Jesus and the Giant Burrito
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Date: 2022-06-12
Audience: Grass Valley Corps ONLINE
Title: Jesus and the Giant Burrito
Text: Matthew 14:13-21
Proposition: Jesus cares
Purpose: We need to do the same
Grace and peace
Captain Roger, Salvation Army Grass Valley, online worship in study – we’re here each week for those of you who can’t or won’t join us in person. Hey, I get it – it’s harder to fast forward me in person!
Our in-person folks have a lot of fun and run down a lot of different rabbit-holes while we’re checking out our passage each week, so I like to remind you that if you can be with us Sundays at 11 am, swing on by and we’d love to have you join the party!
Today, I want to tell you about my friend Chris. He died a couple of weeks back, which sucks.
Chris and I knew each other for about 15 years. We shared an unusual sense of humor, a love for unusual movies, no matter how bad they were, and a deep and abiding dislike of Christmas. We also shared a love of Jesus and the way that God could work through any circumstances, even the weird ones.
One year, Chris decided to start a city-wide young adult ministry group in San Francisco. We were both working at The Salvation Army’s divisional headquarters there at the time and this seemed like a wonderful way to try to bring together some of the young people to hang out.
He’d pitched the idea to a few different people and departments, and everyone thought it was a great idea, but didn’t want to take it on. Chris didn’t think he was ready to lead a group like that and he ended up asking me to help.
I jumped at the chance and got permission from my boss at DHQ to meet there. That wasn’t hard – my boss was also a friend and he was Chris’ dad. I was exactly between the two in age, so often found myself in this weird friend zone where I was also a bridge between the two.
Anyway.
We started meeting with a mixed group of people who ranged in age from about 18 to 30 and we’d get anywhere from eight to twelve or so at each meeting. We’d hang out, do some activities, maybe sing a couple of songs together – Chris was an amazing and eclectic musician – and I’d teach a Bible devotional and we’d chat.
There’s a lot I want to say here, but that’s enough for you to understand the setting.
We got into this thing where people started to open up and ask those questions which we all have, but most people are afraid to ask in church. You know, all the uncertainties and the things that you read in the Bible and wonder, “What in all get out is going on there?” but you don’t really want to bring it up because – especially as a new adult – you worry that people will make fun of your lack of understanding or treat you like a pariah for raising questions when the church often treats doubts as if they are somehow evil.
Just as a side note here: I believe that the point of our faith group gatherings, both in person and online, is to talk about exactly that kind of thing. The Bible isn’t really a guidebook for life or anything like that. It can and should be a way to help understand how we relate to God and each other, but it can’t be that if we don’t wrestle through what it means to us individually and collectively in the modern world we live in.
The Bible is important because it is the BEGINNING of that conversation, not because it’s the final word on it.
Okay, end side bar, but feel free to ask me more about that if you are interested why I think that means that the Bible is MORE important to how I live in the world every day and not less.
Anyway, our meetings always seemed to end up as this kind of talk session where I played Bible Answer Man to a host of questions about any topic. Then there was this one night where we got to talking about what it meant that God could do anything and whether that meant that there was anything God couldn’t do.
That’s when Chris said, “Yeah, but Roger, if God can do anything, can he make a burrito too big for him to eat?”
Wow, great question, huh?
Sit with that for a moment while we turn to the scripture passage we’re going to look at today.
We’ve been working through the book of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, the collection of writings that Christians think are supposed to be an important part of our lives and belief systems. Or at least we say we do. It doesn’t seem to always work out that way in practice. But that’s probably a topic for another time.
Matthew was one of the key followers of Jesus when he was walking the earth and he wrote this biography as one way to let people know about the Jesus that he knew. Matthew believed Jesus was the great savior that God had been promising would come to set his people free. Matthew also believed that Jesus was more than that – that he was not just FROM God, but that he WAS God. And that he’d proved that in dozens of diverse ways. Everything Matthew has written down in his book is there to show that Jesus is who and what Matthew believed him to be so that we might come to think about him the same way. It is the evidence and witness accounts woven together to bring us to a conclusion.
At this point in the story, Jesus had been involved in public ministry for about two years, going from place to place, teaching, healing the sick and injured and even the dead.
But he had managed to step on some toes along the way. You know how it is. Some people will never be happy, no matter what you do, unless what you do is exactly what they want you to and nothing else.
Jesus was finding a lot of that.
There were thousands who came to hear him speak. Hundreds who followed him.
And there were those who were jealous.
And those who didn’t understand and so wanted him to stop.
And those who realized that the things Jesus was saying could change EVERYTHING about the way they had always done things, and they didn’t like that. They wanted to keep doing what they’d always done, no more, no changes, no exceptions.
Jesus found ways to keep going, to keep teaching, to keep healing, to keep bringing people to start the journey which would bring them closer to God.
Then John the Baptist, who had been imprisoned for most of those two years, was executed by Herod Antipas, the King of Israel and John’s disciples came to let Jesus know that the man who had heralded Jesus as the savior of the world was dead.
13 When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick. [1]
We don’t know much about the relationship between Jesus and John. What we know comes from the things their disciples said about them and from the stories we are told about their births, which were God-ordained to call attention to these men’s unique circumstances.
They were cousins, but they don’t seem to have lived near one another. They would have seen each other at family gatherings, like when Passover was celebrated together in Jerusalem. There are stories outside of the Bible which suggest they may have spent time together learning from the same teachers, but these are only stories and don’t have enough detail or attribution for us to know what is or isn’t true.
We know that John was utterly convinced that Jesus was the Messiah right from the beginning. He pointed Jesus out to his followers, telling them:
“Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.”[2]
This certainly suggests that they weren’t close family. I love that John, whose mission was to reveal the Messiah, was surprised to find out who he was.
After Jesus was baptized by John, we are told that:
32 Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. 33 And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ 34 I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.” x [3]
Then the next day he saw Jesus going by and he told two of his disciples, “Hey, that’s the Lamb of God,” which caught their attention, and they went to check him out. One of those guys was so impressed he went to tell his brother. His name was Andrew, and that brother was Simon who Jesus would call Peter – the Rock – and both of them would give up everything to follow Jesus from then on.
We read a couple of weeks back that John, toward the end of his imprisonment, started to worry that Jesus wasn’t doing the things John had expected, so he sent a couple of his guys to ask, “You’re the guy, right?” and Jesus demonstrated how he was fulfilling all of the signs of the Messiah that God had promised. Signs that everyone else got to see as well, so everyone should have been on the same page, right? John seems to have got it.
But now John is dead, and Jesus just wants to get away for a bit to grieve.
I get that.
I think we all do, after the last three years.
About six months into the pandemic, I saw people beginning to fray around the edges because we all were dealing with grief. We were mourning the death of the world we knew and the death of family members and the death of friends, but we were doing it from lockdown and from isolation and from a strange in-between, neither fully here nor fully there, kind of place where we wanted to cry it out, but were afraid, rightly so, that there was more to come and we didn’t want to break down completely.
It was like we were stuck in an unending cycle through the stages of grief.
When Chris died last month, the grief I experienced and am still experiencing felt like a shadow getting in line with a dozen or more others, hoping that I’ll let it come in so that I can deal with the loss instead of just holding it back. There have been too many friends who have passed lately, and no time or space to mourn what the world has lost by their absence. Knowing that death isn’t the end, that there is another life we all enter after this one, can be a comfort, but allowing grief to come in and take hold for a brief while can be necessary and cleansing. The loss is real and must be accepted for us to truly remember the joy we had in someone’s presence.
Jesus just wanted to get away for a bit to grieve. But the crowds followed him. He could have rebuffed them or slipped away under the cover of night, but instead he looked at them and their needs and their uncertainty and he was moved with compassion for them.
Literally the Greek reads that his bowels moved for them.
That’s how they expressed emotions. Like they came from your gut and churned your stomach and inner being until you just can’t hold it in, and you need to do whatever it takes to address that feeling.
Jesus had taken a boat to sail away from the crowds, but they had followed him, chasing the boat by running around the lake, watching to see where it would put in, then rushing to meet him as he came ashore.
He looked at them and felt their needs and wants so acutely that his bowels moved. He couldn’t leave them behind, not right now. They needed him.
So, he spent the day with them, teaching, healing, reconciling, restoring them, because that’s what they needed.
15 As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”[4]
Hey, Jesus, send these folks to McDonald’s to grab a burger or something, because pretty soon it’ll be too late!
16 Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.” [5]
And I picture his inner circle looking around at the crowd and wondering if Jesus has finally slipped a gear. But disciples didn’t usually say stuff like that to their teachers, so instead they gave him a very careful answer.
17 “We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered. [6]
And, frankly, we aren’t even talking about anything like WE would think of as being a loaf of bread here. What they’re talking about are a handful of small pitas and a couple of sardines, probably dried, that one of them pulled from a backpack or a pocket or something. In the Fourth Gospel we’re told Andrew found a kid who had this along with him like some kind of a midday snack and bogarted it for the cause. “Hey, kid, what you got in that lunch box? Tuna sandwich? Can I have that?”
Their telling Jesus they had this was probably meant to show what a crazy idea this was he had that they could feed the crowd. They didn’t even have enough for one grown man! But Jesus is like, “A couple of fish and five of those little dinner rolls? Great! I love those!” and he says,
18 “Bring them here to me,” he said.[7]
I wonder if any of them thought that Jesus was about to eat the kid’s lunch?
19 And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people.[8]
Mark tells us that they had the people sit down in groups of hundreds and fifties while Jesus prays. We don’t know what he said in that prayer, but a traditional Jewish meal prayer was this:
“Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the world, who brings forth bread from the earth.”[9]
And then Jesus starts putting little fish sandwiches together and handing them to his crew with instructions to pass them on to the people. Which they do.
I bet it took awhile.
While the first group ate, the second got their food, then the next, and the one after that, then the one after that.
By the time everyone had finished their first sandwich, there were some who were asking, “Hey, is there any more of that?”
And there was.
And more after that.
In fact, we’re told that
20 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. 21 The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children. [10]
When you work the math out, this could have been ten to twelve thousand people or more. Maybe even twenty thousand.
And Jesus just made them all sandwiches.
Because his guts moved for them.
He felt their need and he met it.
Which is what a King is supposed to do for his people.
A leader is to provide for his people.
Blessed art thou, O LORD our God, king of the world, who brings forth bread.
God provides.
Jesus has told us that before, hasn’t he?
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?[11]
Trust in the providence of God and he will provide.
In the 70s there was a preacher, John Barclay, who said that the miracle here wasn’t what we’ve always thought. His idea was that the example of Jesus taking what little he had and sharing it with others was so powerful that everyone else took notice and searched through their own packs and pockets for food they could share. And the result was a lot of very full people and a potluck table full of leftovers.
I don’t buy that idea myself. All four gospels tell us about this incident, and every one of them treats it as a miracle that happened to the bread and fish in the hands of Jesus. Luke, at the very least, would have been all over a mass sharing incident, because that’s exactly the kind of thing he kept encouraging Jesus-followers to do.
Give of yourself, like Jesus did.
Share what you have with those who have less. Like Jesus did!
Luke loved that stuff. If that’s what had happened, he’d have been all over it. Instead, he tells it the same way as the others. Jesus broke the bread and the fish, people got fed.
This was another way they got all they needed from Jesus because he felt compassion towards them.
Jesus cares.
We need to do the same.
There you go.
When Chris asked me his question, he was trying to bring up something called the Omnipotence Paradox. That’s a fancy name for a dumb idea where saying that an all powerful God can’t do something logically impossible proves there is no God.
Like asking is God can make a square circle or a rock too heavy for God to lift.
Philosophers break two ways on these kinds of questions. Some say that because it is a logical absurdity the question itself is meaningless. Others say that absurd or not, God, being God, can do it – we just can’t comprehend it. So God squares the circle and our idea of geometry can’t flex to picture the result. Or he makes that rock too big to lift, but then lifts it. Which is also meaningless.
But a burrito too big for God to eat?
Yeah, he can do that.
Because that’s what happened in the story we just read, isn’t it?
Jesus made food to feed an army out of a lunchable.
Everyone ate all that they could, and there were leftovers.
Jesus was part of everyone, and Jesus is God, so I guess he made the food too big for God to eat. Logically ridiculous, but true nonetheless.
Time to look for that square circle and a rock larger than the universe.
Or maybe just time to remember Jesus cares.
Jesus cared enough to interrupt his own needs to see to the needs of the people.
What they needed mattered to him. He didn’t care who they were or where they were from or what they wanted from him or didn’t want – he didn’t ask them to sign up for anything first or to live up to some expectation or to pledge themselves to his service.
He just fed them. All of them. Until they had all they could and then some.
Life, and life abundant.
The same offer he has made to everyone.
Come, follow me.
Take your place in the Kingdom of God.
The best of everything is waiting for you.
God’s bowels are moving for you.
What are you going to do with that?
Here’s what I chose to do.
I chose to follow Jesus. To listen to him and to do all that I can to live out what he taught and showed us.
Even when it means setting aside the things I want to help others get the things they need.
My bowls move for them.
That’s certainly not something I expected, not in the beginning. It still surprises me sometimes.
So, let’s pray together, then let’s talk together and walk together and eat together and live together and work out what it means to follow God together. The way we were created to.
Amen?
[1] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Mt 14:13–14.
[2] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Jn 1:29–31.
[3] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Jn 1:32–34.
[4] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Mt 14:15.
[5] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Mt 14:16.
[6] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Mt 14:17.
[7] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Mt 14:18.
[8] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Mt 14:19.
[9] David Turner and Darrell L. Bock, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol 11: Matthew and Mark (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005), 202.
[10] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Mt 14:20–21.
[11] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Mt 6:25–26.