Jesus And The Crowds

We are working our way through the life and ministry of Jesus, as told in the Gospel of Luke. We’re still very early in his ministry. And in today’s text a problem starts to emerge that will come to be a difficulty for Jesus on many days. It’s the problem of too many people wanting to come and listen to him. Too many people wanted to meet Jesus! His problem of the day was crowd control. On that day he solved it pretty neatly, but for us, this morning, I want us to think about crowds, about reaching large numbers of people.

To start us out, will you find our text in your bulletin? We’ll read it together, but let me just say that when you read the lake of Gennesaret, that means the Sea of Galilee, different groups called it different names. Will you read it with me?

“Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.”

So what did he do to solve this problem of too many people? He got into a nearby fishing boat and had them push him out into the water a bit. That way people wouldn’t be clamoring and pushing each other to touch him. They all just sat down on the lakeshore to listen. You may have noticed how well sounds carry over the water, especially when there aren’t any water skiers nearby. They could all hear. And so he taught them the word of God from a boat in the edge of the Sea of Galilee.

There was this strange thing about Jesus. He attracted huge crowds. The Bible mentions the problem many times. There was the day that Kathy preached about 2 weeks ago when a paralyzed man needed to get to Jesus for healing, but there was too much of a crowd for him to get through, so his friends carried him on his stretched up on the roof of the house Jesus was in, took out some of the roof tiles and let him down through the roof to lay at Jesus’ feet.

There was the day when his mother and brothers wanted to see him and even they couldn’t get through the crowd. And he must have had his cell phone turned off, because they had to send a message in through the crowd.

There was the day that he went into a deserted place to be alone with his disciples but this huge crowd followed him and just stayed there listening to him until it became a danger that they would run out of food and start to faint. And they should have planned ahead, but here they were. So he fed them miraculously, 5,000 men, plus many women and children!

In Jericho, there was a tax collector named, Zachaeus, who wanted to see Jesus, but he was too short to see him over the crowd, so what did he do? Who can tell me? He climbed up in a tree to see Jesus.

Sometimes it got dangerous as the crowds started to trample on each other.

Jesus had this problem of attracting too many people! And it was a problem. More than once the disciples told him, “Send the people away.

Maybe we are somewhat like the disciples. To have extra people around means extra work. You get it set in your mind that I’ll do such and such for God, so much, what feels comfortable to me, and then more people come than fit neatly into your plans and it gets much more complicated. But if we want to deal with many other peoples’ needs, that just doesn’t fit into a neat hour once a week on Sunday morning. It takes a lot of work.

If you start attracting crowds, you don’t know who will show up. You lose control of who is there. For Jesus, the crowds started to include legalists who liked to argue about their pet doctrines. Don’t let people like that come into our church!

The crowds brought in tough political questions, what about that rotten king we have, Herod? What about paying taxes to his boss, the Romans? Don’t let people like that in our church!

The crowds had some pretty disreputable people mixed in, people you don’t want around your kids. There were political revolutionaries, crooked tax collectors, prostitutes, people with very unpleasant diseases, especially leprosy. There were very poor people, people who just didn’t dress nice and probably didn’t have polished manners. Don’t let people like that in our church!