Matthew 14:13-21
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
August 2, 2026
The feeding of the 5,000 is the only pre-Easter miracle recorded in all four of the Gospels. Clearly then it was a significant event!
But it’s worth noting that, at the start of that momentous day, Jesus wasn’t planning to perform any miracles at all. For, according to Matthew, He’d just learned that John the Baptist, His cousin who’d prepared the way before Him, had recently been executed; and He felt the need to take a retreat in order to have some prayerful solitude with God His Father to process His grief and to ready Himself to soon suffer the same fate.
Matthew starts this section of his Gospel with these words: “Now when Jesus heard this” – that is, that John had been executed – “He withdrew from there” – that is, from the well-populated areas where He’d been preaching – “to a deserted place by Himself” – that is, to a remote wilderness area (albeit with the twelve disciples nearby). Jesus was seeking some extended, uninterrupted, one-on-One conversation with God the Father. I’d guess He had His heart set on it.
A crowd of needy people, however, guessed where He’d go to find solitude, and arrived there ahead of Him to catch Him as soon as He stepped off the boat. They sought to gain first dibs on the blessings He’d been so generously bestowing. Their eager insistence on His helping them did not annoy Jesus, but touched His heart and filled Him with “compassion”, Matthew says. Mark’s Gospel notes those lost souls reminded Him of sheep without a shepherd. Therefore, despite His own neediness at that moment, Jesus prioritized ministering to them by word and deed, and put His prior plans on hold. He put off what He was yearning for in order to put Himself out to serve people. He didn’t view their interruption of His itinerary as an interference with His mission, but as a chance to fulfill it by taking care of them at a crucial moment of opportunity.
While the text doesn’t explicitly refer to it, I’d bet that Jesus’ wise perspective on life helped Him sacrifice, for a while, His precious time alone with His heavenly Father. He knew that a delay doesn’t always mean a denial and that putting aside something vital for a moment doesn’t mean putting it aside forever. And His wisdom was clearly vindicated. For Matthew tells us that, right after all those hungry people had eaten their fill, Jesus put the twelve on a boat, sent them on ahead across the Sea of Galilee, and stayed behind to dismiss the crowd – upon whose leaving He immediately “went up the mountain by Himself to pray” and so fulfilled His original intention.
But before He enjoyed that time alone with the Father, Jesus gave His time to take care of the desperate. He brought them the good news of God’s grace and showed its reality by healing their sick. People got so caught up in His wonderful words and powerful works that everybody lost track of time until the fading daylight made it difficult to see Jesus from the back rows of the crowd and the missing of dinner made it hard to hear Him over the growls of many empty stomachs. So now it was the disciples’ turn to interrupt Jesus; and they made the practical, sensible suggestion that He send everyone off to buy themselves dinner at the stores before they closed.
Jesus surprised the twelve by rejecting their proposal, turning the table on them and telling them to provide everyone dinner right there right then: an impossibility confirmed by their being unable to come up with more than a few loaves and fishes. But Jesus wasn’t joking, and He instructed the twelve to invite everyone to draw near. As the people closed in around Him, He ordered them to sit down on the grass. Then He took the snack the disciples had handed Him, broke it into parts, gave each of the twelve a part, and sent them out into the crowd to pass on the food. Somehow, some way, everyone ate their fill; and each disciple returned to Jesus with more bread than they started with!
By this point in their discipleship, the twelve had witnessed Jesus enable a man lame from birth to walk, liberate a demon-possessed man from his oppression, and bring a 12-year-old girl back from the dead; but on that day, they may have no more been looking for a miracle than Jesus had been at its start. They probably had eyes only for their long-desired retreat to begin!
By this point also, they’d also experienced Jesus empowering them to do what they never could on their own. Shortly before, He’d sent them out with His “authority” to proclaim the good news, cure the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. But on that day – perhaps because they were too tired to believe it had happened, or perhaps because they were too eager to get to their retreat – they were blind to possibilities before them. I think it didn’t occur to them until after the fact that Jesus was wanting to collaborate with them to work miracles of grace.
Likely on that day the twelve had only begun to see that, while they could do nothing without Jesus, He would do almost nothing without them; that He who could turn stones into loaves of bread would prefer to rely on a next-to-nothing snack from them; that He’d like to make something supernatural happen by partnering with those whose natural capabilities are no match for the task. Yet, while the twelve did not add much to the process of producing a miracle, they put into its coming about all they had – and that modest contribution became the pinch of yeast that raised the whole loaf! And while the twelve only did what anyone could do (invite folks to draw near and pass out food scraps), they did all they could – and that was sufficient to reveal what Jesus can do with a little help from His friends. Jesus accomplishes the impossible by means of whatever is possible for His friends to contribute. They just do their best, and He does the rest.
And, my, what He did that day! He multiplied “too little” and turned into “more than enough”.
What lessons then should we take from that day to encourage us to faithfully put in our modest effort and to look to Jesus to marvelously multiply its impact?
First, allow God to interrupt and disrupt our plans! Second, give Jesus all we’ve got even if it’s not a lot! Third, have faith He can do big things with small contributions! Fourth and most importantly, keep inviting others to come close to Him!
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