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| Want A Miracle?- Part II |
| Written by Pastor Fausel | |
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Grace, Mercy and Peace to you … Over the last many Sundays our Gospel accounts from St. Mark have been showing us a number of miracles that Jesus performed while in the region of Galilee. A couple of weeks ago, we saw Him calming the sea in the midst of a of a storm … we saw Him healing a Woman with a hemorrhage… the raising of Jairus’ daughter from the sleep of death, and this Sunday, the pinnacle miracle of Jesus’ Galilean ministry … the feeding of the 5000. This miracle of feeding the 5000 was so significant … that it was recorded almost to the letter in all four Gospel’s: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s. And even today … this miracle is much discussed and pointed to in Christian thought and literature. And that’s where we get into some difficulty today as confessional Christians. That is, Christians who hold up the Word of God as their source of direction for worship and for life. There are not a few “Christians” today who look at the miracles of Scripture … and seem to need to have a logical, rational explanation for all of them. In other words, they don’t doubt the intent of Scripture to present Jesus as those who saw Him experienced Him … but they would insist that today some allowances have to be made for the fact that these people lived in a time of scientific ignorance. For instance, if people of Jesus’ day were to see a car moving on its own without a horse or an ox pulling it … they would honestly call it a miracle. We’d call it an internal combustion engine. And so many of the miracles in Scripture as we know them, in other Christian circles, are said to have more logical explanations than divine intervention. We don’t need to spend a lot of time on this, but for instance, this miracle of feeding the 5000 is understood by some to be a matter of Jesus pointing to a small boy who was willing to share his lunch … and so all the rest of the people there were moved to do the same. And as a result, there was plenty of food to go around when they all shared. The miracle event becomes simply a moral object lesson on the unselfishly sharing of the gifts God for the common good. But then Spotlight is on what, or whom? It’s on my favorite person … me! It’s ultimately about what I do. Maybe the opposite side of that coin comes from the Christian writer of the 1940’s, C.S. Lewis. Lewis looked at this miracle and others in Scripture … and saw God’s hand definitely at work. Lewis pointed to the fact that many of the nature miracles in Scripture reflect how God’s fingerprints are in all the things that go on around us. For instance, consider the miracle of Jesus turning water to wine. In nature, given a growing season of time … that’s exactly what happens. There are God-designed natural processes where water is converted into grapes by the grape vine … grapes into grape juice … by people, and grape juice to wine by fermentation. But when the Creator of those natural processes is present, the whole thing can, and did, happen instantaneously, at His Word. We also see in Scripture that miracles that are recorded in other ancient literature simply don’t happen. People are not turned into trees, for instance … or trees into some other form of life … Just as Jesus refuses to turn a rock into loaf bread. So, Lewis says is true in the feeding of the 5000. Put two fish in a lake … and given the natural processes that God has ordained and enough time… and voila (wa-la), you have enough fish to feed 5000 people, or more… Or, you plant a single grain of wheat, give the natural processes that God has ordained enough time, and you get 10,000 grains from that single one. Plant those again, and you have plenty bread to feed 5000 people. And so … in the presence of God the creator …the multiplication of the gifts of the earth can happen instantaneously … which is the miracle we see as the result. And all this has a lot to do with what we are to take away, today, as we relate this miracle event to our own lives. Let’s look at it again … Jesus had been teaching, but the day had nearly expired and the people by this time were hungry… The Disciples come to Jesus with that concern … as if Jesus hadn’t already known it. And the disciples’ immediate and pragmatic answer to the situation was for Jesus to send the people away so that each of them could get food for themselves elsewhere, as they were in a remote place… And in reply, Jesus makes this difficult to understand statement … “YOU DO IT.”… “You give them something to eat.” It was an order, by the way, “You give them something to eat …” It wasn’t a question, “Why don’t you?” … but an imperative: “You DO IT!” And so, the Disciples explain to Jesus that if that’s what He really wants them to do, then it would take a small fortune to just to buy bread for this crowd … and reading between the lines, they imply that that much spent for that purpose was not fiscally responsible, “Are we to go and spend that much on bread …?” they say. We know from our reading what happens next … without any discussion, Jesus sets about the feeding of the 5000 men, not counting the women and children, with two fish and five small loaves of bread… So, what are we to learn from Jesus’ directive “You do it!” in the face of this human need. One line of thinking goes something like this … the disciples could have done it… they could have fed the 5000 themselves … if they’d had enough faith. And so, the logical conclusion drawn from that is that … you too can do miracles, if you have enough faith. And then, this argument continues, that all things, perhaps all miracles this side of heaven, are possible for those who have enough faith … even to the extent of telling a mountain to go and uproot itself and be put in the midst of the sea. What IS the truth in all this? Well, let’s see if we can’t unravel this knot. Why did Jesus tell His disciple to give the people something to eat? Did He truly expect them to make food come out of nowhere? Remember at this point, no one, except Jesus, knew about the two fish and the five loaves. They hadn’t taken inventory, yet. How did the Disciples respond to Jesus’ directive? They speak of what they know… how much money a meal would cost times the number of people present … or a cost of 8 months wages, or 200 day’s pay. A lot of money … You can almost hear their thoughts: “We don’t have that much money, and even if we did, would it be prudent expenditure, given the circumstances …to go out and buy that much food? Our original solution of sending them away would be much better!” And that gets us really to the heart of the issue. Who really “gives us this day our daily Bread?” You see … any analysis of this miracle that puts the spotlight on the disciples, or the people, or the small boy, or the fish and the loaves … misses the mark. Miracles are all about Jesus. Providing for our daily spiritual and physical nourishment is all about Jesus. Living our lives in daily faithfulness to God, is all about Jesus. The point of Jesus’ directive to the Disciples was that without Him, the solution to this need was hopeless. Just as .. calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee was beyond them, raising Jairus’ daughter was beyond them, and feeding the 5000 was beyond them … even in faith. Jesus was showing them, and by extension us, through the Scripture, that our sufficiency, our being full, is found only in Jesus. Honestly, humanly speaking, who would have gotten the glory if the disciples, on their own, had somehow, faithfully conjured up enough manna to feed the hungry host? It would not have been Jesus. What would it have said about God if Jesus would have announced … “Hey friends, I know that you’re all hungry. Sorry for keeping you for so long … now … go and feed yourselves!” That’s not about Jesus. The problem this miracle exposes … is our human pride, our hubris. We don’t want to admit that our daily bread is a gift of God. We’d rather believe that it’s something we’ve earned solely by the sweat of our brow. Or something that if WE had enough faith, we could make appear at our bidding. Or maybe conversely, I could make those things go away that always seem to get in the way … if I had enough faith. When the truth is … faith is not about me re-ordering the universe … it’s all about me trusting Jesus … who has promised to provide my daily bread … all my needs … physically and well as spiritually. How many times have we looked in our larder and echoed our complaint in the face of Jesus’ call to faithfulness and said, “All I’ve got is five loaves and two fish, but what are they against so many?” Jesus was telling the disciples to feed the multitude in order to test the attitudes of their hearts. Where was their faith? … in Jesus to provide? Or in themselves, that they could be ingenious enough to solve the problem on their own? The facts are pain … they sought human means to solve the problem, send the people away, or go buy food. God was not a part of either solution. But, it’s easy for us to cast stones. Perhaps we should get the pine tree out of our own eye before we try to remove the speck in theirs. You see, they had not yet fully appreciated who Jesus was. The miracles Jesus was performing at this time were to show the Disciples not what wondrous feats He could perform … but to show them, when He said something … when He spoke especially about the love of God … that His words were coming from none other than God Himself. It wasn’t about doing … it was all about being. Jesus being God in the flesh. And as God, His Words having the Power to call the earth, the sea, and all their natural processes into being … as demonstrated to the disciples by all those things obeying Him. You see, we’re supposed to know all that already! They, the disciples, at the 6th chapter of Mark, were still in the twilight before dawn; they were still learning about who Jesus was. And yet, we still struggle with our humanness, our pride, our need to be self-sufficient … just as they. Their “me” was no less of a god than ours. And even though Jesus had taught them to pray, “give us this day our daily bread” … that theory of God’s sufficient supply was often hard to put into daily trust and practice. And that’s why in this season of Pentecost … the focus is always on Jesus … and the application is always on what He is doing by the power of His Spirit in us. We call it our faith, but He gave “our faith” to us as a gift … and it is still He who grows it in our hearts by the power of His Spirit through His means of Grace. And as a result, miracles, events that are scientifically unexplainable, events that defy the odds of probably … still happen. And such events, seen through the eyes of faith … see a revelation of God’s love. But such events seen with an unbelieving heart see nothing. Miracles will not convert. Only God’s Spirit can. And so for that gift of faith in our hearts and all that means to us, now and for eternity, we give Him our praise, each and every day. In Him. Amen. |