(Preached at Luther Memorial Chapel, Shorewood, WI)
Jesus speaks to you all today, saying,
How fortunate for those people back then! How wonderful a
miracle to behold, having had nothing to eat for three days, then to be fed by
only 7 loaves of bread and a few fish. What I wouldn’t give to not have to pay
my own grocery bill each week. I would give much more in order that God would
enact this miracle today, in front of me.
Yet, everyone continues to try and convince me that there are
miracles everyday. That I just have to look hard enough, and I too, can
experience the miraculous power of God, just like those 4000 did on a hill in Galilee .
However the miracles they bring to my attention are everyday
things that happen to everyone else, as well. To be sure, it is a great miracle
that God looks after me and daily and richly supplies me with all that I need
to support this body and life, but what about my enemy? What about God’s
enemies? Why are they also well fed and cared for?
The curse of the Law is written on more than just your hearts.
It is etched into your bones and scratched into all of creation. You get
hungry. You starve unless you don’t eat. This is a law as well. You must eat to
survive.
Jesus could have done a lot better with this miracle. He could
have made it ongoing. Each generation could be fed with the amount of food
produced by this miracle. Starving children in China would be a thing of the past.
World hunger would finally be eradicated and UNICEF be put out of business.
Because that’s what Jesus is really trying to tell you here,
right? That social evil must be stamped out and providing free food for
everyone is exactly how you crush corrupt governments and tyrants bent on
holding sway over their people by starving them. If everyone had food, we could
then move on to weightier matters, like world peace.
If only you could call on God for a food-multiplying miracle
right now and not have it show up in just some metaphorical way. Jesus does do
this and even places the onus on you. Jesus says, “You feed them.” Jesus says
that its YOUR job to give them something to eat. If it is your job, why
multiply the food at all?
Repent. Jesus puts the feeding of the poor directly into your
lap. Jesus gives you His law in order that you follow it and exceed the
righteousness of both the Pharisees AND the Scribes. You are impoverished in a
land of abundance. You are poor in a land filled with riches and here, Jesus is
performing a miracle 2000 years in your past.
Jesus fed the 4000 and the 5000, but He did not feed them in
front of you. Jesus may be doing miracles everyday, but they are for other
people to see and not for you. What is yours is something far greater than a miraculous
feeding.
Jesus is God. Jesus is man. He knows what it is like to be
hungry and can end world hunger with a single word, but that is not what
happens. The greater miracle that Jesus gives to you is a feeding that, as
often as you eat and drink, has no end.
For you are liberated and made free from the curse of the Law.
Christ feeding the 5 and the 4 thousand points not to social justice, but to
the final removal of feeding. Meaning, that which corrupts your body and soul,
sin, death, and the devil, is removed by God Who starves for life on the cross.
This is because it is not physical hunger that destroys faith.
It is not even witnessing a miracle that produces faith. “Food does not commendus to God”. It is not what goes into you that makes you clean or
unclean.
What does commend you to God? The word of the cross which is
the power of God for salvation. The more prophetic Word, more fully confirmed
that you hear today, is what commends you to God, for by it you receive faith
and by faith you believe.
By faith you believe that, not only did Jesus feed 4000, but
that it has to do with His suffering and death. All that food had to come from
somewhere and where Jesus gives His body and sheds His blood; that is where
this feeding truly comes to fulfillment.
You may be the hungriest person on the planet, but if Christ is
not revealed in the Bible for you, you are done for. You may be the most
satisfied person on the planet, but if Jesus is not feeding you, you are lost.
And this is the power of God’s Word. That you hear of Jesus, on
the cross, rising from the dead, and feeding you still today. That this miracle
is not just a metaphor or a demand for the ending of world hunger, but it is a
call to return to the Table that the Lord spreads in front of you; of which you
only hear in the Word.
Dear Christians, this is why the Church and her Divine Service
do not attempt to reenact this feeding. Simply because it is in the Bible does
not mean we need to copy it verbatim. The Divine Service, by the power of the
Holy Spirit calls you by the Word.
The Word calls you to baptism, not in the Jordan , but in
water and the Word. The Word calls you to the Gospel, so you might hear and
believe that Jesus is the Christ of God. The Word calls you to the Sacrament of
the Altar, not to an upper room in Palestine ,
but to the bread and wine; the flesh and blood; the meat and drink that
promises eternal life.
The true importance of this miraculous feeding and every other
miracle in Scripture is to point to the Creator of all things, hanging on a
cross. The reason the whole world is not fed, is because Jesus does not just
care for the body, but for the soul as well.
It is all well and good that you have food on your table, but
that is not the Lord’s Supper. Neither is every puddle and every written word a
pathway leading to salvation. But where the Word is and the element promised in
the Word is, there is Scripture fulfilled in front of you.
Regardless of whether or not you came to service full, Christ
feeds you His holiness. Maybe you are starving and will not get your next meal
for days. The Body and Blood of Jesus care for you to eternity. You are fed.
The entire world is fed through Jesus, but the true miracle is that He comes
today, to feed even me, the free forgiveness of sins.
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