Feeding a Smaller Multitude

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My wife and I were talking this week about cookies, about birthday cookies specifically, because, and I don’t know if she’s done this the whole time we’ve been married, but it feels like she has, that she has designed birthday cookies for me each year, and then she’s got a cookie lady in the city that will make them. And it seems like every year she just outdoes whatever she designed the previous year.

I remember a few years ago she did kind of a hunting theme and we had cookies with deer heads on them and I mean not anything gory sounds bad deer heads it’s just deer silhouettes and some cookies with targets on them some cookies shaped like shotgun shells and it was just really neat and I thought she’s never going to top that and I don’t know if it was the very next year, but the birthday after we moved here, incidentally, the birthday when I was sick with COVID of all times, at least we had cookies. She had already brought the cookies home. She decided with me being so excited about our new house here to have the lady do our front yard.

So we had cookies in bison shapes and we had cookies in flamingo shapes, which is how we tell everybody that’s the house we’re in is the house with all the flamingos and fake flamingos and they’re mine. And we had Oklahoma flag cookies, and I thought she’ll never be able to top that. And last year, last year she made cookies that were inspired by a skit from Saturday Night Live back when it used to be funny.

Something that 20 or 25 years later, I still, man, that just sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? I just crack up about every time I think about it. And I open the box of these cookies and just lost it.

And we were talking about this the other day and I thought there’s no way she’ll be able to top that. She said the same thing. I don’t know how I’m going to top that.

She always manages to. And before you feel too sorry for her, I finally figured out how to get in touch with her cookie lady and surprised her with cookies this year. And I have no idea what I’m going to do.

I have until February to figure it out. But she was talking about she’ll never be able to top that. It seems like she always does.

But, you know, there may come a year when she’s not able to top the cookies from last year. And the cookies will be there, but it won’t be as big a reaction. It won’t be as funny or as amazing as the previous year.

But as I told her, we’ll still have cookies. So even cookies that aren’t as exciting in their design as the previous year are still pretty good. I mean, unexciting cookies are better than no cookies, right?

Right? Can I get an amen for that one? All right.

Well, y’all aren’t necessarily a real vocal congregation on Sunday nights, but I think we can all agree on that point. Unexciting cookies are better than no cookies. In reality, we don’t have to always top last year’s design for them to be good.

And I tell you that because I’ve looked at this story even before I was preaching all the way through Mark, I’ve looked at this story for years. I say for years. I was older than I should have been before I even realized it happened because it’s overshadowed by another story to where I’ve looked at it and thought, what do I even do with this?

We’re going to look at an event in the life and the ministry of Jesus tonight that’s often overshadowed by a larger event that precedes it. And because of that, we might look at that and go, Well, that’s kind of a letdown in comparison to what we. .

. There’s no way Jesus tops the previous miracle, but I think this one is still important. I mean, they’re all important.

This event is still important, and we’re going to talk about why tonight. We’re going to be in Mark chapter 8. Mark chapter 8, if you’d turn there with me in your Bibles, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Mark, it’ll be on the screen for you.

But we’re going to look at the first 10 verses of Mark chapter 8 tonight, and a story that we call the feeding of the 4,000. yes you heard that right if you’re not familiar there is a feeding of the four thousand and like I said I was older than I should have been before I realized that there was a separate event because it’s often overshadowed by the feeding of the five thousand yeah you’d think he’d start with the four thousand and build up to the five but he didn’t and we’ll talk about we’ll talk about why this still matters tonight mark chapter 8 starting in verse 1 in those days the multitude being very great and having nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples to him and said to them, I have compassion on the multitude because they have now continued with me three days and have nothing to eat.

And if I send them away hungry to their own houses, they will faint on the way for some of them have come from afar. Then his disciples answered him, how can one satisfy these people with bread here in the wilderness. And he asked them, how many loaves do you have?

And they said, seven. So he commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground and he took the seven loaves and gave thanks, broke them and gave them to his disciples to set before them. And they set them before the multitude.

They also had a few small fish and having blessed them, he said to set them also before them. So they ate and were filled and they took up seven large baskets of leftover fragments. Now those who had eaten were about 4,000 and he sent them away.

Immediately got into the boat with his disciples and came to the region of Dalmanutha. And you may be seated. So if we compare this, if all we do is compare this story to the one we’ve looked at previously, it wasn’t last week or anything, it was a few, several weeks ago probably.

But if all we do is compare this with the feeding of the 5,000, then we might conclude that it’s less impressive. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s still impressive, it’s still something I couldn’t do, but compared to the other miracle, we might say, why even talk about this one? When we’ve already seen what He can do.

I mean, because in the first miracle, He fed 5,000 plus. I’m not sure why we call it the feeding of the 5,000, because there were more than that, although we don’t have an exact number. It said there were 5,000 men plus their families.

In this case, we have 4,000 plus. That’s been years since I’ve been in a math class, but if I recall, unless we’ve changed it with Common Core or something, 5,000 is still more than 4,000, right? So in the first miracle, he fed a lot more people.

In the first miracle, he used five loaves. In this miracle, he used seven loaves. In the first miracle, he used two fish, and this time he used several, it says.

This time he fed fewer people with more food. And I think that’s why this event gets less attention. Oh, and by the way, the first time he took up 12 fragments, I’m sorry, not 12 fragments, 12 baskets of fragments, 12 bunches of leftovers.

He fixed up 12 doggy bags to go. This time there were only seven. And so in our human nature, I think a lot of times we look at this and go, what’s the big deal?

In reality, though, this is still miraculous. even if it’s not as flashy as the previous miracle it’s still miraculous and Jesus deserves the credit for it and and we’re going to see some of the things that are on display about who Jesus is and what he can do that are shown through this miracle and it’s just as important as the others as I said even if one day the design of the cookies is not all that exciting they’re still going to be good and I’m still going to be glad that I had them and if they didn’t show up at birthday time, I would think something was wrong, right? And so all of these miracles of Jesus, even if we look at them and think from a fleshly standpoint, they’re not as flashy as the previous miracle.

They’re still there. They’re still consistent. They’re still a consistent representation through the Gospels of who Jesus is.

And that’s just as important as hitting these highlights, is the fact that Jesus was consistently doing things to demonstrate who He is. And it wasn’t just the fact that the gospel writers were constantly having to tell a bigger story, then we might think they were making things up. This is another little clue in there that they’re telling us like it happened, because if we were making up the story, if we were making up anything about the story, we might make this the feeding of the 10,000.

But they told us the feeding of the 4,000 because they were being honest and accurate about what happened. And so there are some reasons why this miracle deserves a second look. And we see that Jesus showed his compassion here.

This is important. And there’s going to be some repetition from previous messages about things that I’ve told you Jesus was demonstrating. And again, that’s not just because my needle is stuck in the groove and I have nothing new to say.

It’s because throughout these stories, Jesus is consistently showing us who he is. And God reminds us over and over who Jesus is because, well, Sometimes he just has to drive it in hard for us to understand it. So Jesus demonstrates his compassion in performing this miracle.

He says in verse 2, I have compassion on the multitude because they have continued with me three days and have nothing to eat. These people had been with Jesus for three days. That is a level of commitment I’m not sure we understand.

Three days they had gone to listen to Jesus. And it doesn’t really sound like they were coming out during the day and listening to Jesus and then going home and then coming out the next day and then going home. It sounds like they had been out there in the wilderness with Jesus for three days.

This was the ultimate camp meeting. This was the ultimate Brush Arbor revival where they’ve just gone out there for days to be with Jesus. And it is hard sometimes to listen to 30 minutes of teaching.

You didn’t think I knew that, did you? It’s hard for me sometimes too. And so I try to, let’s just say, I know I’m not the shortest preacher, well, I’m not the shortest winded preacher in the world, but I keep it a lot shorter than I would like to because I recognize from sometimes having to sit there and listen to others, it gets a little challenging to focus beyond 30 minutes.

It gets a little challenging to sit there that long. And that’s just part of our modern conditioning. They went and sat there for three days because they wanted to listen to Jesus.

They had no food in the area and nowhere to buy any. I assume they’ve probably, to be able to stay out there for three days, they’ve probably brought some provisions with them. But they’d run out of whatever they had, and there was no place to buy any.

One thing that is impressive about this miracle is that based on their description of where it took place, it seems to have been more remote than where the feeding of the 5,000 took place because they were going to send them out into little villages to try to buy food, And probably they weren’t going to be able to come up with enough. But now, whatever options there were the first time to go try to buy food, there wasn’t anything. These people were just going to have to go home.

And if they were sent home to eat, Jesus points out in verse 3 that the distance and time meant there was a good chance some of them were going to get sick along the way. Some of them were even going to faint from hunger. And Jesus’ response looking at this, he could have said, it’s not my problem.

There were so many times throughout Jesus’ ministry that he could have looked at. Somebody that came to him with a problem and could have said, this is not my problem. Particularly when Jesus had been thronged by the crowds for days and days and just needed a moment to himself, and yet he still went and met their needs, even though he’s trying to just have a moment.

Jesus didn’t look at them then and he didn’t look at them now and say, it’s not my problem. His response was, I have compassion on the multitude. And that word compassion indicates a deep feeling of sympathy for them.

Something that he felt deep down in his gut. This is not a situation where somebody comes up asking you for money and you give them a couple dollars just to get them to leave you alone. He really felt their sense of desperation.

He felt for them. And his compassion for them wasn’t just a feeling. It drove him to act.

And it drove him to do something that especially if we take it just on its own, is incredibly miraculous. And the second part of this is that He showed His power in the way He met this need. Try to divorce this story for just a minute from the feeding of the 5,000 and just look at it on its own terms. He commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground.

He took seven loaves. He gave thanks. He prayed for them.

He broke the bread. And He began handing out pieces of bread to the disciples and said, take to the people. And they began to pass them out.

And they had a few small fish. And he took those and he started splitting those up and he started handing those out to the disciples to disperse to the people. And they did.

Jesus took seven loaves of bread, and I don’t think that means like our big sandwich loaves or a big loaf of French bread. I think it’s more like the things that Sharon makes for the living Lord’s Supper. They’re delicious and they’re a good size, but they’re not a big volume.

Took seven of these and several fish. I don’t think that means dozens. I’m guessing seven, eight, nine fish.

It’s not going to be enough to feed 4,000. And he begins tearing these apart after he’s blessed them. He’s giving them to the disciples and saying, disperse these to the people.

They’re feeding all these people. There are 4,000 plus people there. Everybody gets fed until they are full.

And then there are still seven baskets of leftovers left over. And I can’t help but imagine seven baskets has got to be more than they started off with or pretty close. Taken just on its own.

This is a miracle. And we don’t ever want to lose our sense of wonder at the miracles of God, the miraculous works that He does, just because we say, well, it’s not as big as the last one you did. Let’s not fall into that trap.

I don’t know if all the Sunday school classes heard the same lesson today, but Bob taught us about the leper who went back and said thank you. Of the ten that were healed, one came back to Jesus in Luke 19. I know it’s in Luke.

Or maybe it’s Luke 17. Luke 17. Only one had this awe of Jesus that drove him to come back and say thank you.

The others, it was just kind of, okay. And maybe they’d seen Jesus heal so many others that it had kind of lost its novelty. And we’d all like to think we’d be in the shoes of the one man who came back to Jesus and said thank you.

Folks, when God shows up in your life in some incredible way, don’t write it off just because it’s not as flashy as the last thing he did for you. Every time God shows up, it’s incredible. Every time God shows up, it’s miraculous.

Jesus did something here that you and I could not do. Now, we’ve seen, we see this all the time with church stuff when we have food, and we joke about it being a loaves and fishes situation where we’ll set out a potluck and think there’s no way that’s going to feed everybody, and we have all this food left over. I suspect, I suspect that if we weighed everything before and after, we’d find out we did not have more left over.

I suspect if we kept careful tabs on how much was taken, everything adds up and the food’s all there. This is not something that you and I can do. And by the way, if more food does show up miraculously, we didn’t do that.

God did that. So we joke about situations like this, but this is not something that you and I have the power to make happen. It’s something only God could do.

So Jesus not only showed his compassion once again, Jesus showed his power in front of the people once again, and he demonstrated this power in such a way that validated his message. Now, Jesus was nobody’s trained monkey. As a matter of fact, when the religious leaders would come to him and question his authority to teach what they didn’t like, and they would say, prove who you are, prove that what you’re saying is true, show us a sign, Jesus would say no sign for you.

I don’t work for you. That’s my paraphrase of what he said. He actually said there will be no sign given to you except the sign of Jonah, which is not what they were looking for.

He said, if you want a sign, the only sign you’re going to get, the only sign you need, and incidentally a sign which you will reject anyway, is the fact that I’m going to rise from the dead. That’ll tell you everything you need to know. But Jesus did not jump at their commands.

But when Jesus wanted to demonstrate the validity of his message, when Jesus wanted to demonstrate to people who were actually listening the power that he had and the authority with which he spoke, he showed it with miracles. And he did that here again. And we can’t discount the importance of that just because he did something bigger on another occasion.

If that were the case, then we could just ignore all of these miracle stories from the New Testament because none of them are as big as the resurrection. Yet they’re all in the Gospels because they’re all important. Piece by piece, they show this consistent pattern of who Jesus is.

And then I think this is the most important aspect of this story that we would easily miss unless we take a moment to look at the historical context of what was going on. Jesus not only showed his compassion and he not only showed his power, but he showed here the reach of the Gospel. And again, this is easy to miss because the big difference between the two miracles, the feeding of the 5,000 and the feeding of the 4,000, is where they took place.

Which side of the Sea of Galilee they took place on. All sorts of historians and Bible scholars tell us that the place where he was in for the feeding of the 4,000 was a predominantly Gentile area. It was the same area, the same Gentile area, where he had already been once before and cast the demons out of a man and into a herd of pigs.

Now, when Jesus did that, Do you remember from months ago looking at that story, do you remember how the people of the town reacted to Jesus sending the demons into the herd of pigs? How did the people react? They were not happy and they asked him to do what?

Leave. Get out of here. I don’t know if they were angry about their pigs.

I don’t know if they were scared to death. Maybe a mixture of all of the above. They wanted him to go.

But the Bible says that who we’ve come to know as the Gadarene demoniac, He was the man who was infested with the demon. He stayed. And what does the Bible tell us that he did?

He told them what Jesus had done for him, right? As a matter of fact, Jesus told him, tell your friends, tell your neighbors what the Lord has done for you. That story’s in Mark chapter 5.

And it says in Mark 5. 20, he departed and began to proclaim in Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him and all marveled.

So this crowd in this area, in addition to the Jews who were following Jesus around, this crowd certainly because of where it took place it it certainly contained a large number of Gentiles and my guess is that there are quite a few people in this crowd who had heard the story of Jesus delivering the man from Gadara of the demon that was inside of him and flocked to hear him because they’d never heard anything like this in their lives and so when Jesus passed through if you recall back a few weeks ago he had healed the syrophoenician woman her daughter you remember the story about the the puppies and him said and her saying even the puppies even the dogs get to eat from the master’s table he’s on his way back from that and he’s still passing through gentile territory and some of these people I’m sure had heard the stories of him casting the demons out of the man and had to go hear what jesus had to say so they were driven to hear from jesus and in this miracle, Jesus takes a shocking step of ministering to Gentiles, of meeting the needs of Gentiles, of feeding the Gentiles.

If you’re new to this Gentile, sorry, is just a catch-all word for non-Jews. And the Jews and the Gentiles were not supposed to mix. As a matter of fact, possibly more shocking than what he did with the actual food is the fact that he sat Jews and Gentiles down to eat together because that just didn’t happen.

And what Jesus did here in this story, in this miracle, is in line with what he had told the Phoenician woman, that there was going to come a day when the Gentiles would share in the bounties of the Lord’s table. If you recall that story, he wasn’t telling her the Gentiles are cut off from the Lord. He was just saying they’ll have their turn and it’s not quite yet.

Now, when he told her they were going to have their turn at the Lord’s table. He was not talking about this feeding, I don’t believe. I believe that encounter with that woman and this feeding were both pointing to the same thing, which was something else, the day when Jesus would make salvation available to the Jews and the Gentiles alike.

There’s going to come a day not too far off in the gospel accounts when the Jews and Gentiles alike are welcomed at the Lord’s table. The Gentiles had never been welcomed at the Lord’s table, and the Jews weren’t there because they deserved it. There was going to come a day when they were all brought into fellowship.

They were all sat down and fed from the Lord’s bounty because of Jesus. There was going to come a day when salvation was going to be available to everybody regardless of their background. Now, it’s easy for us to say, well, that’s how this works.

Because many of us have grown up with this idea that Jesus saves everybody. Jesus saves people from every nation, tribe, and tongue. That’s how this works.

But don’t forget that for them, that would have been shocking. And by the way, having the intellectual knowledge of it and remembering it in our day-to-day lives, that’s often two different things. Sometimes we need to be reminded, sometimes I need to be reminded that Jesus can save anybody.

It doesn’t matter what their background looks like. It doesn’t matter if I’m comfortable with the idea of Him saving them. It doesn’t matter if they come from a background where I look at them and say, oh, they’d never come to Jesus.

They’d never get right with the Lord. Because that’s how his earliest followers felt about the Gentiles. That’s certainly how the Jewish community as a whole felt about the Gentiles.

They’d never be right with God. Many times the saying was Gentile dogs. That’s why he talked that way with the Phoenician woman.

Those people, those Gentiles, they could never be right with God. And yet in a room like this, I would have to imagine that the vast majority of people in here are from Gentile backgrounds. And here we sit with the assurance of eternal life, with the assurance of a relationship with our Father, not because of anything we’ve done, but because of what Jesus did for us, that He did for the Jews and the Gentiles alike, that He’s alluding to here by meeting this physical need of the Gentiles as He’s teaching them about His salvation, as He’s teaching them about His kingdom.

He was preparing them for that. the idea of you and me being brought into fellowship with the God of Israel would have been shocking to them. Just as shocking as I think sometimes the idea is for us of certain people around us, not even groups.

I like to think that as a society and as a Christian culture, that hopefully we’ve moved past this idea of certain groups of people not being good enough for God. But I think a lot of times we have in our mind individuals that we think they’d never be right with God. As shocking as it would be for some people in our minds to get right with God, that’s how they would have felt about us.

But here Jesus Christ brought the Gentiles in and sat them down and fed them. And again, I think it ties back to what He told that woman. There was going to come a day when the Lord’s table would be open to everybody.

And so is this miracle as flashy as the other feeding He did? No. If we’re looking at it in purely mathematical terms, He fed fewer people with more food.

But the way he did it, the way he did it and the people he served make this story important for us to understand because it’s a reminder that the gospel has a reach that far exceeds what we often think is possible. But as the Apostle Paul said, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile. So our job is not to think, well, I could see that guy coming to Christ, but not her.

Our job is to share the gospel, make Jesus known and trust that he can work in the life of anybody he pleases.