In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the mid 1980’s my brothers and I enjoyed watching the television show MacGyver. The hero of the show always seemed to manage the impossible escapes and feats with regular household items. Recently, I was reminded of the show when viewing a MasterCard ad from the Super Bowl.
Our hero is bound to a chair at the beginning of the commercial. He uses an air freshener to cut through his ropes. We hear “air freshener: two dollars.” He then zip-lines down a wire using a tube sock. We hear “tube sock: four dollars.” We then see our hero tinkering with a truck and getting it to start. We hear “Ball point pen, tweezers, paper clip, nasal spray and a turkey baster: fourteen dollars.” Finally we see him escape just as a bomb explodes behind the truck he is crashing through a gate. We hear “the little things that get you through your day… priceless.” He always seemed to do the impossible with the ordinary. In today’s Gospel, we see that God does the infinite with what is finite.
At the beginning of today’s reading from Mark, the apostles return to Jesus to tell him of the work they had done after Jesus sent them out to teach, heal, and proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God. They had traveled and had done amazing things, but we get the sense from the passage today they were tired. After all this work, when they had gathered together, Jesus invites them to come away with him to a deserted place to rest. Mark tells us that by the time they had reached the place where they had planned to rest, a large crowd had gathered to meet them. All of their plans for a quiet rest with Jesus are put aside.
Many of us know the feeling that the disciples must have had at that moment. It is the same feeling that comes over you when you arrive home after a long day, hope to relax, but find that something pressing has come up. The basement has flooded, a child is sick, or work calls you back just as you step in the door. And what do most of us do in that situation? We do whatever needs to be done, and we rest afterward. Even if we do begin to feel stretched too thin. We find ourselves beginning to come upon our limits, and having them stretched. Sometimes, we may feel overwhelmed.
At some points in today’s Gospel reading, the disciples clearly seem overwhelmed. The crowds have come to see and hear Jesus and his disciples. Because of the work that they had been doing, the disciples were now public figures, so people were seeking them out as well. The crowd, that had followed them, was the very thing that they had sought to escape so that they could rest. Mark tells us that when they encountered the crowd the first time they did not even have the “leisure to eat.” Yet, Jesus sees the need of those in the crowd and responds. We are told that is out of compassion that Jesus began to teach the crowds. It was out of love that he was moved to care for the crowd despite having gone off to a deserted place to seek rest and reflection.
We can tell that his disciples felt they had finally met their limit when they came to him saying “This is a lonely place, the hour is now late; send them away that they may buy themselves something to eat.” They probably expected Jesus to do precisely what they asked. His response was probably not at all what they expected. “You give them something to eat.”
The very same apostles who had cured the sick, cast out demons, and preached the good news of the Kingdom of God, when presented with the problem fall back into thinking as people of the world. They find themselves thinking on the limitations that they perceive in this world. They focused on what they didn’t have “Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” In response, Jesus sends them out to see what they do have. He is told five loaves and two fish.
He divides the crowd in to smaller groups. Jesus then takes the five loaves and two fish, gives God thanks for what he has provided, breaks them and gives them to the disciples to distribute to the gathered crowd. The crowd eats their fill and twelve baskets remain after all have eaten.
We see in this miracle of Jesus that he is God the Son of God, taking what is limited, and doing the unlimited. God takes what is present, and makes it much more than it was. Five loaves and two fish, feed five thousand men. What was seen as insufficient to meet the needs of the crowd became more than sufficient in the hands of Jesus Christ. We see in the feeding of the five thousand how God can use what is finite to accomplish the infinite.
When looking out on the crowd, the disciples focused on what they did not have. They saw so much need, and they did not see what was there that God could use. What they had was enough in the hands of Jesus Christ.
We find ourselves in a similar position to the disciples as they looked out upon that hungry crowd as we look upon the world. There seems to be more need than we can handle on our own. We live in a world that is afflicted with violence, hatred, poverty, sickness, estrangement, despair and greed standing in opposition to the Kingdom of God. In addition, we live in a world where our daily lives have demands and concerns that on their own can seem like more than enough for us. We look out and see a world where a predominant message is that there is not enough, so we had better take what we can from what there is for ourselves. As those who follow Jesus Christ, we are called to see the world in God’s abundance, love, and power, not in scarcity and need.
We can become tempted to only see only the greatness of the need, and not the gifts that God has given us to meet those needs. If we do so, we become in danger of becoming overwhelmed, as the disciples were overwhelmed in seeking to feed the crowd that was before them. Yet when faced with a world that is hungry for the good things of God, Jesus words to us are the same as he spoke to his disciples, “You give them something to eat.”
Just as Jesus took five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand, he uses us and the gifts that he has given us to meet the needs of the world. When Jesus fed the five thousand he divided the crowd into smaller groups, and sent the disciples out to feed them. As we seek to feed the world we need to look to see what need is sitting on the grass in front of us. We don’t have to meet the needs of the entire crowd. That is God’s role. We are called to meet the needs that are before us. Jesus calls us to look for what needs are before us in the community around us. Feeding fifty or one hundred seems more manageable that feeding the whole crowd.
Jesus took what was present and broke it, and made it more than it was. Once we have seen what needs are immediately before us, we have but to listen to our Lord again, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” “What gifts do you and your fellow disciples have? Go and see.” We are called to prayerfully consider how the gifts he has given us can meet the needs set before us.
Once we have ascertained what we have been given, we are called to surrender those gifts and abilities, indeed our entire lives into the hands of Jesus Christ. He will do with us what he did with the bread and the fish. In his abundance, love, and power, we will find that what we have miraculously becomes enough to meet our needs and the needs sitting before us. We will find that God’s grace and love, moving through us, is more than enough for our needs, and for the needs of the world. Amen.
