Jesus multiplies responsibility to multiply possibility — Matthew 14:13–21

When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, 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. 

As evening approached, 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.” 

Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.” 

“We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered. 

“Bring them here to me,” he said. And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children. Matthew 14:13–21

 

Jesus multiplies responsibility to multiply possibility.

For the 250th anniversary of America, the media company Big Think put out a magazine with the title “Opt-Out Nation.” It had all sorts of stories of different people who have opted out of different things: a lady who opted out of home-owning by living in a van. An entire region of West Virginia that has opted out of cell phone service. Different cities that have become sanctuary cities by using the 10th amendment to opt out of enforcing immigration laws. Makinac Island in Michigan opted out of cars. Maybe the most interesting one was Sudbury Valley School opted out of traditional education by giving students the power to vote on what they want to do at school, and so there are no mandatory classes, no grades, and the teachers are there just to support whatever the kids choose to do. The point of the whole issue was to say that America was founded as an opt out nation. When King George III kept raising taxes, Americans said, actually no we’d rather not, and we’re willing to die for the right to opt out.

A big part of all this is that life in a society comes with all sorts of responsibilities. We have responsibilities to our country. We have responsibilities to our local government. We have responsibilities to our neighborhood, to our HOA, we have responsibilities to our job, we have responsibilities to our family, we have responsibilities to our friends. And then we can join different organizations and take on more responsibilities. We might join an intramural sports league, and we have the responsibility to show up for games. We might sign up for volunteer shifts, and then we have the responsibility to show up. We have some new members joining our church today which brings many responsiblities to show up for church and Bible study give money and volunteer events. All these responsibilities pile up, and so we naturally look for things we can opt out of to gain some of our freedom back.

So maybe you were surprised when we read the gospel reading today about the feeding of the five thousand, when we hear about how Jesus miraculously provides for actually way more than five thousand people, assuming there was thousands of women and children there as well, and then you turned the page to see that the theme of the sermon is Jesus multiplying responsibilities. Isn’t the point of this miracle that Jesus provides to take away responsibilities? Isn’t the point that when the disciples and all the people are faced with this huge problem, what are they going to eat, that Jesus steps in and he takes the responsibility to feed them? That when the responsibilities of our life pile up, Jesus will swoop in and save the day?

Well, kind of. But a few details in the reading show us that this miracle is more than “God will provide what you need,” though it isn’t less than that. He certainly does provide for us. But it also shows us that when responsibilities and problems pile up in our life, Jesus does not want us to opt out. He wants us to opt in. In the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus doesn’t just multiply bread and fish. He multiplies responsibilities so that possibilities are multiplied.

Our first clue that something deeper is going on here comes in the timing of when and where this miracle took place. When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. What had just happened is one of the most tragic episodes in the Bible. John the Baptist had just been executed. John was Jesus’ relative, he was his forerunner, he meant a lot to Jesus. And at least two of Jesus’ disciples had first been John the Baptist’s disciples, so they were very close to him. And then they heard the terrible news, that John was dead, and it wasn’t some noble martyr’s death. He was killed basically as a party trick for the drunk King Herod. So when news of this gets to Jesus and his disciples, they need some time to process this, and they try to get away by sailing to this desolate place.

But their plans would be foiled. Jesus was a local superstar among the Galileans at this point in time, and when people heard that he was on the move, they packed up and followed him into this remote wilderness area. Well, actually, apparently they didn’t pack up; they apparently wanted to follow Jesus so badly that they didn’t even think about packing a lunch before they up and left. So Jesus and his disciples had been hoping for a day away from it all, a day to work through their grief, but when their boat pulled up to shore there was this massive crowd expecting to be served.

I’m sure you know the feeling. The saying “when it rains it pours” is common for a reason. You feel like you just get all your responsibilities in order when your boss announces mandatory overtime. You finally get through a packed stretch of schedule only to have a family issue come up. Or maybe your family problems feel like they’re never-ending, and then something happens between you and a friend that takes up a lot of energy and then something breaks in your apartment and now you’ve got problems on top of problems on top of responsibilities. And you start to ponder buying a one-way ticket to who knows where and opting out of all of these things.

The reality is, that when we are faced with compiling problems in our life, the more we turn inward. I’m sure everyone in this room has thought, wow look at all these challenges I’m facing right now, I need to focus on myself before I uphold responsibilities to anyone else. If only all these people who are knocking down my door knew what I’ve been through. The rocky relationship with my parents. The co-worker who makes me want to pull my hair out. The trauma that I faced when I was young. All these problems, I deserve some extra me time.

And this is encouraged by our opt-out nation, it’s in our society’s DNA a little bit. I was watching a sitcom that had a bunch of therapists as main characters. One of the heroes of the show is a guy who came to therapy with some PTSD from his military service, and he becomes this great success story where the therapists are able to help him manage it and he becomes good friends with them and he eventually is able to use his cooking skills to open his own food truck. And even better, he’s able to hire his military buddy who had been struggling with his own problems to work with him in the truck. It’s this great story. But then, in one of the later episodes, the character gets an offer to go work in a great restaurant as a cook. It’s his dream as a cook to take this job, but it would mean that he would have to stop his food truck and leave his friend who he’d been employing jobless. And so the episode is basically him going around and asking all the different characters in the show what he should do. Should he continue carrying this responsibility for helping his friend? Or should he shirk that responsibility to chase his own dream? And it was crazy, the characters in the show told him without hesitation, you need to take that job. You’ve done your job, you’ve helped your friend for a while, but you can’t let him hold you back forever. You need to put yourself first.

Look at how different Jesus acts from what our society would say. He was already physically exhausted from all of the ministry that he had been doing for these people. He had the religious leaders breathing down his neck, the very people that should’ve rejoiced that the Messiah was here were trying to find was to get him arrested. His tears over his friend and relative John the Baptist probably weren’t even dry. And now this throng of people who he’d already been serving for months still won’t leave him alone. But he didn’t opt out, he didn’t turn inward. He didn’t put himself first. Instead, he saw that the people in the crowd desparately needed his help, and his heart went out to them. And even in all of the problems that he was facing, he saw the possibilities to heal and teach people and he did.

And the disciples must’ve had a similar reaction to witnessing this as we might: wow, look at how selfless Jesus is! But of course he’s Jesus, and I’m not, and I don’t have that kind of capacity for selflessness. So I’ll do my best to serve others, even if it’s a tough time for me, but if I need to opt out I will.

In fact, we can tell the disciples had this reaction from what they said towards the end of Jesus’ healing and teaching, 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. In other words, Jesus, great work today, but you’ve done enough. It’s time to call it. Tell the people to go buy their own food. The disciples were keenly aware of a huge problem coming. Thousands and thousands of people, and nowhere to buy food. And they thought, we’ve done enough today. We’ve given up our day off that we were supposed to have, and now this crowd is going to get hungry, and we don’t want that to be our responsibility. And so they told Jesus to opt out, to push the responsibility onto the crowd to go find their own food.

They must’ve been shocked when Jesus replied, You get them something to eat. Jesus did say, you know what you’re right, it’s time for you to put yourselves first. Instead, he multiplies the disciples’ responsibilities. He tells them, even with everything that they were going through, they should look at at this massive crowd and make their problems your problems.

Friends, the reality is there will always be an excuse we can reach for to avoid this “you give them something to eat.” There will always be someone else you can push responsibility to. You hear a friend is struggling, and you think I should really buy them a coffee, but you think ah I don’t know if I can handle someone else’s problems along with my own. They have other friends who are in better shape to help. You know that the people of our church is working together to get out in the community and meet more people with God’s love, but you think ah I really need to protect my free time right now. There’s other people who like those social or volunteering events more than me anyways. You’re reminded often that there are so many people in desparate need of all sorts of physical assistance probably in your building, and certainly on your block, but you think ah I’m saving up my money for retirement. There’s other people, professional non-profits, government-funded organizations, who they can ask for help. I’m sure you can think of the people or the situations that seem to be piling on, adding too much to your plate, giving you more responsibilities than you can handle.

The world will look at your situation and say, you need to put yourself first. Jesus looks at you and says, you give them something to eat. And we probably react like the disciples did, is this guy crazy? We can barely handle our own problems right now, much less all these other problems! This just isn’t practical, Jesus, we have here only five loaves of bread and two fish. This just isn’t practical, Jesus, there are only 24 hours in a day. This just isn’t practical, Jesus, I need some weekends for myself. This just isn’t practical, Jesus, with inflation and housing costs on the rise I need to make sure I have a cushion.

Bring them here to me, Jesus said. And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. Jesus knows what your problems are. He knows the struggles in your past, in your present. He knows the responsibilities of living in the modern world are more than humans really should have. He knows all of the other responsibilities that are clamoring for your time, your emotional energy, your money, your stamina. He sees that what you have to offer to all of this, and he sees how laughably short you come. And he says bring what you have to me. And he shows you how he is able to turn problems into possibilities for his glory.

That’s, after all, why Jesus performed miracles. Well, first of all, he healed people because of his compassion. But he also did it to show how he is able to meet us in our weakness, in our lack, in our inability, with more love and power and ability than we could ever ask or imagine. After all, isn’t this the core of who our God is? God saw all our shortcomings, all our failures, all our lack of ability to live selfless lives, all the times we have let our sinful hearts put ourselves first. He saw our biggest problem was not emotional stress or physical need, but our spiritual apathy towards him. And instead of pushing the responsibility to us, instead of saying, you people are the ones who messed this up, you fix it, his heart went out to us and he sent his Son down to us to take on all the responsibility, to live the perfect life that we wouldn’t and pay the penalty we couldn’t on the cross to accomplish the salvation of our souls.

So friends, there is a time to close your laptop and recognize you need to rest. It is ok to take a Sunday off from the set-up team here at church, though as we said last week it’s never beneficial to take a day off from God’s Word. There is a limit to the amount of food you buy for the person in need on your trip to Target. In fact, the next verse after our reading says immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Jesus got his alone time. But do not buy into the lie that our culture tries to peddle to you that because you have problems in your life, you have the right to opt out of any responsibility to others that you please. Jesus says you give them something to eat, but he’s not doing it to be a slave driver. He’s not doing it because he wants to take a break himself. He wants you to see what happens when you take on more responsibility than you thought you could and then he multiplies the possibilities for the glory of God as a result.

This really happens in real life, by the way. And some of you have done this, and you have looked back and thought, man I know I was hesitant to take on that responsibility, but I can’t imagine what my life look like if I hadn’t. I’ll give you one story: I know a family whose church was doing a building project, and they already gave a substantial amount of their income to church because they believed in its mission, but they wanted to give more for this building project. So they did. They looked at their budget spreadsheet and there wasn’t much room to spare. There wasn’t any room to spare, actually. So they took a lot of deep breaths, said a whole bunch of prayers, and increased their offerings past what money they actually had. And guess what happened. God provided. Somehow, some way, the balance sheet always seemed to zero out over time. In fact, one time he did it spectacularly. It was coming to the end of the month and the bills were due, but even with buying less groceries and not running the A/C they were going to be around $1200 short. But God showed his power in their shortcoming, though, of all things, an insurance company. A school bus sideswiped their family van and took the mirror off. They obviously didn’t have the money to spare for a new mirror, so they reported it to insurance, and guess what the quote was that insurance was willing to pay for the repair: the exact amount of the mirror repair plus what they needed to pay their bills. To the penny.

I’m not saying that this reading is commanding you to give more than what you have, like that family. But I am telling you that if you always play it safe, if you always shirk as much responsibility as possible to the next person, if you always prioritize your own problems over the problems of others, you are limiting the possibilities for God to show his glory in your life and in the lives of those around you. And if there’s one thing we learn from Jesus’ miracles, it’s that we should never put limits on our loving, compassionate, selfless God. So the next time you feel overwhelmed with responsibilities, don’t opt out. Bring what you have to your God and prepare to be amazed at how he can multiply.