Mark 8:1-9; Romans
6:19-23; Genesis 2:7-17
In the Name of the Father and of the
+ Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The crowd had been following Jesus
for three days. However, it wasn’t until the third day that anyone expressed
concern that they just might be hungry, and that wasn’t someone from the crowd,
but it was Jesus Himself. Now, why is that? It is because the crowd was being
fed all along with the Bread of Life, the Word of God, proclaimed to them by
the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. You’ll remember that Satan once tempted
Jesus to assuage His forty-day hunger by turning stones into bread. Then, Jesus
answered Satan saying, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every Word
that proceeds from the mouth of God.” For three days Jesus had been feeding
them the Bread of Life – the very Word that proceeds from the mouth of God –
identifying the lies they had been following, calling them to repent of their
sinful dissatisfaction, forgiving them of their sins, and thus delivering them
from the lies to the truth that gives real satisfaction and everlasting life in
the kingdom of Heaven.
For, the trouble with us sinful
people is that we always want to eat what isn’t good for us, what doesn’t bring
nutrition, health, and life, but only malnutrition, illness, and death. It’s
about what we take into our bodies and into our souls, what we feed on, what we
trust in, and what we derive life from. That is why the LORD uses the analogy
of bread to describe the importance and centrality of His Word for our life. Bread
is a staple, a fundamental source of nourishment, energy, strength, and life. Like
our First Parents before us, we flee from the wholesome food of the Bread of Life,
God’s Word, and instead we fill our ears and our souls with junk food, with garbage,
lies, and deceit. Truly, St. Paul’s prophetic words have been fulfilled today
even as they were in His own time, “the time is coming when people will not
endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for
themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from
listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”
Yet, the crowd following and
listening to Jesus those three days hadn’t expressed that they were hungry –
which is quite amazing if you think about it! Still, Jesus had compassion on
them. That word compassion in the
Greek is a wonderful word splachnizomai.
It literally means a churning of the
bowels. Splachnizomai is a
gut-wrenching feeling of empathy for the suffering of another. That is what
Jesus felt for the people that had followed Him three days listening to His
Word and teaching. That is what it means that Jesus had “compassion on the
crowd.” Jesus knew their need even before they did. He knew that they needed
physical nourishment just as much as spiritual nourishment. Thus, Jesus also
taught them, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you
will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than
food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they
neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds
them. Are you not of more value than they?”
Thus, what is revealed in today’s
Gospel is not only the necessity and the priority of the Word of God, the Bread
of Life, for true life with God, but we also see Jesus’ humanity and union with
us, the meaning of His Incarnation. We see God’s love and compassion for us,
how He knows us so intimately, as only a Creator can truly know His creatures
whom He has made and formed and knitted together in our mother’s wombs, whose
days He knows before ever one came to pass. This is what it truly means to have
compassion: to suffer with, to suffer alongside of. For, inasmuch as the crowd
had been listening for three days, so too, had Jesus been teaching and
preaching for three days. He was in the same boat as them, so to speak. He was
hungry too. He felt compassion – He felt what they were feeling – and so He was
moved to act. However, knowing their need, personally, Jesus also knew their
weakness personally. And, later, in His own time of need, Jesus would say to
His disciples in Gethsemane who were heavy with sleep, “The spirit is willing,
but the flesh is weak.”
The disciples demonstrated the
weakness of their flesh in their answer to Jesus, “How can one feed these
people with bread here in this desolate place?” No doubt if they were in the
village or city they would have been assured at the presence of bakers and
fishmongers, but, seeing nothing but barrenness and desolation, their assurance
was gone and their hope lost. Therefore, Jesus gently taught them to trust not
in the flesh, or in material things, what their eyes saw, and what their human
reason and wisdom expected, but to trust in the Word of God. Jesus asked them
how many loaves they had. It was not because He did not Himself know, but it
was to bring into the light the meagerness and the insufficiency, the hopelessness
of their own provisions. For, until we are able to confess our sinfulness and
our inability to restore ourselves, we are unable to receive the benefit of the
Gospel, the Good News, that we have been forgiven and restored to a right
relationship with our God and Creator through faith in Jesus Christ who has
redeemed us and has set us free. Then Jesus directed the crowd to sit down on
the ground. It would not be by their works, by their reason, by their strength,
or even by their faith that their bellies would be filled, but it would be by
the Word of God, now pressing their meager offerings into life-giving and
life-sustaining service.
Jesus caused the disciples and the
crowd to become aware of their hunger and their insufficiency. When you feed
your bellies with junk food and garbage, you have the sensation of being full
and satisfied, while your bodies are literally starving to death for nutrition.
Our ears and our brains and, consequently, our souls are so filled with the
junk food and garbage of the world’s wisdom, values, cares, and anxieties that
we, too, would be spiritually starving to death were it not for our frequent eating,
hearing, and receiving of the Bread of Life, the Word of God. When they became
aware of the meagerness of their provisions, their first reaction was that of
unbelief, hopelessness, and despair. But, the Lord took their meager
provisions, seven loaves and a few small fish, and with them fed them all until
they were satisfied, and then collected seven baskets full of leftovers. When
the LORD fills your cup, it overflows in abundance. Only consider these words
of promise that He gives you: “Good measure, pressed down, shaken together,
running over, will be put into your lap.” “I am the bread of life; whoever
comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will
never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a
spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Whenever the LORD gives, He gives
in abundance. His mercy and His generosity are far greater than our actual
needs, as is His love far greater than our sins.
The LORD’s miracles of feeding His
people are plenteous throughout the Holy Scriptures. From the very beginning,
in the Garden, the LORD provided food for nourishment of the body to which He
attached His Word that nourished the soul. The Passover meal was a sign of His
providence as He led His people out of slavery and bondage in Egypt into the
land of promise. He provided manna, quail, and water to sustain His people
forty years in the wilderness. In the sacrifices of the tabernacle and the
temple, the LORD attached His Word of promise to bread and meat, oil and wine,
to show His favor and blessing upon His people. The LORD sustained Elijah, the
widow, and her son throughout the drought and famine, the jar of flour not being
spent nor the jug of oil empty. Jesus had already fed over five thousand with
bread and fish before performing this miracle again in the feeding of the four
thousand, indicating that He may have done this several more times throughout
His ministry. And, the night on which He was betrayed, He pressed meager bread
and wine into divine and holy service in the Last Supper, promising through His
Word, that those who ate and drank received Himself in holy communion for the
forgiveness of sins, the strengthening of faith, and life that cannot die. Our
Lord Jesus Christ continues to press our meager provisions of bread and wine
into divine and holy use in the Sacrament of the Altar where we eat His flesh
and drink His blood in His promise that, “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks
my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
Like Martha, we too easily become
distracted by worldly and fleshly cares and anxieties. We see violence,
warfare, and bloodshed in the world and we are fearful. We are tempted to think
that we are alone and must solve these problems on our own or suffer in
isolation. Likewise, we similarly despair at our meager provisions to support
our congregation and the ministry in this place. We see empty seats and less
and less money in the plate, and we know that people are not beating down our
doors to come in. And so, we are tempted to believe that we must do something,
we must fix things, or slowly decline until we have to close our doors. “How
many loaves do you have?” Jesus asks. Yes! Confess the meagerness of your provisions,
your inability to dig yourself out of your self-made sin-hole, your grave, your
death, and look to Jesus, the Bread of Life who provides you daily bread, all
that you need for your body and your life. He takes up our meager provisions
and He presses them into service to feed and to nourish, to strengthen and to protect,
and then to send you out into the world, to your neighbor, through your
vocations, to share the Bread of Life you yourself have received in
superabundance.
Come, taste of the bounty of Eden
restored in this Feast of the Bread of Life, Jesus Christ. His flesh is true food,
and His blood is true drink. “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not
like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live
forever.”
In the + Name of Jesus. Amen.
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