Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick. Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. The Jewish Passover Festival was near.
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?”
Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.
When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.”
There were two things about this passage that stuck out to me: first, I am a Philip. Philip is a pragmatist here, and I think if you had interviewed him about why he said what he said (“It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”), he would have said, "Look, I was just being real!" My job is to be real. Every day I get up in the morning and go to my office and sit at my desk and look for potential problems, and then try to figure out ways to solve them. I figure out a cost/benefit analysis for everything I do. So I'm sorry to say that if Jesus had asked me that question, I probably would have responded the exact same way. The problem was that Philip didn't know who he was with. ("You didn't know who you were with! It's from The Godfather." Er, sorry.) Philip didn't understand how BIG his God was, and that God was getting ready to show that bigness. And the thing is, we still don't get it. We analyze and figure and reason, and we forget that God is bigger than all of those things. We forget that sometimes he chooses to uses our weakness to serve his purpose just in case we get the crazy idea that it was our own doing.
Andrew, on the other hand, had some small idea of what was happening. If it had been me, I'd have run right past that boy with the measly loaves and fish. I wouldn't have even considered it worth mentioning. He was unsure, he was questioning, but he at least had the wherewithal to bring it up. And then Jesus took his tiny little mustard seed amount of faith and used it to feed a small town's worth of folks. It's actually a pretty clever little analogy that the scriptures have laid out for us... almost like the teensy portion of bread and fish is reminiscent of Andrew's faith. And with God, he takes a little and makes it a lot. We just have to take the first step, even if we sound stupid or what we're saying seems impossible.
Second, the last verse really hit home with me because it reminds me how fickle we humans are. Here they are, a year before literally calling for Jesus' head, and they're saying that surely this is the Prophet who has come into the world. It's amazing, actually, how quickly they forget. How quickly we forget. I see it all the time with youth group kids who go to Challenge Youth Conference or camp or whatever, and they say, "Surely this is Jesus who has come into the world." For that instant, they see him for who he is. And then they go back to school, to life, whatever, and they forget. But the thing is, it's not just fifteen-year-olds who do that. So do the rest of us, probably even more often than they.
God forbid that we ever forget what the Lord has done for us.
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