Sunday, August 6, 2017

Healing and Feeding or How Jesus Rolls (Reflections on Pentecost 9, Year A)

Jesus Feeds the 5000
“…he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.” (Matthew 14:14)

It seems that every time we look at a familiar story in the Bible it tends to morph into something new. The last time the story of the feeding of the 5000 in Matthew’s gospel (Matthew 14:13-21) rolled around in the Revised Common Lectionary, I was really struck by the fact that Jesus gave himself to the care of the crowd even though he’d just learned that his cousin and mentor, John the Baptist, had had his head sliced off by Herod Antipas.

Verse 13 tells us: “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.” Can you blame the guy..? Jesus was probably grieving for his cousin and needed some alone time, or he was making a strategic withdrawal before Herod got any ideas about coming after him. Whatever his motivation to scram out of Dodge might’ve been, Jesus was still willing to give up his time and be compassionate to the people when they needed him. This is kind of a pre-Calvary example of Jesus' willingness to sacrifice.

When I look at this story again today, I’m asking: What's up with Jesus? What's he DOING here? If you look a few paragraphs earlier, before all the John the Baptist stuff that starts chapter 14, you’ll see one of Jesus’ great teaching discourses about the Kingdom of Heaven (That was the gospel lesson for last week in the RCL). If you were to remove the detour about John, the Jesus narrative shows him as teacher, healer, and provider of food. So what I pick up on is Jesus’ compassion and desire to see the sick be healthy is more important than his need for privacy. Then he tells the disciples (who really do seem concerned that the crowd gets something to eat) to feed the folks out of their own supply and not make those five thousand fend for themselves.

What is Jesus providing? Education, healthcare, and nutrition. Out of compassion.

“Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” (v.16)

I suspect there may be a lot of well-meaning American Christians who are perfectly delighted to see Jesus dispense education, healthcare, and nutrition, but they just don’t want to see the federal government doing it. I write this post as we’ve been listening to weeks of debate from our leaders in Washington, D.C. about the merits of affordable healthcare, public education, and entitlement programs. But I notice that Jesus doesn’t stop and ask the sick if they can afford a premium or if they have a pre-existing condition. Neither does he blame the multitude for coming out to meet him without bringing their picnic baskets. He doesn’t send the poor away empty. He tells his disciples to feed them.

My take-away from this is that Jesus wants us to be educated, healthy, and fed. When the resources exist to care for a population, that population deserves to enjoy them. The story of the feeding of the 5000 also impresses me with the miracle of God’s providence. We may think we don’t have enough to share, but God uses what we have and shows us it’s always more than enough. And Jesus puts the responsibility on us—his disciples—to see that all are served. 

It would be pretty swell (wouldn't it?) if we the people could create a society in which all needs were met and in which people were educated, cared for, and fed as a right not as a privilege. But, as our government seems pretty deadlocked as to how to go about this (or even if they want to attempt it), the burden falls back on us Christians to do the work of Jesus.

He was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of others. Are we?

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