Abundance

Today I reflect on the significance of food in our gatherings, drawing from the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. We explore how sharing meals fosters community and celebrates God’s presence. Despite our feelings of inadequacy, Jesus shows that even small contributions can lead to extraordinary outcomes. Through the lens of divine grace, we see that God’s love is limitless, inviting us to offer our broken pieces to Him. This message encourages us to find nourishment and identity in our relationship with God, embracing His abundant love and grace.

00:00:00  So whenever we want to gather together to celebrate something, whether that’s a wedding or a birthday or really any other kind of gathering, what is one of the things that you would naturally expect would be part of that gathering food? Yes, of course, you need to think of the food to provide for the people. And it’s an interesting kind of quirk of human culture that you could imagine a scenario where eating is something that we simply do in private because mouths open and gaping and all the sounds are kind of made, particularly when you’re enjoying food. You can imagine a scenario where that’s something that’s, oh, that’s a bit disgusting, a bit gross. We’ll just do that in private and do other things when we gather together. And yet right across human experience and it seems right through history, when we’ve gathered together, we’ve always eaten together and probably drank together and had music and other experiences as well. Food is one of those things that really joins us, connects us, allows us to experience the life of God.

00:01:15  And so it’s no small wonder that as Jesus gathers this community, well, I mean, they’ve already gathered together. Anyway, we saw last week in the gospel that Jesus and his disciples were trying to get away, trying to find a lonely place to go to. And they say when they get there, there’s this massive crowd of people who are waiting for him, and there is that sense of they’ve come. They’ve travelled unexpectedly to this place on the side of the lake. And so as Jesus turns the corner of the cove and sees them all there, the first thing he does is to set about to teach them at some length. But as the day wears on his second concern, he’s not their spiritual needs as significant and important as that is, but also the material needs that they have a hunger not just for the Word of God, but for food that endures. And so he asked this question, and you note that we’re not in Mark’s Gospel, so we don’t have the frailty of the disciples anymore.

00:02:16  Jesus is now the one who is completely in control of this whole scenario. John tells us he knew what he was about to do. He knew what was going to unfold. He’s just simply inviting the disciples to be part of this. So they think that they’re kind of significant as well. Do we have any food? What are we going to do? Well, there’s this one small boy who has five loaves and two fish. But, you know, even if we had 200 denarii and of course, we don’t have 200 denarii would be about $50,000 today. Even if he had 50 grand, we would only be able to buy a small piece of food for this crowd. It’s not just the 5000 men, but probably 20,000 people in total. So it’s a lot of people to feed and to provide for. So of course, you’re not going to have enough money to give them all something to eat. Andrew was able to identify that there is this community. There is this young boy who has brought some food.

00:03:15  But for Jesus, that is enough. He doesn’t need abundant resources. You know, so often we think, oh, if only we had more staff, if only we were able to kind of raise enough money to do this or that, then all of our problems would be solved. But the way of grace, the way of life in God, is that even the small stuff matters. Whatever little thing that we can do in honour of God, in whatever way that we can offer ourselves to God, that will be enough. And in the other gospels, Jesus gets the disciples to start handing the bread out. But here Jesus does it personally because he wants to be intimately involved in every single one of our lives. And so it is this case of him taking the bread and giving it to each person in turn, that he’s wanting every single one of us to experience being fed and nourished directly by him. He’s longing for that. He’s longing to take care of every single one of our needs.

00:04:18  He’s longing for us to find our life in our goodness, in God, not to experience any kind of deprivation. Because so often we kind of imagine that the ways of the world are the ways of God, but there’s only so many resources to go around. And so we kind of imagine there’s only so much grace, only so much of God’s love. And we kind of imagine that if we’ve broken into that in some way, or if we’ve done terrible things in the past that prevent God from loving us, then well, there’s a limit to how much God can love. But no, the love of God is abundant. The love and grace and mercy and peace and truth and goodness of God continue to flow out where we have human limitations in the ways of the spirit and the ways of God, there are no limits that he’s always inviting us into this place of freedom, into this place of celebration, of life, of goodness. So no matter how fragmented we feel we are today, no matter how many times we’ve broken it or destroyed it or stuffed it up, no matter how many times we’ve got it wrong, Jesus will invite us to gather those collections, 

00:05:31 gather those fragments together, gather all those different broken bits of our lives, and bring them all together to be part of this celebration. Because nothing is wasted in the way of God. Nothing is insignificant, too small to be not worthy of his love. So let’s allow the Lord to feed us and nourish us today, and to invite us into that celebration when we can find our identity in our truth, in God.