You, you do it

(Matt 14:15-21)

I touched on this a couple of posts back (Peter Gets It), but I find myself drawn back to Matthew’s version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, because it reads differently from how we often tell it. It deserves a post of its own.

We know the story (we think) – Jesus heard John had been executed, and went to a deserted spot, by boat; the crowds followed on foot and Jesus had compassion and healed all the sick people they brought. The disciples were worried about having so many people stuck in a remote place with no food, so asked Jesus to be responsible and send them away to buy food for themselves in the villages round about. (How that would have worked out – 5000 men plus an unknown number of women and children buying food in the villages around a remote spot sounds more like a plague of locusts than a shopping expedition; but from the disciples’ perspective, it would have no longer been their problem, nor Jesus’ either.)

So Jesus says “they don’t need to go away: you give them something to eat.” And yet again, the disciples fail the test – “we don’t have anything except five loaves and two small fish” – so Jesus has to step in and save the day.

There is something really wrong in our heads if we are reading scripture this way. It is as if we think Jesus went out of His way to prove how inadequate the disciples were for three years (or however long), but then, when He rose from the dead, said, “Well, you’re “it” now, I guess…”

That would make Jesus the world’s worst teacher. Which He most certainly wasn’t, and isn’t.

Let’s look more closely:

ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· Οὐ χρείαν ἔχουσιν ἀπελθεῖν· δότε αὐτοῖς ὑμεῖς φαγεῖν. οἱ δὲ λέγουσιν αὐτῷ· Οὐκ ἔχομεν ὧδε εἰ μὴ πέντε ἄρτους καὶ δύο ἰχθύας. ὁ δὲ εἶπεν· Φέρετέ μοι ὧδε αὐτούς. (Matt 14:16-18, SBL Greek Testament)

Jesus said to them (the disciples), “It is not necessary that they have to go. You, you give them to eat.”

They said to Him, “We don’t have [anything] here except for five loaves and two fish.”

He said, “Bring them here to me.”

Pause a moment. The One who said “Let there be light” – “and there was”, says to the disciples, “You, you give them something to eat” – and they don’t. Really?

Look again and you will see they do.

Read more widely and you will also see that God responds quite differently to “nothing” than He does to “nothing – except this small / irrelevant / hopeless thing”.

Because the disciples say “nothing except five loaves and two fish”, Jesus is able to say, “bring them to me”. He doesn’t perform magic, nor does He multiply the loaves and fish. If He had, we would read that the disciples had to keep coming back to Jesus to pick up another armful of bread and fish.

He orders the crowd to recline on the grass (i.e. ready to eat when the disciples feed them) and He gives thanks for the food – the “nothing except five loaves and two fish” – with which the disciples were going to feed the five thousand; broke the loaves and gave them back to the disciples. The disciples gave them to the people, who all ate what the disciples gave them and were were satisfied ( reclining on the χόρτου or ‘pasture’, they all ἐχορτάσθησαν or ‘ate their fill’, a term more normally used of cattle!) The disciples collected the leftovers (twelve baskets). Those who ate were five thousand men, not counting the women and children. (οἱ δὲ ἐσθίοντες ἦσαν ἄνδρες ὡσεὶ πεντακισχίλιοι χωρὶς γυναικῶν καὶ παιδίων.)

So what happened?

1. Jesus had already issued the order: “you give them food.”
2. Almost inadvertently, the disciples identified the food with which they would feed the crowd.
3. Giving the food to Jesus, they enable Him to agree with them that this is the food now set aside for God’s assignment and with which they will feed the people. (What would have happened if they had said “No, Lord, that’s silly. We won’t give you the bread and fish”? There wouldn’t have been anything to write about, I suspect know.)
4. He also effectively tells the crowd to get ready because the disciples are about to feed them; given that they had just seen all their sick healed, they almost certainly responded with expectation (“neat, we are going to be fed!”) and trust (which is what faith is), so not only did Jesus agree that the loaves and fish was dinner, the crowd did too.
5. So when Jesus gives the food to the disciples, and they give it to the crowd, the crowd are fed.

Which was Jesus’ command to them in the first place.

So when Jesus gives you a command, you should expect that He will then help you walk that out. In fact, you should probably expect that until you receive and act on His instructions, communicated by Holy Spirit, you won’t be able to fulfil His command.

What you should NOT AT ALL expect, is that He has just set you up “to fail. Again.”

You. You do it!