Matthew 14:13-21. "God Wants You to See The Godman’s Compassion."

This Sunday sermon, based on Matthew 14:13-21, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran on August 6, 2023.  Scripture selections come from the New International Version. 

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Transcript

God Wants You to See The Godman’s Compassion.

Matthew 14:13-21

Grace and peace to you from God our Father through the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Gospel reading we heard earlier is unique. It’s not a unique miracle. There’s another instance recorded in the Bible, wherein Jesus feeds four thousand people using seven loaves and an unspecified small amount of fish. Here, we have five thousand fed with five loaves and, specifically, two fish. So the miracle itself is not unique.

What is unique is that this account - the miraculous feeding of the five thousand - is recounted in all four Gospels. The only other story common to all four Gospels is Jesus’ death and resurrection. They don’t all include his birth. They don’t all include his baptism and temptation. They don’t all include his public sermons. They don’t all include his ascension. But Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all made sure to record Jesus’ death and resurrection and this particular miracle as they wrote their accounts of the life of Jesus Christ.

I hope that leads you to appreciate how important this miracle is. Again, it’s not unique. And I’ll even go so far as to say, we wouldn’t need this miracle recorded for us to come to faith in Jesus as our Savior. If the feedings of the five thousand and the four thousand simply dropped out of our Bibles overnight, what’s left would still have the Gospel message clearly proclaimed: Christ Jesus as our Savior, our substitute on the cross, the sacrifice bringing about reconciliation between us and our God.

But our God felt it important that we hear this story. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t make their choices about what they’d write in their accounts of Jesus’ life autonomously. The Bible teaches that every word in it was written by human authors under the influence and power of God’s Holy Spirit. God wanted you to hear about this miracle.

And if you were worshiping with us last spring, you actually heard me preach on this miracle already. We spent a few months working through John’s Gospel in our Sunday messages, and John recounts this miracle in chapter six of his Gospel. What I brought out, last time I preached on this miracle, was the forethought - the planning - which characterized Jesus and his ministry. Jesus was never caught off guard. Jesus was always in control, always prepared. 

I’ve got some notes in your bulletin talking about the different ways this miracle is recounted by the Gospel writers. Each of them presents the miracle, but each includes particular details, and doesn’t note others, to highlight different aspects of this miracle. For Mark, the most important thing is Jesus’ power and authority in the situation. Luke notes the way Jesus brought his disciples into the work he was doing. John’s primary focus is not on Jesus’ control of the situation, but on the way the crowd, as always, ends up misunderstanding Jesus’ mission.

Matthew also has a particular focus in what he records here. And as I preach on this miracle once again, I want to bring out to you today what Matthew brings out for us. Matthew highlights Jesus’ compassion as he tells this story. Let’s see how.

The text begins: “When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately.” When Jesus had heard that what had happened? Let’s set the scene. Where this story picks up, Jesus had sent his twelve disciples - the men we call the apostles - out on a short mission trip, perhaps a month or two prior. He had been spending some time with his broader crowd of followers, traveling through various towns to preach and teach and heal. 

While on this tour, the followers of Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, came to find Jesus. They needed to tell him something. John - Jesus’ cousin, the man who had baptized him, who had preceded him to point the people toward Jesus as the Lamb of God, sent to take away sin - John had been executed by Herod, the Roman-backed client-king of Judea, because John had been publicly and privately decrying Herod’s sexually deviant and immoral behavior. Because of his preaching, John lost his head. John’s disciples recovered his body, buried him, and then came to tell Jesus.

So Jesus is hurting, as this story begins. He withdraws to a solitary place to mourn. Jesus is a man, a human being. He loved his cousin. He’s grieved by this death. Most Bible scholars, myself included, come to the conclusion that Joseph, Jesus’ “stepfather,” had died sometime between Jesus’ twelfth and thirtieth birthdays. Jesus, as a young man, a young adult, mourned the death of his father. As a grown man, he mourned the death of his cousin, and later, of his friend Lazarus. Death caused Jesus to grieve here on earth.

So the grief you feel at the death of a loved one is not sinful. Death ought to inspire grief. We ought to reflect on the nature of life when death comes near to us. We ought to remember that this life is fleeting and out of our control. We ought to soberly reflect on the wages of our sin, which wages are death. The man Jesus Christ also grieved.

But see what happens as Matthew continues telling us the story. “Hearing that Jesus had left, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.” Here we see that Jesus was no mere human like you or I. Of course, we can look at the miracles he is doing and conclude that there’s someone special here, someone more powerful than us. But God worked miracles through mere humans before Jesus. What makes Jesus different is his compassion. 

We are so ill-equipped, as modern Westerners, to deal with death. For most of history, death was a far more frequent visitor to homes and families. Babies died. Some cultures would delay naming children for months after birth, because they wanted to be sure the child would live. Children died. Strange diseases would overtake them, and there were no treatments. My own father’s oldest sister died in childhood; that was just the nineteen-fifties! 

Young adults died, middle-aged people died, elders died. We are so insulated from that. Death is such an anomaly for us, in fact, that we would be horrified to hear of a friend who had to go right back to work after a death in the family. Much less can we imagine someone trying to help others at such a time! No - during their bereavement, we bring them a lasagna, we send them flowers, we pick up their shift at work. 

Do you see what Jesus does during his bereavement? He wants to mourn. He withdraws to wait for the apostles to find him after their mission trip. He wants to be alone right now. But when he sees this large crowd, he puts all that out of mind and has compassion on them. 

Were this not enough to convince us that this man Jesus is something special and different - someone set apart from every other human - what he does for the crowd here clinches it. This is no mere man, but the Godman. It’s God, sailing a boat to find a private place where he can cry. It’s a man, who’s able to heal any illness with his touch and feed thousands from a bag lunch. The two different feeding miracles underscore his power. Here, where the crowd is a thousand greater, the food is less. In the other instance, where the food is greater by two loaves, the crowd is smaller by a thousand mouths. Jesus wants us to see that there’s no limit on his power to provide. He is the Godman, and he is full of compassion.

At some point - Matthew doesn’t quite make clear to us when - the twelve apostles find Jesus, who’s serving this great crowd. They’re far out in the north of Israel, near a city called Bethsaida. The map in your bulletin notes the location. Three of the disciples - Peter, Andrew, and Philip - are from this region. And knowing the area, they see a problem. For this crowd, which followed Jesus from the southwest - Judea - into the wilderness backcountry of Galilee, it will be a long trip home. They need to get going now, if they’re going to find somewhere safe to eat and settle down for the night. So “the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.’” 

Oh, disciples. Just like us. So ready, in so many ways, to hear Jesus’ words; to treasure his instruction; to lead others to him; and also so prone to thinking so little of him. To looking to our own strength, wisdom, abilities to provide for us. We are so often so quick to discount God’s ability to provide. We worry about the next election, and who will be in charge of our country, rather than remembering that the Godman is enthroned over the whole world. We find a thousand things to occupy our time on Sunday morning, kids’ sports or shifts at work or just sleeping in, because we believe that those things will bring us and our families greater benefit than having his Word in our ears. Jesus does not generally call this “unbelief.” He calls it, “weak,” or “little,” faith, when we discount his ability to provide. And what is weak and little, will only grow as it is fed and exercised. So Jesus exercises the faith of the apostles here. “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat,” he tells the twelve.

In saying this, he is showing his compassion for the twelve. For they, and we, must come to this realization. What God commands of us in his Law, we cannot offer. 

God commands that we love and honor him above all things, and love our neighbors in place of ourselves. Perfectly, at all times, in all places, from the moment our life begins in the womb until the last breath passes over our lips. We are called to “be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect.” Such a work, we cannot accomplish. Nor could the disciples have fed this multitude. 

This is why God wanted this miracle recorded alongside the death of Jesus in all four Gospels. What the cross would later accomplish, this miracle had already illustrated. God in his Law makes demands of us. God at the cross satisfied those demands with the death of his Son. Christ, on the shore, makes demands of his disciples. Christ, on the shore, delivers what he demanded of his disciples. What God demands from you - holiness, righteousness, innocence - Christ delivers to you. Delivers it here, in the holy waters of baptism. Delivers it here, in the bread and wine of the Supper he instituted. Delivers it here, in the words off the lips of his called servant, as his Gospel is proclaimed to you. In God’s holiness, he demands holiness. In God’s compassion, he gifts you with salvation through his Son.

What Jesus demanded of his disciples, he accomplishes by multiplying the loaves and the fish. Then see how his compassion for the apostles is shown once more. After distributing the meal, they collect leftover pieces. For the twelve men, there are twelve baskets of food. Perhaps the crowd deserved to be fed - after all, they trusted Jesus enough to come out after him into the wilderness, with no thought for their own sustenance. But shouldn’t the twelve be sent away hungry, as a lesson to them? “Trust me next time!” No. This is not how our Savior looks at his people. He is full of compassion, just as he proclaimed to Moses a millennium and a half before he made it clear to his apostles. Adonai, adonai, el rachum v’chanun, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God,” erech apayim v'rav chesed, “slow to anger and great in love.” 

You of little faith - so often worried about the things of this world, afraid of the future, uncertain and angry - Christ loves you. He looks at you, and has compassion. He will always provide for you, even when your faith is weak and your compassion falters. No longer does he withdraw in grief, that you would have to seek him out in wilderness places. Here he will ever be, in Word and Sacrament, for you. Bread for your hungry soul. Amen.