Hungry?

Hungry? 
Matthew 14: 13 - 21

13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 

14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 

15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 

16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 

17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 

18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 

19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 

20 And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 

21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Today’s passage occurs right after a significant event in Jesus’ life.

Herod has just had John the Baptist beheaded in a prison cell, at the whim of a party and the pride of a king, and John’s disciples have taken his body and buried it and gone to tell Jesus.

John was not a stranger to Jesus. 

In fact, John was family — his cousin - remember?

The one who leapt in his Elizabeth’s womb as she met with Mary.

John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, and then pointed at Him and said to his own disciples and the crowd, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” 

And now John is dead, executed for telling the truth to a corrupt ruler.

So Jesus gets into a boat and withdraws to a solitary place.

He is grieving. 

He wants to be alone. 

Anyone who has lost someone they love knows this instinct — the need to get away, to sit in silence, to not have to fein composure for anyone.

The crowds see which way the boat is headed and they go by foot around the shore, and by the time Jesus lands, there they are: thousands of people, needing things from Him, wanting things from Him, on the worst possible day for Him to be needed and wanted.

I want you to sit in that moment before we go any further, because I think it is the hinge on which this whole story turns. 

This is not just a story about a miracle. 

That is where our attention immediately finds focus.

But when you look deeper, you see this is a story about what a grieving man does when He is interrupted by other people’s need. 

And what Jesus does tells us something about the character of God that we need to hear, especially those of us who are running on empty ourselves.

I. Compassion That Sees


“When Jesus landed and saw the large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.”

He does not send them away. 

He does not ask for the afternoon off, though no one would have blamed Him if He had. 

Instead, Matthew tells us, He saw them, and seeing them, He had compassion.

I mentioned this a few weeks ago in a previous sermon - 

The word “compassion” in the Greek is a visceral word — it refers to the gut. 

This kind of compassion is felt in our inner most being - and it causes us discomfort. 

In Jesus’ day, it was believed the soul lived in the abdomen, since that is where many emotions are felt.

Today, we might make references to being moved in spirit with phrases like - “I was heartbroken.”

Regardless of where it is felt, this is not polite sympathy from a safe distance. 

Matthew wants us to understand that Jesus’ compassion for the crowd was “deeply felt”.

This is compassion that costs something.

The kind of compassion that interrupts your own grief because someone else’s need has become, in that moment, more urgent to you than your own pain.

What did Jesus see when He looked at that crowd? 

Luke and Mark both tell us: He saw people who were like sheep, without a shepherd. 

Not just hungry people. 

Not just sick people. 

Lost people. 

Leaderless, and near hopeless people.

People who had walked for miles, around the banks a shoreline, on the rumor that maybe, finally, someone was coming who would notice them.

I think many of us know what it is to be in that crowd. 

We have walked a long way on the hope that somebody, anybody, would see us — really see us, not just process us, not just manage us, but see us the way Jesus saw that crowd on the shore of Galilee. 

This passage reminds us - the God we serve is not distracted.

He is not a God who is too busy with bigger concerns, too occupied with his own sorrow, too important to notice you standing on the shore. 

Even on the day He received the worst news of his life, Jesus looked at ordinary, needy people and something in Him broke open toward them.

This is the first thing the feeding of the five thousand teaches us about God: 

Before He is a God who provides, He is a God who sees. 

The miracle doesn’t start with bread and fish. 

It starts with a look. 

It starts with attention. 

It starts with a heart that will not let human need pass by unmoved, even when that heart is already carrying its own weight.

If you take nothing else from this passage, take this: 
You are not invisible to God. 

Whatever grief He may be carrying — and I use that phrase carefully, but the text invites us to say it — whatever is on His mind, whatever else is happening in the vast government of the universe, when He sees you, He has compassion on you. 

That is not sentiment. 

That is the settled character of God the Father, revealed in Jesus Christ.

II. Compassion That Involves Us

But look what happens next, because this is where the story gets uncomfortable for the disciples, and honestly, for us.

Evening comes. 

The disciples, who have presumably been watching Jesus teach and heal all day, come to Him with what sounds like a perfectly reasonable, even thoughtful, suggestion: 

“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 food.”

It’s actually a good plan. 

It’s logistically sound. 

And, perhaps conveniently, it is also a plan to make the problem someone else’s problem. 

Send them away. 

Let them or someone else handle it. 

We’ve been here all day and we have done our part.
We provided crowd control and a formed a security perimeter around Jesus so He could teach and heal. 

Now everyone can be on their way - let the surrounding villages sell them some bread and everyone can go home.

Jesus’s response must have landed like a splash of cold water: 
“They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

You. 

Not the town.

Not the market. 

You.

The disciples do the math out loud, and you can almost hear the disbelief in it: 

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

In a crowd of over five thousand people, that is not a shortfall. 

That is nothing. 

That is comical. 

Andrew, in John’s account of this same story, all but throws up his hands: 

“How far will they go among so many?”

Here is something worth realizing.

Jesus does not perform this miracle out of thin air, unassisted, while the disciples watch. 

He does not wave His hand over an empty table. 

He starts with what is already, however inadequately, in their hands. 

“Bring them here to me,” He says.

I think this is one of the most important verses in the whole story, and it’s the one we’re most tempted to overlook or ignore. 

Jesus asks for the loaves and fish before He multiplies them. 

Understand this - He does not need the bread and fish, not in the sense that His power is limited by raw materials — the God who spoke light into being from nothing could have summoned five thousand meals from thin air.

But He chooses, in his ordinary dealings with us, to work with what we bring Him.

Again, this is not because God is short on resources. 

It’s because God is not interested in cutting us out of the story of His own provision. 

Compassion, in the hands of Jesus, does not stay a private feeling He has about the crowd while the disciples stand around watching him work. 

He turns to his disciples — tired, grieving right alongside him, no doubt hungry themselves — and He says, in effect: this is yours to give, too.

There is something both humbling and dignifying in that. 

Humbling, because it strips away the excuse that we have nothing worth offering. 

Five loaves and two fish is not much of an offering when you’re trying to feed a stadium. 

And yet dignifying, because Jesus does not ask the disciples to produce food from nothing, the way He could have. 

He asks them to bring what they have — small, insufficient, almost embarrassing in its smallness — and to let Him do something with it.

How many of us hold back the little we have because we’ve already decided it isn’t enough to matter? 

We look at the needs in front of us — in our families, our neighborhoods, this church, this broken world — and we look at what we have to offer — some time, a little money, an imperfect gift, a tired body, a faith that some days feels more like five loaves than a feast — and we conclude, reasonably, that it’s not going to make a dent. 

So we hold onto it. 

Or we hand the problem to somebody else. 

Send them to town.

Let someone better resourced handle it.

Jesus says: “Bring it here to me.”

He is not asking you to be the source of the miracle. 

He is asking you to a willing participant in it. 

He is asking you to be willing to hand over whatever you have, so that He can bless others.

Neither you or I are the bread of life. 

Jesus is.

But all of us have loaves and fish, however small, and Jesus is still saying, two thousand years later, “Bring them here.”

III. Provision That Multiplies

Matthew gives us four verbs, and Christians have paid close attention to them for two thousand years, because we hear them again every time we come to the Lord’s Table: 



 - He took the bread, He gave thanks, He broke it, and He gave it to the disciples to distribute.

Notice the order. 

Took. Blessed. Broke. Gave. 

He takes what is offered. 

He asks God’s blessing on it. 

He breaks the bread and the fish, returning it to His disciples to distribute.

The multiplication does not happen by the loaves simply growing larger in his hands, like a magic trick.
It happens in the breaking and the giving. 

Which means the miracle is not separate from the act of generosity — the miracle is the act of generosity, sustained and multiplied by the power of God, as it moves from hand to hand across that hillside.

I don’t think that’s incidental. 

I think it’s the whole theology of the passage compressed into four verbs. 

Grace, in the economy of God, does not usually arrive as a finished stockpile, dropped from heaven. 

It arrives as bread that is broken and given, broken and given, again and again, and somehow — inexplicably, by the power of the God who spoke the world into existence — it does not run out before the need does.

And don’t miss this - 

“They all ate and were satisfied.” 

Not merely fed. 

Satisfied. 

Every commentator I trust points out that this is no small detail. 

This was not a ration, a late afternoon snack, a morsel to “tie them over” until they can return home and fix their dinner.

Whatever moved through those baskets and across that crowd was abundance, not scarcity. 

And when it was over, the disciples gathered twelve baskets of leftovers - one basket, tradition has often noticed - for each disciple to carry. 

As if God wanted each of the Twelve to hold in his own two hands the evidence that what they had offered Him, however small, had come back multiplied beyond anything they could have produced or predicted.

Twelve baskets left over from five loaves and two fish. 

That is not a God who barely makes ends meet. 

This is a God whose provision runs to excess, on purpose, so that no one standing on that hillside could mistake it for luck.

This is the deliberate, extravagant kindness of the Lord, who had looked at them that afternoon and felt His heart move.

Bringing It Home

Let’s put the pieces back together, because I think this passage has something specific to say to us today, in our own remote places, on our own evenings when the need in front of us seems to outrun the resources in our hands.

First: before anything else, God sees you. 
Not generically. 

Not as part of an undifferentiated crowd. 

He sees you specifically.

He sees the exhaustion, the hunger, the reason you walked around the shore instead of staying home, and something in Him moves toward you. 

If you came in this morning wondering whether God has noticed what you’re carrying, hear this passage as your answer. 

He has. 

Compassion is not an occasional mood of God. 

It is His nature.

Second: God’s provision, more often than not, runs through what we bring Him rather than what we find around us. 

Jesus could have fed that crowd without a single loaf from the disciples’ basket. 

He chose not to. 

He still chooses not to. 

The church that feeds the hungry, the neighbor who shows up with a meal after a funeral, the check written that the giver can barely afford, the hour spent listening to someone who is drowning in sorrow — these are still, today, five loaves and two fish handed up to Jesus with the whispered confession that it isn’t enough. 

And He still says: Bring it here.

I want to say clearly what this passage does not say. 

It does not say that if you just have enough faith, or give enough of your own resources, you can manufacture abundance by sheer effort or belief. 

The multiplication in this story belongs to Jesus, not to the disciples and not to the crowd. 

The five loaves did not stretch themselves. 

He took them, blessed them, broke them. 

The miracle is His to perform. 

What is asked of us is only the willingness to bring what we have and put it in His hands, empty-handed as that may feel.

Third: When Jesus provides, He intends to provide past the edge of the need, not right up to it. 

Twelve baskets left over. 
Enough, and more. 

If your picture of God has shrunk down to a God who might, if you’re careful and lucky, just barely provide what’s necessary — this story is an invitation to enlarge that picture. 

The God who fed five thousand men, besides women and children, out of a boy’s lunch, is not a God working with a tight budget. 

This is a God of abundance. 

And God of extravagant grace.

He is a God of surplus, of leftover baskets, of “they all ate and were satisfied.”

Conclusion

I think often about what it must have been like for those disciples that evening, walking back through the dark with a basket of bread on each shoulder, bread that an hour before had not existed. 

I imagine they didn’t talk much. 

What do you say?

Here is what I want you to carry out with you today. 

Whatever griefs you brought in with you — and some of you carried a great deal through that door this morning — Jesus does not ask you to set them aside before He’ll notice the hungry places within you. 

He carries His own grief and your need at the same time, the way He always has, the way the cross itself would eventually prove. 

And whatever you think you don’t have enough of — time, strength, resources, faith, hope — bring it here to Him anyway. 

Not because it’s enough. 

It probably isn’t. 

Bring it because He is the one who takes, and blesses, and breaks, and gives, and somehow, inexplicably, there are always baskets left over.

What you bring Him will, in reality, never be enough. 

And is doesn’t need to be. 

Because HE is enough.