A Banquet in the Wilderness

Text: Matthew 14:13-21

If you’re a good listener, you’ll find that there’s a low hum in all of our lives. A vibration. A buzz. A tension.

For some of us, it’s the constant, low-level hum of an anxiety that’s always there. For others, it’s the relentless, squeezing tendency toward depression.

Some of us walk around in a never-ending state of self-doubt and a fear of taking risks, while others feel the weight of their own and everyone else’s lives on their shoulders.

Some of us, at the most inopportune moments, will almost physically jump at the memories of regret that slip out of our subconscious into our conscious minds. Others are just afraid or angry, and don’t always know why.

Some of us overmedicate ourselves in various ways. Others walk around not feeling anything, but wishing we did.

All of us, to one degree or another, can relate to that famous description of life at war as being actually just a description of human existence itself: Long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

In our passage this morning, Jesus has gone away by boat toward the wilderness to be alone. He is up north, on the Sea of Galilee, in the region where he grew up. News has reached him of his cousin John the Baptist’s death at the hands of King Herod Antipas, and he’s gone off to be alone with his friends.

But the crowds see him launch off and have other ideas. As news begins to spread in the towns and villages that Jesus will be landing nearby, people begin to gather. They walk along the shoreline, guesstimating where he will land. By the time Jesus and his disciples reach the shore, a large crowd has formed (verse 14). And this is one moment when, if you’re a person who tends to feel harassed and harried by the needs of others, the story of Jesus will make you sigh. Because Jesus, wanting a break to dwell on the death of his cousin, immediately begins serving the crowd. He has compassion for them, Matthew tells us. He sees the sick among them and begins to heal them.

But the crowd is large and the day is soon spent. As evening approaches (verse 15), Jesus’ disciples counsel him to take a break. It’s getting late, they tell him, and everyone needs to eat. It’s time to send these folks away to buy food. We can imagine that the disciples are also hungry themselves. They didn’t bring a lot to eat, as we will soon learn, and probably are as interested in feeding themselves as they are worried about the hunger of the crowds.

But Jesus is having none of it. “These folks don’t need to go,” Jesus says in verse 16, “You guys give them something to eat.”

The disciples, however, don’t really have anything to eat. They manage to gather the equivalent of one person’s lunch—not two salmon and five baguettes, but five little flatbreads and two small, salted fish.

“Give them to me,” Jesus says in verse 18, and has all the people sit down. Jesus lifts the loaves and fishes up to heaven and thanks God for what’s been provided. Then he begins handing the bits of food to the disciples to hand out. As each disciple turns around to give what he’s been given to a person in the crowd, the next disciple takes a handful and does the same. Over and over this keeps happening, until someone presumably notices that the food isn’t running out. Perhaps afraid to say anything, the disciples just keep doing what they’re told: Walking back and forth between Jesus and the crowd, handing out food.

Eventually an entire sports stadium’s worth of people has been fed. The disciples are, presumably, exhausted. At what point they get to eat, we aren’t told. But by the time all the food has been handed out, everyone has eaten, and all the cleanup is done, each disciple is left standing with a picnic basket of food in his hand. Their five loaves and two fish, in addition to feeding a crowd of thousands, have become an entire day’s worth of food for twelve grown men.

This is an amazing story, and probably Jesus’ best known miracle. But there’s also so much that is human going on in our text that I don’t want us to miss. It would be easy to moralize about the selflessness of Jesus, or to clap at the miracle of the loaves and the fish. But the story also tells us something of the human experience more broadly, and of life as the people of God.

For starters, Jesus is in mourning but isn’t allowed to rest. The crowds know he can serve them, and don’t even give a thought to how exhausting their pursuit of him might be.

Having said that, however, the crowds themselves are people in pain. Why are they chasing Jesus, after all? Because people whom they love are sick or dying, and Jesus is someone they hope can help.

The disciples are men caught between obligation and desire. They are committed to serving their rabbi, but have limitations of their own. What a variety of feelings they must have felt as they hungrily began organizing the crowd and handing out food, only to realize they were in the middle of a miracle. How good did that food taste when they finally sat down to eat for themselves? Were they exhausted or walking on clouds? Either way, I bet they slept hard.

And then there is Jesus’ involvement of the disciples in the miracle. “You give them something to eat,” Jesus tells them. And ultimately, that’s what they do. They give what they have to Jesus, and when he gives it back it can suddenly feed thousands.

And it’s this last point that I want to relate to the human experience more broadly. All of us are going through something, as I implied at the beginning of this message. All of us are Jesus, or the crowds, or the disciples, or some combination thereof in this story. We all have sick among us, or are sick ourselves. We all are at one time or another in mourning. We all find ourselves smack in the face of obligation to others at the worst possible moment. But in all this God still works miracles. He creates situations that catch us off guard. He feeds us and heals us and uses us for his glory. But even as he does so, the story of our lives keeps on going.

For Jesus, his cousin John the Baptist will still be dead after the miracle.

For the crowd—as we learn from the same story in the Gospel of John—they will still have to learn that Jesus isn’t there to jump through hoops and meet every felt need.

For the disciples, the journey of faith will still be a long one.

Yet none of this means that a miracle didn’t happen. None of this means that God didn’t do something amazing that day in the wilderness. Everyone woke up the next day with the same basic life that they had the day before. But something also had changed. The clock had shifted forward one minute. The story had advanced by a page.

And it’s the same for us here this morning. We will leave church today and still basically be the same people that we were before we got here. Bills will show up in the mail. We will still need gas for our car. But we will also be a people who stood face to face with God on Sunday. We will be people who heard his word and sung his praise. We will be people who lifted up our lives to him in prayer and who encountered him by grace in the communion meal.

We will be a people who know that God prepares a banquet in the wilderness.

Let’s Pray