August 2 2020 Sermon

P9A 2020: Matthew 14;13-21
When I read this passage this week it occurred to me that I can’t remember the last time I
was in a deserted place and hungry. That’s happened to me before when I’ve been backpacking,
sometimes when I’ve timed a road trip poorly. But one of the side-effects of staying home
throughout this pandemic is that I’m never more than one room away from my kitchen, so as
soon as I feel the first twinge of hunger, I’ve got my face in the fridge or, more often, the
cupboard with the junk food. If I’m honest, although I have on occasion complained that “I’m
starving!” I’ve been privileged enough that that’s never really been true. My stomach might
rumble, but I’ve never had to worry about where I’m going to find my next meal. I can’t
imagine what life would have been like for the crowds following Jesus, and they probably
couldn’t imagine what life is like today, even considering that about one in eight households in
our country struggles with hunger. In Jesus’ day, that statistic would easily have been flipped.
We shouldn’t be surprised that hunger was such an ever-present threat in biblical times.
Jesus is always curing people, and it’s reasonable to attribute at least some of those illnesses to
malnutrition and the compromised immunity that comes with it. All four of the gospels portray
Jesus miraculously feeding crowds, but it was not just the supernatural way in which Jesus
multiplied a few loaves and fish that was worth writing down. In fact, neither the disciples nor
the crowds seem to react with shock or awe at Jesus’ divine ability. It was extraordinary just for
the people to all eat and, as Matthew is careful to narrate, not only to eat but to eat and be filled
—five thousand men and women and children. That means that those with the least status,
those most likely to be forced to go without when food was scarce, also got to eat, and eat until
they were full. If you can imagine the feeling of finishing Thanksgiving dinner, maybe after a
season of dieting, that might be something like what the crowds experienced, something that
they only felt rarely, or maybe never before.
Jesus feeds the people because the people need to eat. As the disciples point out, it’s late,
they’re not in town, there isn’t any food where they are. But beyond practical necessity, we are
told Jesus’ motivation for being there in the first place: he had compassion for them. That’s
why he cured the sick and provided food when they were hungry: he had compassion. Healing
and feeding were not Jesus’ goals that day; he was trying to get some alone time because, as the
preceding verses report, he had just heard the news of his cousin, John the Baptist’s beheading.
But when the crowds follow him, instead of turning them away, he meets their needs because he
has compassion—which literally means he suffers with them. For Jesus, who is God living the
human experience, when the people are ill, he suffers their illness. When the people are hungry,
he suffers their hunger. From his abundance of compassion, Jesus chooses to alleviate their
suffering because he feels that suffering as his own.
This is a lesson that Jesus has to teach his disciples, a couple of times, in fact. The
disciples want Jesus to send the people away to take care of themselves. There is no sense that
the disciples see themselves in the same boat with the crowd. They have some food, but they’re
not about to share it, even as they see others who are hungry. Jesus has to teach them to have
compassion, to understand that the hunger of the crowd is their hunger, too, and Jesus has to
show them that the abundance God gives them is plenty for them to share as they enter into
solidarity with those who suffer. It is not an accidental detail that Matthew includes 12 baskets
full of leftovers. You can picture each of the disciples hauling around a heavy basket of uneaten
bread and fish after distributing food to 5,000 men plus women and children; we might imagine
how stingy they felt for being unwilling to share when thousands ate until they were full and
there’s still more food left than the disciples themselves could eat.
That’s the end of today’s story, but of course it’s not the end of Matthew’s story. And
remarkably, almost this same exact episode repeats itself just one chapter later in Matthew’s
gospel, where Jesus has compassion on the hungry crowd and has to talk the disciples into
sharing their food with them. The only differences? This time the disciples have more food,
and the crowd is smaller by a thousand. Even though they watched Jesus perform this miracle
once already, even though their arms may still be sore from carrying the baskets of leftovers,
even though they’ve seen the abundance of God at work through Jesus’ compassionate
generosity, they forget almost immediately and need to be taught all over again. You can’t be
too compassionate. God’s abundance doesn’t run out.
As followers of Jesus, God calls us to Christ-like compassionate generosity, to not turn
away from others’ suffering, but like Jesus, to suffer along with them. God blesses us
abundantly so we will share what we’ve been given, because when we live in solidarity with
those in need, we can’t bear to enjoy for ourselves what we withhold from others. Yes, in this
story it was bread. And hunger is, absolutely, a serious need, for more people than we’d like to
think. But what if our compassion, our suffering with, extended to other kinds of struggles?
What are others striving for that we take for granted? What problems do we think exist “out
there somewhere” that are our problems, too, since we’re all part of one human family? The
challenge is that there is a lot of work to do; the good news is that God abundantly equips us to
do it.