Date: August 6, 2023
Festival: 10th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13)
Text: Matthew 14:13-21
Preaching Occasion: Zion Lutheran Church, Mt. Pleasant, MI, and CTKLC
Appointed Scriptures: Isaiah 55:1-5; Romans 9:1-13; Matthew 14:13-21
Sermon Hymn: LSB #633 At the Lamb’s High Feast We Sing
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dearly beloved, when you receive terrible news, like a loved one passing away, what do you do? Everyone grieves differently. Some people go through all the five stages of grief. First, there’s denial: you can’t believe the bad news. “There must be some mistake,” you might say. Then as you slowly realise the truth of it, you might experience the next stage, anger, lashing out at the people around you who are trying to comfort you, or the hospice nurses, and perhaps lashing out at God. You might even be angry at the person who died, feeling abandoned by them. Then you might go to the next stage: bargaining. You might bargain with yourself that if you just do certain things, you’ll feel better—like drowning your sorrows at the bottom of the bottle, or pretending you’re not sad, or even bargaining with God. “God, please make them better, and I promise I’ll be a better Christian. I’ll start going to church again.” But if God does heal them, you never hold your end of the bargain.
When He doesn’t accept your bargain and you can no longer ignore your feelings, you move into the next stage of depression. You finally let it all out, crying like a child on someone’s shoulder, or alone in your room, or in the car at the Meijer parking lot. Then finally, you move on to acceptance. You can’t ever “get over” someone’s death, but you accept what has happened; and you accept that, if they were a believer, God will raise them from the dead and you will see them again in the new creation. You might go through all these stages of grief, or you might skip a couple steps and go straight to anger or depression. However we deal with grief, we all know death is not right. It reminds us that something is seriously wrong with the world—and us. “The wages of sin is death” [Rom. 6:23a].
We might even try to pretend death is not that serious. We will use euphemisms like, “They passed away,” or, “They’re no longer with us,” because we can’t bring ourselves to say the words, “They died.” Or we’ll say death is natural, which it’s not, because death only came into the world as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion; it did not exist previously in Eden, so it is only an aberration of God’s design. Or we’ll deceive ourselves about dying an “honourable” death, but if you’ve ever seen or smelled a dead body, any honour you had is swiftly taken away. Or we’ll soothe ourselves with lies such as, “Heaven received another angel today.” Which is absurd; Scripture does not say humans are downgraded to angels when we die.
Or instead of a funeral, we’ll call it “a celebration of life,” so the funeral—sorry, “celebration”—becomes all about them and their good works rather than being about Christ and His perfect work on the cross and His promise of the resurrection. It’s the epitome of the bargaining stage because their sins are trivialised—even the really bad ones—and we praise them for the little good they’ve done to make ourselves feel better instead of properly grieving and resting in Christ when we are weary and heavy laden with the tragedy of death, receiving His easy yoke and the light burden of His grace [cf. Matt. 11:28-30].
Or maybe we deal with grief by isolating ourselves, dealing with it alone. Maybe it leads us into sin by using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings or some other means as our coping mechanism. Or maybe we don’t do anything; we just cry in private or lie down and sleep, even cry out to God in prayer, if we can even manage ourselves to do so.
Beloved, in our Gospel lesson today we find Jesus in the midst of such grief. You see, just before this, Jesus found out that John the Baptiser, His relative—possibly His cousin—was murdered. Herod Antipas, the king of Galilee, had married his brother’s wife. John was audacious enough to tell him this was unlawful and sinful—it was against the 6th and 10th Commandments. Herod imprisoned him instead of killing him because he had deep reverence for the man as a prophet, but his new “wife,” with the clever guile of Satan himself, tricked Herod into promising to give his stepdaughter whatever she asks. When her mother manipulated her to ask for the head of John the Baptiser on a silver platter, literally, Herod unhappily obliged, for he could not go back on his word, and he especially could not disappoint his beloved stepdaughter. Jesus’ disciples found out about this, they told Him the news, and then we read the first verse of our pericope, “Now when Jesus heard this, He withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by Himself.”
When we read this miracle account, this first half of the verse is easy to gloss over, so I want us to pause and consider this. Jesus was told that His cousin was murdered, whom He loved very much (remember, John leapt in his mother’s womb when the unborn Jesus was near, so they’ve had a deep connection since the womb), and He left to “a desolate place by Himself”—He isolated Himself. He needed to be alone. This isn’t the only time Jesus went to a desolate place to be by Himself. From what we know of Jesus when this happens, such as the garden of Gethsemane, we can only assume He may have gone wherever He went to pray to His heavenly Father as He grieved. We could use this as a lesson for our own grief—that we, too, should cry out to God in prayer when someone we love dies. While there is value in that, I don’t think that’s what we should glean from this. Rather, let us consider the humanity of Jesus.
It seems as if Jesus skipped all the stages of grief and went straight to depression. He wasn’t in denial because He left immediately not to confirm John’s death but to be alone. We can’t assume He was angry because He didn’t lash out at His disciples or the crowd. He didn’t try to bargain by trying to alleviate His feelings with vain promises or with God His Father. Rather, He immediately left to be by Himself, perhaps depressed that His beloved cousin died brutally.
To make it worse, Jesus didn’t have much time to grieve. As the text continues, “But when the crowds heard it, they followed Him on foot from the towns.” It seems rather insensitive of them, but we don’t know if “the crowds heard it” means both the new about John and Jesus departing or just that Jesus left to be by Himself. John was a famous figure, so it was probably both. Either way, wherever Jesus went, He didn’t have much time to grieve, for He sees them ashore and approaches them. I don’t know about you, but if there were a bunch of people waiting for me—wanting something from me—during my time of grief, I’d be impatient and irritated. They were like annoying paparazzi who just couldn’t leave Jesus alone. But Jesus “had compassion on them and healed their sick.”
If you’ve been in any Bible study with me, you know how much I love that Greek word for “compassion,” which is σπλάγχνα [splagchna]. The word literally means “guts” or “bowels,” and compassion was placed there because in Greek thought, the gut was the seat of human emotion, much as the heart is for us today because of the heart palpitations that occur when we’re moved by someone or for someone. In fact, the Greeks were onto something because scientists have observed links between our emotions and our bowels. So, when Jesus saw these sick people, it’s like He had this pain in His gut that moved Him to have mercy on them. And it is this same compassion that moved Him to feed them rather than send them away like the annoyed disciples wanted. But there was a problem. They only had five loaves of bread and two fish for over 5,000 people.
You know how the story ends. You’ve heard it many times. Jesus takes the loaves and two fish, looks up to Heaven, says a blessing, gives the loaves of bread to His disciples, and the disciples distribute the five loaves that somehow end up feeding over 5,000 people. Note that verse 21 says there were about 5,000 men, not including the women and children, so there were probably closer to 10,000 people.
How do we reconcile these two seemingly opposite emotions in Jesus—His grief and His compassion? We can only speculate because Jesus doesn’t tell us what He was feeling here. Perhaps when He saw the sick and hungry people in the crowd, He saw His cousin in them. They, like John, will all die someday, especially with these illnesses afflicting them. Of course, He always knew they’d all die eventually, which is the entire reason for His incarnation. But perhaps, in His humanity, death was made ever more real for Him, like when someone you love dies and you are suddenly reminded of your own mortality, and you begin to sympathise more with people who suffer with the same or similar affliction that took your loved one away. Perhaps it is that feeling that moved Jesus not only to heal them but also to feed them. I don’t know if there’s a word to describe the fusion of grief and compassion. Maybe compassion is just the best word we have.
Beloved, this is the same compassion Jesus has for you. Have you noticed how familiar these words are in verse 19? “And taking the five loaves and the two fish, He looked up to Heaven and said a blessing. Then He broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples.” … “Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to the disciples…” The feeding of the 5,000+ is a mirror image of the Lord’s Supper. The bread in the Lord’s Supper is miraculously His flesh just as the five loaves miraculously fed over 5,000 people. You will hear from many Christians who do not believe the Lord’s Supper is Christ’s true body and blood, that it’s only symbolic. They ask, “How can Jesus make the bread His body in all places at once? How does He not run out of flesh? The finite cannot contain the infinite.” To this we simply say, “How could Jesus feed over 5,000 people with only five loaves of bread? It doesn’t say they multiplied into thousands of pieces but that they were fed with the five loaves. And how did He not run out, for He had leftover pieces? If the finite cannot contain the infinite, then Jesus is not God.”
If God’s Word can create the whole universe from nothing, if Jesus can turn water into wine, if Jesus can tell a man to get up and walk and he walks without any physical therapy, if Jesus can tell a dead person to rise and they rise with a normal body and not as a zombie, if Jesus can feed over 5,000 people with five pieces of bread by merely blessing it, how can He not also feed His Christians of all time with His body and blood by blessing it? When Jesus has compassion on His people, He doesn’t commit symbolic acts that don’t mean anything; He commits bodily acts that truly heal and feed His people. So then, in your grief, your sorrow, your guilt, your shame, whatever it is, Jesus has compassion on you. He is deeply moved to give you His very body and blood in the Supper to deliver you from your sin-sickness for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. In the words of St. Ignatius, the Lord’s Supper is “breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality, the antidote we take in order not to die but to live forever in Jesus Christ” [Ignatius to the Ephesians 20.2].
This brings a whole new meaning to the 5th petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” At the end of Luther’s explanation to this petition in the catechism, he writes, “So we too will sincerely forgive and gladly do good to those who sin against us.” You see, then, that we don’t only forgive those who sin against us but also do good to them. That is, we also have compassion on them just as Christ had compassion on us. So, when you receive the Lord’s compassion and forgiveness in the Supper, you don’t keep it all bundled up for yourself. You share it with others like bread around the table. You forgive as He has forgiven you—freely and without merit. You have compassion as He has compassion on you; in Paul’s words, weeping with those who weep [Rom. 12:15]—grieving with them, lending them your ear, perhaps even using your own pain to help them heal, to pray with them, bringing them to the One who suffered for them out of His incomprehensible compassion for them.
You know the Lord’s Supper gives you forgiveness, but is it enough for your grief? Yes, because Jesus gets it; He intimately understands grief. As Hebrews says, “We do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” [4:15-16]. So, He gives you bread—His flesh—not only to forgive your sins but also to strengthen and nourish your faith as you walk through the valley of sorrow.
Therefore, beloved, whether you grieve for someone you’ve lost, or over your own terminal illness, or over your own guilt and shame of your sin-sickness, come to the Table, you who are weary and heavy laden, and Christ our Saviour will give you rest, whose yoke of grace is easy and whose burden of salvation is light. To Christ belongs all the glory, now and forever. Amen.
The Lutheran Column 