“Jesus’ Theology of Abundance”
Matthew 14:13-21
This is a remarkable passage of Scripture, so remarkable that it is the only miracle story that is found in all four Gospels.
The feeding of the 5,000 (which was probably closer to 15-20,000 because they only counted the men) takes place immediately after Jesus and the disciples hear the devastating news of the brutal murder of their dear friend John the Baptist.
Understandably, Jesus and the disciples tried to get away from the crowds for a while.
They were grief-stricken.
It turns out that they couldn’t get away.
And even in His grief, Jesus has compassion on the multitudes that followed Him and spent the day healing the sick.
As it got late in the day, the disciples start getting worried, “This is a remote place,” they tell Jesus, “Send the crowds away so that they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”
But Jesus says, “You feed them.”
And the disciples must have looked absolutely flabbergasted.
They have nothing.
No food.
No reserves.
They stare out at the hungry mass of people and it’s starting to look more and more like a hungry mob!
And you know, it would have been hard for this mass of people to go into the villages and buy food for themselves anyway.
For one thing, most of these people were poor, sick, and homeless.
Homelessness and extreme poverty were at crisis levels in Jesus’ day.
The movement of wealth out of the poor regions and into the wealthy ones had decimated the rural areas where Jesus did most of His ministry.
Jesus was preaching, teaching, healing, feeding, and leading a host of very poor and marginalized folks.
This is something that is easy to forget as we read the Scriptures.
Most of the people who came to Christ were in absolutely desperate circumstances.
And in today’s passage the disciples felt desperate as well, “We have nothing—only five loaves and two fish,” they tell Jesus.
Jesus responds by saying, basically, “Bring your nothing to me.”
He blesses the fish and bread and distributes the food to the masses.
We are told that “they all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up the twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.”
The disciples had been thinking out of a theology of scarcity which says, “We don’t have enough to go around.
We can’t feed all of these people with our meager resources.”
It’s somewhat similar to the comments we hear so often today, as if we who live in the richest country in the world are so poor that we can’t afford to care for the poorest people around us.
Unlike the disciples, Jesus has a theology of abundance: that is, share what you’ve got because ultimately, God provides everything anyway and we can trust Him.
Sharing is at the core of what Christianity is all about.
There is an abundance in our nation, but we need to come to it, not with an individualized approach of “How much do I have?” but rather with the communal dimension of “How do we all thrive together?”
Jesus’ message of joy, hope, peace, and love means that there is enough to go around when it is broken, blessed and shared.
Here is a challenging thought:
God knows no limitation.
After all, out of nothing God created the entire universe.
The Kingdom of God is about abundance, not scarcity.
My refrigerator doesn’t always have to be full for Jesus to take what I have and feed others.
Today’s story isn’t an invitation to be wasteful or to live beyond our limits.
Even after the experience of this miracle of abundance the disciples gather up and are good stewards of the leftovers.
A good question to explore, though, is why so many of us buy into the myth that there isn’t enough to go around.
I’m guilty of this.
I often live out of a vision of scarcity with my own bank account, time, and other resources.
But, with this story Jesus challenges me to re-imagine my life and live into a theology of God’s abundance.
In the kingdom of God, we don’t have to hoard—there is always enough supply to meet the demand.
The scarcity mindset is deeply embedded in our culture, and its messages impact every church in some way.
The myth of scarcity says that there is not enough food, water, shelter, space, money, time, and love—you name it—to go around so we often hold on to what we have.
It leads to hoarding so that if we need it in the future it will be there, without a thought about how these decisions affect others who need it today.
The Bible, on the other hand, is a story of abundance.
It dares us to try out generosity and risk.
But, at the same time, advertisers try and convince us that we need bigger and better things.
And so, the drive of consumerism is actually dependent on this myth of scarcity.
Marketers tell us we aren’t rich enough, beautiful enough, young enough, or smart enough; but buying something will help us.
As a result, the average American is living with a lot of debt.
The former senior officer of the Belgian Central Bank, Bernard Lietaer claims that greed and fear of scarcity do not exist in nature, not even in human nature.
Rather, we are programmed; intentionally built into a money system designed to keep us wanting and buying.
We have lived in this system for so long that we think of fear and scarcity as the normal and legitimate way to behave when in reality they are neither.
The feeding of the 5,000 is recorded in all four Gospels but there is another feeding miracle where Jesus feeds 4,000.
The feeding of the 4,000 is often referred to as the second feeding miracle.
After the second feeding miracle in Mark Chapter 8, the disciples are alone with Jesus and they start to get real anxious because they don’t have any bread to eat.
And then Jesus quizzes them.
“When I fed the five thousand with just five loaves, how many basketfuls were left over?”
They answer, “Twelve.”
“When I fed the four thousand with seven loaves, how many were left over?”
They answer, “Seven.”
Jesus follows up with the question that gets to the heart of it all: “Do you not yet understand?”
He is asking them, “What is the message of the leftover loaves?”
Stuck in their anxiety and focusing on what they don’t have, the disciples are unable to see the message that Jesus has performed right before their eyes—twice!
Are we any different?
The scarcity mindset is what keeps many churches from taking risks into the great unknowns, on a mission with Jesus.
The scarcity mindset keeps ministries under-resourced as people fear giving away the little bit of time and money they have.
It keeps us from seeing how God wants us to bless and share.
This is the main reason we will always have the poor among us.
It is not because it is God’s will, it is because of our theology of scarcity.
It is because of our fear.
It is because we just can’t seem to trust in the God of abundance enough, and so, like the farmer in the parable—we continue to build bigger barns for ourselves rather than share what God has provided for us.
Once upon a time, there was a terrible famine.
The people in one small village didn’t have enough to eat, and definitely not enough to store away for the winter.
People were afraid their families would go hungry, so they hid the small amounts of food they did have.
They even hid their food from their friends and neighbors.
One day, a wandering soldier came into the village.
He asked the different people he met about finding a place to eat and sleep for the night.
“There’s not a bite to eat in the whole county,” they told him.
“You better keep moving on.”
“Oh, I have everything I need,” he said.
“In fact, I would like to make some stone soup to share with all of you.”
He pulled a big black cooking pot from his wagon.
He filled it with water and built a fire under it.
Then he reached slowly into his knapsack and, while several villagers watched, he pulled a plain gray stone from a cloth bag and dropped it into the water.
By now, most of the villagers were surrounding the soldier and his cooking pot.
The soldier sniffed the stone soup and licked his lips.
“Ahh,” the soldier said aloud to himself, “I do like a tasty stone soup.
Of course, soup with cabbage is even better.”
Soon a villager ran from his house into the village square, holding a cabbage.
“I have this cabbage from my garden,” he said as he held it out for the soldier.
“Fantastic!” cried the soldier.
He cut up the cabbage and added it to the pot.
“You know, I once had stone soup with cabbage and a bit of beef, and it was delicious,” said the soldier.
The butcher said he thought he could find some beef scraps.
As he ran back to the shop, other villagers offered bits of vegetables from their own gardens—potatoes, onions, carrots, celery.
Soon, the big black pot was bubbling and steaming.
When the soup was ready, everyone in the village ate a bowl of soup, and it was delicious.
How many of you have heard The Story of Stone Soup?
The Red Bank Community Food Pantry is a lot like that story.
Many people contribute their time, energy, and financial resources and everyone who comes to the pantry in need of food gets more groceries than they can carry.
Really, it’s a miracle.
It’s a miracle that often feels like we are living within the passage we read for this morning.
If we pull together, contributing what we can, Jesus turns it into much and God’s will is done.
I wonder if the world hunger crisis could be solved if all the churches in the world pitched in.
And what about the homeless crisis in all our cities?
What if all of God’s Churches decided to focus, not on our differences but on the central undisputable face of Jesus’ message—that we are all called to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, look after the orphans and widows and provide shelter to the homeless?
And instead of just dreaming about it, let’s start it right here.
You know the story: A guy on the beach after a storm was rescuing star fish one by one.
A friend came up to him and said, “You can’t save them all.
Why are you out here?
You can’t make a big difference.”
But I’m changing the ending, if we all work together in the name and within the will of Christ—He will make the difference, He will provide the miracle—if we bring Jesus what we have, like the passage we read this morning—whatever it is—in Jesus’ hands—it is enough!
When Jesus took the five loaves and two fish, He blessed them, broke and gave them in a way that foreshadowed the Lord’s Supper.
The Body and Blood of Christ.
The salvation He offers, there is more than enough to go around.
…Move to Communion…
