Saturday, August 5, 2017

“We Have Nothing Here” - August 6, 2017



Matthew 14:17


We who enjoy religious freedom (and we do) are often unaware of how dangerous it can be to follow Jesus.  In our country, people trivialize what that means, what with Rush Limbaugh and his buddies inventing a “war on Christmas”.  There is no such thing.  If there ever was, it was led by the Puritans; between 1659 and 1680, anyone in Massachusetts caught celebrating Christmas could be fined up to five shillings.[1] That is nothing, though, compared to what it may take nowadays to be a Coptic Christian in Egypt, where churches have been bombed, or to hold to the gospels in Pakistan, where taking the Bible’s view of Jesus over the Koran’s view means that you could be charged with blasphemy, which is a capital offense.

In that light, the account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand is one of great hope, because this story isn’t just about the bread.  In our setting, it can be turned into a bedtime story for a child, The Boy Who Shared His Lunch, and that may be appropriate for someone under twelve or so.  But read in context, it’s a lesson about Jesus’ survival, and the survival of his movement.  The ways of God's kingdom are always going to be calling the world's ways into question, and the powers and principalities of the world don't like to be questioned or analyzed and shown to be hollow.

            There’s no question that Jesus and his disciples had connections to John the Baptist, who was a rabble-rouser of the first degree.  The gospels each tell of how Jesus went out to the Jordan to be baptized and that it was there that he experienced the Spirit of God in a new and empowering way that would propel him from that moment on through the following years of teaching and healing and prophetic confrontation with earthly powers that would torture and kill him.  (No, that would not be the end of him, but it was what he would have to endure.)  How close was Jesus to John?  Luke describes them as cousins born three months apart. 

            Certainly they were close enough that when Herod had John executed and, in one account, presented his head on a platter as a gift to his wife and daughter, Jesus decided to get out of the way for awhile.  That is the setting for what happens in the section of Matthew’s gospel that we heard this morning:

“Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns.”  [Matthew 14:13]

John was dead, and Jesus was in danger, trying to be inconspicuous, but he had somehow inherited at least a part of John’s following, and there they were, looking to him for leadership.  There were things he could do for them.  He looked at them with compassion (not something John was especially known for) and he could and did heal their sick, which was a gift that John didn’t have.  But there were other, practical needs to look after, and Jesus’ disciples weren’t so sure that they would be able to meet those.

“When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” [Matthew 14:15]

And that made sense.  You do not want five thousand people whose leader has just been killed by a tyrant suddenly noticing how hungry they are.  You do not want to keep them around any longer than necessary.  But on the other hand, if you are there in one of the local villages and even a small percentage of the crowd suddenly appeared, looking for food – say even 10% of them – what would you do about 500 people, followers of a politically suspicious religious leader, showing up on your doorstep and demanding supper?

            The people were hungry, yes.  The disciples knew that they had not only hungry people, but potential for some intense crowd problems, possibly leading to riots, that could present a reason for Herod to call in the Romans.  Herod needed little prompting to execute members of his own family.  What did he care about a bunch of rebellious peasants?  He would be better off without them, anyway.  How convenient that they were all gathered together in one place.

            Do you see the position that Jesus was in?  Do you hear how desperate the disciples were when they said,

“We have nothing here”?  [Matthew 14:17]

Five loaves and two fish was as good as nothing standing between them and failure or worse.

            Well, as it turned out they may have had nothing but they did not have no one.  They had Jesus.

“And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.” [Matthew 14:18-20]

Twelve baskets, like the twelve disciples; like the twelve tribes of Israel who, when they grew hungry, were fed with manna in the desert when they were being led out of the tyrannical slavery of Pharaoh into God’s freedom.

            When all else fails, that is still where safety and security comes from.  When we have nothing, Jesus himself is everything for us.  When we are at our wit’s end and do not know which way to turn, his wisdom is there to guide us.  When our resources are totally depleted, he provides what is needed.  It may come from some unexpected direction like when, after those Coptic churches were bombed, there were Egyptian Muslims who formed a human chain outside other churches while their Christian neighbors prayed.  It may come in the form of a persecutor like a man named Saul who held people’s coats while they stoned the first Christian martyr, a man named Stephen.  Saul heard Jesus speak directly to him and his life was turned around so completely that, going by the name Paul, he himself preached the gospel at the risk of his own life, and wrote to one of the churches he founded:

“we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed”. [II Corinthians 4:7-9]

No, we don’t have anything here.  We have nothing.  If we think it’s on us to save the world, we are bound to fail, however  

“this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” 
           
If we are ready to trust Jesus with the little bit of nothing that we hold onto, no matter what, all will be well.

            Of course there is a lot that gets in the way of the kingdom of God.  No kidding.  The words are recent, but the cry is old:

“Through the flood of starving people,
Warring factions and despair,
Who will lift the olive branches?
Who will light the flame of care? …

As we stand a world divided
By our own self-seeking schemes,
Grant that we, your global village,
Might envision wider dreams.” …[2]

But what is far older than that, older than humanity, older than the world itself, is the eternal, loving power of God that brought all things into being.

            From nothing.




[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_in_Puritan_New_England
[2] from Julian B. Rush, “In the Midst of New Dimensions”, The Faith We Sing (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000), #2238.

No comments:

Post a Comment