. We are on cloud nine when we have
accomplished something we set out to do—and the bigger the goal that is
accomplished the better we feel about ourselves.
The one judgment I haven’t mentioned yet is the biggest—the
judgment that we shall receive from God.
God is able to see things that other people cannot. We are able to fool other people by lying and
covering things up and operating in secret.
The closest anybody comes to God’s judgment besides God himself is the
judgement we do of ourselves in our own conscience. You know many secrets about yourself that
other people do not know. In fact, even
those who are closest to you do not really know you. Only you know you. And only you know what you have done in
secret. When you recall things you’d
rather forget you already condemn yourself in your own conscience and we are
not exactly impartial in the judgement of ourselves nor do we remember the
tiniest bot of what we’ve done over the years.
What is going to happen when we are judged by God who truly is impartial
and remembers quite clearly all that we have forgotten?
We prefer to not think about God judging us because it seems
as though it can’t possibly go well for us.
Probably the best we’re going to be able to say would be along the lines
of: “I have a half a thing of tic-tacs.
I have five loaves and two fish.”
That is to say, “I tried!—Well, sometimes I tried! I felt bad about what I did, does that count
for something? Well, sometimes I felt
bad. Other times I really enjoyed doing
what you hate with every fiber of your being, God, and the only reason why I
didn’t do it more is because I wasn’t sure that I would get away with it.” What are these justifications of our actions
compared to what is necessary to pass muster before God? These are stupid answers and they aren’t
going to work, just as Andrew’s answer was stupid. Five loaves and two fish aren’t going to feed
so many people. Your excuses and trying
and lying aren’t even going to come close to what is required of you.
And so our reason, because it is so dog-gone clever, says,
“Well, you might as well just not think about such things. There isn’t a ghost of a chance for you so
why think about whether or not you shall be judged as righteous before God? All it’s going to do is make you sad or
worried.” And so it is that most people
carry on their lives purposely not thinking about how they are going to meet
their Creator and be judged by him. It’s
like the whole world is playing pretend or make-believe. “Let’s pretend that there is no resurrection
from the dead. Let’s pretend that there
is no judgment. Let’s pretend that there
is no hell for those who are not worthy of heaven.” This is similar to the refusal to think about
feeding 5,000 people with food because you don’t have any food. There’s no point in thinking about doing
something when you are incapable of doing it.
But there is another justification before God that we would
be totally unaware of if God did not reveal it to us, just as there was another
way to feed all those thousands of people that the disciples could not have fathomed
beforehand. The other justification we
have before God is the one that we have by faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus was condemned to death with our sins
upon him and was raised to life for our justification. So long as Jesus Christ is raised from the
dead—and he is—there is a righteousness for us before God that is not based
upon the Law—it is not based upon what we have done or left undone. It is based upon the holy, innocent, bitter
sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In him is forgiveness of all sins and perfect righteousness before God. Through faith in him this is yours. What you have done in secret, what your
conscience condemns you for, is not the basis for God’s judgment. Jesus Christ alone is, who has been already
judged for your sins, was punished, and now is given to you, to hold to by
faith.
According to the laws of economics and physics and probably
some other laws too that govern our normal existence it was impossible to feed
those 5,000 people until they were good and full and still have baskets and
baskets of bread as leftovers. These
laws say that that is impossible. And
yet Jesus did it. Likewise there are
laws that cry out for your punishment as what is supposed to happen to you
because of what you have done. This is
not God’s fault. This is not the Law’s fault. This is your fault. You are the sinner. And yet you are justified before God because
of what Jesus did and this has been distributed to you through the Word.
How, exactly does this happen? Here too, I think we can see something
analogous between what Jesus did with that feeding, and what he does for our
justification before God. We don’t know,
really, how Jesus fed all those people, and I don’t think it was altogether
clear to those who witnessed it either, otherwise they would have described it. Instead they just said what happened. When he had given thanks he broke the bread
and distributed it. Everybody ate as
much as they wanted and then there was a whole bunch of leftovers. It is
quite easy for me to picture in my mind’s eye a feeding of that horde of people
according to the normal laws of economics, physics, and so forth. I can picture a great big buffet laid out
with stores in reserve. But I don’t know
how the bread and the fish multiplied in Jesus’s hand.
So it is also with our justification before God. I don’t understand the mechanics involved in
Jesus’s righteousness being given to us.
I can’t picture it. In fact, the
only thing I can picture in my mind’s eye when it comes to someone’s
justification is them doing what they are supposed to do.
But clarity of thought is not the same thing as truth. Although it wasn’t clear to the apostles how
Jesus fed that large group, it nevertheless happened. So also Jesus died for the sins of the world
and was raised for our justification. In
him we are righteous. It’s happened and it’s
done even though no one has looked behind the veil into the holy of holies
where the Son of God made atonement for sin.
But that’s alright.
We don’t need to know everything or understand everything. We should just eat what God gives us to
eat. The 5,000 ate and were satisfied
even though they did not understand what had happened. So also God speaks to us and we should trust
in him, even if not everything is as clear as we might want it to be. God is not a liar. He has given us Jesus to believe in and
promises salvation through him. Let that
be enough for you.
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