SPEAKER_00 0:04

The feeding of the 5,000 is the only miracle recounted in all four Gospels. Why is this particular miracle so significant in the eyes of the evangelists? And what can we learn about following Jesus the Good Shepherd? Reverend Wei E preaches the word.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Church, this morning we are looking at the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5,000, which I'm sure most of you, if not all, would have heard of this story at least five to ten times in your life, right? It's a common story that we tell in church. Besides the resurrection of Jesus, this is the only miracle that is recounted in all four Gospels. It also encapsulates the character and identity of Jesus. It tells us who he really is and what he is doing with us. So today we are looking at Mark's account, right? And uh from the very first sermon on the Gospel of Mark, uh, we have noted that Mark is very fast-paced. He kind of just wants to chong through uh most of the stories, right? Uh into the passion. Um and yet, his account of this miracle is the longest of the four. Of the four different gospels, right? Uh it's slightly longer than John uh John the uh the believed uh disciple of Jesus. Uh but his account is the longest. And Mark seems to want to dwell in this story because it gives a particular insight into who Jesus is. And Mark does this interesting thing where he sharpens this insight by doing uh a sandwiching of two stories, one in the middle of the other, which is quite quite a common technique that you find in the Gospel of Mark. So if you go to the next slide, we'll see actually that this whole um or rather story A, the first story starts actually from verse 7. Right? I'll not go into it, but from verse 7 to 13, we read that Jesus is sending out his disciples two by two, go out into the towns, into the villages, and and and uh he gave them authority to cast out demons and to heal the sick, to preach the gospel. They were essentially sent out on a mission trip by Jesus to carry out Jesus' ministry. Yeah, so so there was what Jesus was doing with his disciples, and then out of nowhere, Mark starts to talk about King Herod. And it seems like it's completely irrelevant at this point, but as we'll soon find out, it is highly relevant to the the eventual feeding of the 5,000. And I'll just kind of quickly look at the story in the middle. Uh it spans from verse 14 to 29, but uh allow me to just read from verse 17. So Mark 6, verse 17, for it was Herod who had sent and seized John and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother's his brother, Philip's wife, because he had married her. For John, John the Baptist had been saying to Herod, It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. And Herodias had a grudge against him and wanted to put him to death. But he could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he kept him safe. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he heard him gladly. Verse 21 continues, but an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his nobles and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee. And when Herodias's daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests. And the king said to the girl, Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it to you. And he vowed to her, Whatever you ask me, I will give you up to half of my kingdom. And she went out and said to her mother, What should I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist. Um if you go to the next slide, uh, it just recounts what happens after that. You know, um, she went, she goes back to Herod, asks for John the Baptist's head. He's sad about it, but he behates John the Baptist anyway, and he serves his head on the platter. Um we don't know what kind of dance it was. We don't know why the king was so enthralled by her that he decided to just give uh up to half his kingdom to this uh girl, right? I cannot imagine a dance being that great, right? Um I'm thinking maybe Harold is really drunk, or the dance is uh uh much more exciting beyond a PG 13 uh 13 rating, right? Um but whatever it was, somehow he thought it was a good idea to make a vow to give him anything he wants. And so when she asked for the head of John the Baptist, Herod had no choice but to give in. And so here we have a story of the king of the Jews here throwing a lavish birthday banquet for himself with all the elites in attendance. And here he executes John the Baptist. And it is uh with this story, that sandwich in the middle, right, um, that that Mark kind of can go back to the story of Jesus and his disciples. And so we are to see that this story actually has some uh some interpretive key to whatever we are gonna read next, right? It helped us sharpen what Mark is really trying to say about Jesus. So in verse 30 to 32, uh just quickly read out for us, you know, the apostles returned and and told Jesus um all that they had uh done and taught, and he said to them, Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while. For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat, and they went in a boat to a desolate place by themselves. We return back to story A. And now the disciples have come back from their mission trip, they are reporting everything to Jesus, and Jesus says, Come, we will go to a quiet place and we will rest and have our meal. But at verse 33, we read that now many saw them going and recognized them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. When he went ashore, this is Jesus, he Jesus saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. This one statement here, he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without shepherd. It's the crux of what Mark is trying to convey about Jesus, about his identity, about his character. Right? Jesus had compassion on the crowd. Not simply because he was sympathetic to their plight or to the needs of the people, right? He saw them. And he said they were like sheep without a shepherd. Um, this motif of a sheep and uh a shepherd and his sheep, right, is actually very prominent in the Old Testament. Um I'll very, very quickly go through uh some some portions of the Old Testament just to look at how the the theme of the shepherd is being used. Uh in Genesis 48, verse 15, when Jake uh when Jacob blesses Joseph, right, he says that uh the God of Abraham, Isaac, and himself Jacob is the God who has been my shepherd all my life long uh to this day. Right? So God himself is um described as the shepherd of his people. And then we see in 1 Chronicles 11, uh verse 2, that when David was anointed to be king, his anointing was not uh just to be like a political ruler with with power and might, right? He was anointed and chosen to be a shepherd to God's people Israel, and then he shall be prince over his people Israel. Um and so shepherding is tied to kingship. To be a king of Israel, the king of the Jews, is to be a shepherd, right? And so um, you know, Israel was to have a shepherd king that will lead the people in the ways of God, the great shepherd. But of course, we know this, the history of Israel. Many subsequent leadership uh and and and kings and and uh leaders of the nation will fail as shepherds. So at one point, God indicts these shepherds and prophesied through Ezekiel against them. Um the read-out portions of Ezekiel 34 for us. In verse 2 of uh Ezekiel 34, uh God God says, Shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves, should not shepherds feed the sheep. So the sheep were scattered because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered. He was prophesying against these uh these shepherds who have failed their job. And in verse 11 onward, he begins to prophesy, for thus says the Lord God, um, behold, I myself, right? This is God saying, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. I'll feed them uh with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. And so now when we come back to our passage for today, when Jesus saw them and said they were like sheep without shepherd, right? What Mark was really trying to say in these two stories is that here on one hand we have King Herod, officially the king of the Jews, but failing his role as a shepherd to Israel. He's throwing lavish uh birthday parties for himself, he's inviting only the elites, the noble people, the leading men of Galilee, and he's just you know self-indulgent, self-serving. He failed his role as the shepherd. But on the cusp of this, uh, or rather, at the at the end at the end of a story of a failure comes the true shepherd, Jesus, who goes away and a huge crowd of people come after him. A crowd of people that Herod wouldn't even bother to look at. And Jesus saw them, had compassion, and knew that they were a sheep without shepherd. Right? This Jesus is now here as the true shepherd king. And he had compassion. It was something more than just sympathy. Right? Before having children, like I I guess I could say, oh I understand, you know, or I sympathize with how much hardship the young people go through. I when I was in youth ministry already, like people were slogging and always cram, cramming, and uh trying their very best to do well in their studies. And I could say, no, I understand, uh, it's it's tough, right? Um, but there was always an emotional gap, right? Um, a burden that uh that you don't really feel unless you are a parent yourself, or unless you're an educator yourself. Then suddenly the children's problem become your problem too. So Jesus was not just feeling some kind of sympathy for people who are in need, he felt their needs as his own problem. He felt it at a very personal level, as if it was his own children having to go through PSLE and O levels and A levels or whatnot, right? Jesus was moved with compassion because these were his very own people. And so seeing them without a shepherd, uncared for, scattered, lost, hungry, it moved him deeply on a personal level. And this is the point Mark is driving at. Jesus now is the true king of shepherd, the true shepherd of uh Israel, and he has come now to lead the people and to provide for the people. And as the the true shepherd in Mark 6, we see that he does two things, right? The first is uh very shortly we we see that he began to teach them many things, right? That's in verse 34b. Right, as shepherd, he was providing first for their uh spiritual needs, he was teaching them many things, and we are not told the contents of his teaching, but uh we we do we know at least that it was important enough that Mark noted it down, right? Jesus was tending to their spiritual needs. But after that, the second thing, the second thing that we that he did was really the bug of today's story, right? As uh our sister Jennifer has read for us, um that he was going to provide for their physical needs and to feed them. And this is the the the story of Jesus taking five loaves and two fish, five loaves and two fish, right, from the from the disciples um and multiplying it and feeding five thousand people. We see glimpses of the old testament here. Um the the the setting, the desolate place, it went out to a desolate place, uh a place that is uh deserted, right? Um and it reminds us of uh the desolate place and the provision of bread and fish uh in Moses' time, right? When God provided the bread, uh rather the manna and the quail to Israel in the wilderness. Um also harkens back to Elisha, who uh also had a miracle feeding, uh a bit smaller scale, right? He fed a hundred people with 20 loaves of barley bread and some fresh grains. And there's a point to all of this. Mark is trying to portray Jesus as the new and greater Moses, the one who actually provides the food, right? I mean, Moses did not really provide anything for the people, but now Jesus is like the new and greater Moses who himself provides for the people, and he's greater than Elisha, who was known as one of the greatest prophets, right? But Jesus is greater, whose miraculous provision far exceeds what Elisha did. And so the first thing we will see uh in Mark 6 for today, then is that in this miracle, uh miraculous feeding of the 5,000, we see Jesus for who he really is. He is the true shepherd king, completely unlike King Herod, who was self-serving, who was self-indulgent, who failed to be a shepherd of God's people, and who failed to feed the people. Jesus is the true shepherd in Ezekiel 34, uh, verse 16. Who declared when when when God declared, I will seek the lost, I will bring back the straight, I will bind up the injured, I will strengthen the weak. He is greater than David, he is greater than Moses, he is greater than Elisha, and his provision far exceeds what anyone or anything else can offer. And so today, whatever our needs, whatever our longings or our lack, he alone is the one who provides in a way that truly satisfies. Yeah, true satisfaction is not ultimately found in the glamour or in the pleasures of the king's court, right? Not found in the pleasures of a gratuitous birthday party thrown by a king. It is not ultimately found in wealth or status or in our partners or in the families we build for ourselves. It is not found in anything else or anyone else that we thought uh would give us happiness if only we have it in our lives.

unknown 16:59

Right?

SPEAKER_01 17:00

It is often those who have much that you still find that they do not have enough or that something is missing. Uh a few weeks back, someone commented uh that you know at one point in her life, she had everything she thought she wanted in life. And yet she did not feel happy, or she did not feel fulfilled. And some of you might be feeling the same, right? Um, you have everything you thought you ever wanted in life, and yet you are still not satisfied. You still want more, you still need more. You feel that your life is not fulfilled. And the truth is that chasing after creatures or the created things to give us satisfaction, instead of chasing after the creator, right? When we chase after creatures and created things, um, it will never give us ultimate satisfaction. You know, they say when you're stranded uh in in the open sea, uh there's water, there's there's a famous line from this poem, right? Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Right? They say don't ever drink the sea water, right? Uh because for yeah, sure it is water. When you drink it, it will first wet your lips, but it will not quench the thirst. And in fact, it will make the thirst worse. And that's like chasing after the things of the world. You chase and you chase and you chase, thinking that it will fill up some void or some gap in your heart, and you just realize that the hunger, the thirst just becomes more and more uh exacerbated. Or it is like being sheep without a shepherd, with a vast open theory and thinking that the whole world is an oyster, you can go anywhere you like. But without the shepherd, we have no clue at all where to find green pasture and steal water. And we are all like sheep in need of a shepherd. And today we see that Jesus is the true shepherd king, right? The good shepherd who had compact who has compassion for the lost, the scattered, the injured, the weak. He is the good shepherd who knows us and our needs better than we do ourselves. And who provides us with more than enough to satisfy us. And so the question for us today is will we want this good shepherd to be our shepherd? Right? Seeing that Jesus is the one who can provide, will we want him to be our shepherd? That will involve surrendering our ways and our goals, or stopping all of our striving and our grasping, and instead coming to Jesus with all of our needs and trust that He will provide us, uh He will provide for us in ways that He deemed best. It involves living on Jesus' terms and not ours. Which sounds scary because that is essentially losing your control over your life, right? To be like a ship that really is gonna be like I'm not gonna go anywhere else uh except for the direction, the path that my shepherd is leading me. But it is really only with this full surrender and reliance on Jesus that we can genuinely sing and proclaim Psalm 23. And I'll just read it out for us. Psalm 23, uh, again, a well-known passage: the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside steel waters, he restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. It is a song sung by someone who completely depended on the Lord to be his shepherd, and who followed this shepherd's guide no matter what. And so this is the first thing that Mark is doing uh with uh his passage this morning, right? He shows us who Jesus is and what he does for us, and now we are called upon uh by by Jesus. Will we surrender our lives so that he can shepherd us? So that he can be the one to provide for all our needs, so that we can stop all our striving, all our chasing of things that we think will satisfy us. Allow him to shepherd us. The second thing that we see in today's passage is we we see that Mark is showing that Jesus was also doing something with his disciples. He was not just doing something for the people, he was doing something with his disciples. And coming back to Jesus performing the miracle of the feeding, I want to read from verses 35 to 37. So verse 35 it says, When he grew late, his disciples came to him and said, This is a desolate place, and the hour is now late. Send them away to go into the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat. But Jesus answered them, You give them something to eat. And he said to him, Shall we go and buy 200 denarii worth of bread and give it to them to eat? 200 denarii is about eight months pay, right? And one question if that will actually be enough to feed 5,000 people. We see the disciples were the ones who, very good, they they they they were the first, I don't think they were the first actually, but they they took the initiative and tell Jesus, you know, hey, there's a problem, right? Um they were the they were the ones to go to Jesus and and and to tell him, you know, it's getting late, there's no restaurant, there's no coffee shop around here. Send them away so that they can go somewhere else and buy food for themselves to get their dinner. Uh they had a genuine concert and they had a logical solution to the problem, right? But Jesus surprises them with these words. You give them something to eat.

unknown 23:44

Right?

SPEAKER_01 23:44

At this point, if you were in the crowd, I'm sure you were trying to avoid eye contact with Jesus. Uh don't look at his eyes, so he's not really talking to you, or like, yeah, I don't think no, no, no. I think Jesus is calling the person beside me, right? Um, but Jesus is talking to you. You give them something to eat. Why would Jesus do that? Right? Why would Jesus ask them? These poor disciples with no money, they left without money, so they came back probably without money, right? Why would Jesus ask them to give the people something to eat? Surely Jesus knew there's no way they could feed 5,000 people. Um, but he asked his disciples to feed them because Jesus knew what he was going to do. Right? Uh in John, the Gospel of John, especially, you know, there's a there is a the there's a line, for he knew what he was going to do, right? Jesus knew what he was going to do, and he was involving his disciples in his work. Um, he was trying to make the disciples the means of his ministry. So let's go back to the oh, uh maybe we can go uh one or two slides back. Um we gotta go back to I want to go back to that that that's that that whole story sandwich, right? If we go back to that, we remember we remember that this passage is part of the first story, right? It's part of a bigger story that began from verse 7 to 13, which was Jesus sending the disciples out on a mission trip to carry out his ministry. On their trip, they proclaimed the gospel, cast out demons, healed the sick, um, did what Jesus was doing in his ministry. And now Jesus wants to involve them in uh uh in something seemingly mundane, right? Feed the people. It was uh catering to a physical need, it was a mundane thing, so to speak, feed the people. But it was a mundane task at an impossible scale, right? They simply had no means or resources to feed so many people. But Jesus was going to show them that this was not a problem for him. In fact, you could say he did not need his disciples at all, right? He is Jesus, right? He could even turn rocks to bread if he wanted to, he did not need his disciples' input or resources at all. But he pointedly said, you do it. Because Jesus wanted his disciples to participate in this miracle and to offer what little they had in obedience to Jesus' instructions. And to um yeah, to to to to offer whatever little they have uh in obedience to what Jesus is telling them to do. And if you think about it, the the sheer number of people is crazy enough, right? And in this situation, to offer something so small as five barley loaves and two fish is laughable. It's so puny, right? Who has the the the gall or the audacity to offer something so small, like a drop in a bucket, right? To try to feed this sure size of people. But Jesus asked for it, they gave it, he took it, blessed it. And it was more than enough. It was more than enough for him to feed the people. They collected even more after everyone was satisfied. And all this because someone offered the laughably inadequate amount of food. And I want to assure you that Jesus is still multiplying provision today. Uh I think I shared this story uh maybe at least like two years ago, but uh, in the earlier years of our West Timor medical mission, right, there was a trip where the team usually would buy a bunch of glasses beforehand, right? They would get a ship all the way from Jakarta to uh uh Nikki Nikki at that time. Um for their particular trip, uh they thought they had enough spectacles, right? Uh enough glasses, uh, but they were seeing so many villagers coming in, and so many of them elderly, so many of them with with like eye problems, and many of them were asking for glasses. And the the team were was worried, right? Um it's not like medicine. Medicine they can buy from pharmacy around in Kupang or around in in uh Soe or Nikki Niki, right? Uh this was something they had to ship from Jakarta. It took at least one month to buy that thing and to ship by sea to Kupang. Right? There was no way they could go out and buy more. Um you could you could probably talk to some of the team members who were on the trip and who uh experienced this. They were just faithfully doing the Lord's work. And as each villager came, they just gave out glasses one at a time. And to their surprise, the supply never seemed to deplete. Um and so even though that trip they saw more people than usual, they did not run out of glasses to give. And God is still multiplying our provisions, God is still doing miracles in our lives and through us today. And Jesus hasn't stopped using our five loaves and two fish to meet greater needs than we can ever adequately meet. Right? He calls us to offer whatever little resources that we have and whatever little abilities that we have and just give it up to him. We may feel laughably inadequate. But Jesus calls us to offer ourselves up and to offer our resources up anyway. Uh years ago when I was doing uh a month a month-long internship in a church in Thailand, um, I went there not knowing the language, um, and uh they had a orphanage, a small orphanage of four kids. Two of them were boys, and they were kind of like bunking with me for a couple of weeks, and um I did not know the language at all, I didn't know how to communicate at all. Um so I think what I did was uh I mean unconsciously, right? I was just like smiling a lot, or just trying to be jovial, trying to smile a lot, trying to interact with them, do whatever little I can with them. Um and and but I mean I didn't feel like I had any input in their lives at all. But at the end of the mission trip, uh the pastor was telling me um that just by my presence, uh looking at me and like smiling, I mean, some of you might be like very surprised, but what is smiling all the time, but like there I was really trying to just smiling all the time, and that really ministered to them. That was a blessing to the kids at the orphanage, right? There was nothing I could really do to add anything to their lives, and yet by a small, simple gesture, God did something with the kids. The truth, and I hope everyone receives this well, the truth is that we are all powerless and we are all inadequate. In and by ourselves, we can we can do nothing.

unknown 30:52

Right?

SPEAKER_01 30:53

I don't care how clever you are, I don't care how wealthy you are, we are powerless and we are inadequate. And yet Jesus calls us to partner him in his ministry anyway. He continues to call on his disciples to be his means of providing the needs of his people. And where we are powerless, he is powerful. Where we are weak, Jesus is strong. Where we are inadequate, he is more than adequate for the task that he has set for us. And so he will take in whatever we have. As long as he as long as we are caught by him, you know, he will take in whatever little we have and he will multiply it and amplify it for his work. And so while firstly we saw that Jesus is a shepherd, you know, the question was, will you allow him to shepherd you? And if you have chosen Jesus to be your shepherd today, will you also become his co-worker, his co-worker? To become his under-shepherd to the world? Will you courageously offer your five loaves and two fish and trust that Jesus, who fed the 5,000, can take what little you have and make it more than enough. Will you become a means of Jesus' ministry, a channel of his blessing, so that the needs of others may be met, and more importantly, so that they too can come to know the great shepherd.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

We pray that you've been ministered to by the Word of God today. If you'd like to know more about ancient Christian Church, please visit our website at ycanglican.com. Have a blessed day.