Pentecost 11

Matthew 14:13-21- Pentecost 11- August 28, 2011 

  The Love of God is Always Found in Christ

Frequently in the four Gospels, we hear of Jesus withdrawing someplace by Himself alone.  He did this often in order to pray, or to instruct His disciples, or sometimes even just to rest.  The Gospel reading for this morning begins by saying, “When Jesus heard this, He withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by Himself.”  What Jesus had just heard is explained right before our text begins.  Jesus had just heard that John the Baptist had been beheaded by King Herod.  Herod had married his own brother’s wife, which was a sin. Leviticus 20:21 reads: “If a man takes his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing.”  John was a prophet.  So he told Herod what no one else wanted to tell him.  And he suffered for doing the right thing.  John probably knew that his rebuke would likely do no good.  He probably knew furthermore that it would bring him into great danger to confront such a powerful and crooked man.  But he did it anyway.  

He took this great risk because he was convinced of three things.  First, of course, John was convinced that Herod was a sinner who needed to be called out on his sin.  Second, John was convinced that Jesus was his Savior.  He knew that the message of all the prophets before him, and the subject of his own preaching, was fulfilled in the object of his own faith.  He pointed to Jesus with his own finger calling Him the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  That’s what faith does it points to Jesus and says behold the Lamb of God who takes my sin away too.  And whatever doubts John might have had while he was languishing in prison were answered by Jesus Himself through messengers, saying, “Go tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them.”  And this brings us to the third thing that John the Baptist was convinced of: that nothing, not even death, could separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus his Lord.  THE LOVE OF GOD IS ALWAYS FOUND IN CHRIST.  

When Jesus withdrew to a private place with His disciples, He was not fleeing anything, and He certainly was not abandoning anyone.  Jesus was, as He always is even today, where He needed to be.  He wasn’t hiding.  After all, the crowds that had been swarming Jesus soon caught up with Him.  And whether they knew it or not, considering the fact that the last of the Old Testament prophets had just been killed, these crowds went to exactly the right place; they went to the New Testament; they went to where Jesus was.  They sought mercy from Him who alone could provide what they needed.  

This is exactly what Jesus wanted.  When He saw the great multitude of 5000 men – plus women and children – having gathered to see Him, He had compassion on them and began to heal their illnesses.  This is all the information that St. Matthew provides in his Gospel account.  But it accurately summarizes the activity of Jesus’ entire ministry.   Jesus is compassionate.  It is His very character as the Son of God.  To have compassion is to love.  God is love.  Now, this word “had compassion” is a strong word.  It is the type of commiseration or sympathy that one feels in his own body.  To say that Jesus was moved with compassion is really quite literal.  That’s what the word means.  Jesus was physically affected by His love and concern for this crowd of people.  He felt their pain like no one else could – not only as He would soon feel it on the cross, but even there as He beheld them in their misery – He felt their pain.  

God’s love and mercy toward us is not just some theoretical proposition.  The love of God is a real compassion from which we benefit here today.  This is because still today all of our problems deeply move and affect the flesh and blood heart of the Son of God who lived and died for sinners.  God’s LOVE IS ALWAYS FOUND IN CHRIST.  

But God’s compassion is more than a mere feeling fleeting through His tender heart.  We see in our lesson that Jesus not only feels something, but He joins His affection with active mercy.  He healed their weaknesses.  The very thing that caused Him pain to see, He took upon Himself.  St. Luke tells us that everyone who needed to be healed was healed.  St. Mark tells us that Jesus had compassion because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and so He became their shepherd, and taught them many things.  And He kept teaching them.  He taught them even as He healed them, and He didn’t stop teaching them … until the disciples interrupted Him.  Apparently they thought that something else was more important than the mercy Jesus showed by giving them God’s word. 

The disciples said to Jesus, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”  The people did need food. The disciples were right about that.  But could it possibly be that Jesus got so caught up in His own teaching and preaching that the people’s need for food just slipped His mind? Of course not!  Jesus is not some scatter-brained preacher out of touch with how the world around him functions.  No.  He is the very Son of God by whom all things were made.  Jesus is not some windbag too busy talking about himself to notice the obvious need right under his nose.  No. Our daily bread is always His concern.  What Jesus was teaching from the Bible to those crowds in the desert had everything to do with what they were going to eat for supper.  There was nothing more relevant to all their needs that day than listening to what God had to say.  

And so it is with us.  By hearing the Gospel, we learn of Him who is the source of everything we have in this world.  Our food, and clothing, house and home, wife and children do not come from some disinterested god who doles out gifts at random.  No! All these good things are graciously given to each one of us by our God who takes an active interest in all our needs.  Everything we have, everything the world has, God gives for the sake of Jesus whose compassion alone reveals God’s love.  THE LOVE OF GOD IS ALWAYS FOUND IN CHRIST. That is why we need Jesus Himself to teach us, and not to stop teaching us, no matter how pressing our other needs might seem to get.  It is by teaching us that God has mercy on us.  God’s word is always relevant to all our needs.  

The disciples, however, told Jesus to stop preaching the word of God.  That’s what they did.  They didn’t think that they were despising God’s word.  They thought that they had properly honored it.  After all, they had been listening to Him for quite a while.  “Oh, sure there’s a time and place for teaching and preaching,” they figured, “but right now these people have got to focus on other more practical needs.  What you preach from the pulpit is good.  Don’t get us wrong.  There’s a time for that.  But sometimes we need to just focus on our daily life and not be distracted by theology and lessons from the Bible.  We have other needs, you know, that the word of God doesn’t really so clearly address.”  That’s essentially what the disciples told Jesus.  “Stop preaching, so that they can find food.”  How foolish of them.  What a sinful attitude.  They got it exactly wrong.  Not only was Jesus speaking the words of eternal life upon which their souls could feed, but of course He was capable of giving them what they needed in this life too.  

Yet how often do we do the exact same thing?  How often do we in the same way regard the preaching of God’s word as a mere distraction from our other felt needs?  And so we count our many problems – our need to be healed from sickness, our need for strength and health as we get older, our need for financial stability, our need for friendship.  And then we regard the Gospel as not really addressing these needs.  We act as though they must be filled somehow apart from regularly listening to God who gives us all we have – as though the God who took on human flesh and blood to die for you could possibly abandon you in your earthly need.  But even if we do gain all these things that we think we need, even if we do get our basic daily bread that we so easily take for granted, what good is it if we do not know Him who has compassion on poor sinners like us?  

But we do know Him.  We know Him because He has taught us in the word of the Gospel that we gather to hear.  And He continues to teach us every time He shows us where all of our sin was washed away by the blood of His dear Son.  We know God where we see Jesus live a perfect life of obedience to His Father in our place.  We know God where we see Jesus suffer and die for all of our sins and for the sins of the whole world.  We know God where Jesus gently corrects all of our misdirected priorities by forgiving us our sins and covering us in His own perfect righteousness.  We know the God who loves us, because His LOVE IS ALWAYS FOUND IN CHRIST into whose death and resurrection we have been baptized.  And so we go to Him, we go to Jesus to receive from God everything we need for life and in death.  

It is only when we know the God who declares us righteous on account of Jesus Christ His Son, that we also know the God who wants to feed us when we are hungry, and heal us when we are sick.  Jesus proved this in our Gospel lesson for this morning when He multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish into more than enough to fully satisfy so many thousands of hungry people.  Jesus not only showed compassion for their physical needs.  Jesus also He showed that He more than abundantly fills our need to stand before our righteous God with a clean conscience confidently claiming the obedience of Christ alone which is given to each one of us by faith.  

The mercy that God shows us when He fulfills our spiritual need in Christ is the basis for His merciful providence when it comes to our physical needs as well.  In the same way, the mercy that we have received from God in Christ is the basis for the mercy that we as Christians show to others.  When the disciples suggested to Jesus that the crowds should disperse and fend for themselves, look at what Jesus said.  He said, “You give them something to eat.”   “You feed them.”  Jesus commanded them to show charity. “You see a need for mercy?” Jesus says, “you fill that need. But don’t you tell Me to stop preaching the Gospel.”  And we say Amen to that.  Because we need the Gospel.  We need to know the God who feeds us even more than we need the food.  

We gladly seek to fill the needs of those who are less fortunate than we are because we know the God who gives it all.  We show mercy, not as detached from Christ’s preaching, not out of guilt, but as a result of Christ’s preaching, from the joy of knowing God and in freedom of the Gospel.  Jesus knew that the disciples did not have enough food to fill so many hungry mouths.  And Jesus knows that we cannot fill all the needs that we see around us.  We can’t even fill our own needs.  But we don’t show mercy simply on the basis of what we have.  We show mercy on the basis of what we know our God will supply.  We give freely because our God gives freely.   In this way, our charity to others testifies to the love of God in Christ.  

There are still times when it seems that God has withdrawn Himself from us.  There are times that we must suffer, or go without, or when it seems that God isn’t providing enough daily bread.  Sometimes perhaps we even face persecution for our faith.  And all of us, like John the Baptist, will some day in some way face death.  But we know that none of these things can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  We are convinced of this; because we do not look to how abundantly God provides our physical needs in order to find Jesus.  Instead, we look to where Christ is teaching us what He has done to rescue our souls from death.  We find Jesus where He gives to us in word and sacrament what He lived and died to win for us.  When we find Jesus here, we do not find a Jesus who has withdrawn Himself far away from us.  No. We find Him exactly where we need Him to be: filling our greatest need.  

In Jesus’ name, Amen.