When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”
Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”
John 6:5-8
Feeding the five thousand is such a wild story. That’s a lot of hungry people, and hungry people can get irritable and even dangerous. All the gospels have an account of this story and in each of them you can feel the nerves and tension among the disciples. They had a big problem, a very big problem, and all of their ideas and solutions were not big enough. Apparently, they just weren’t thinking small enough. As it turns out, Jesus had all He needed in the open hands and open heart of a small boy and his small lunch.
The ministry of Jesus was full of miraculous events. Marvelous signs and wonders demonstrating a breathtaking collision of heaven and earth. Jesus called it the Kingdom. If you are anything like me, I find it interesting which events we put in the “miracle category” and which ones we exclude. For example, most of us would throw Jesus feeding the five thousand in the box right away, but what about the woman at the well? In this story there is no grand event, there is no physical evidence, there is no spectacle, but this woman was completely transformed, from the inside. Everything that had once been touched by shame and regret and guilt was now touched by hope and grace and love. Sounds like a miracle to me.
The blind will see / The sick will stand / Sing hallelujah with confidence / Let healing come / Let mercy in / Sing hallelujah and live again
As we live and breathe today, let us not be so stunned by the large problem that we miss the small step of faith. If we are too caught up in searching for the grand spectacle, we just might miss a conversation with the King Himself.
The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
John 4:25-26