Introduction

We’ve been looking at the book of Mark and the life of Jesus. Tonight, we come to a very, very famous passage: Jesus feeding the multitude. The good news for me is that when we come to passages of Scripture, when I’m studying to prepare for the teaching, I look at many, many, many different views and many different commentators and scholars. Often, I have to choose because sometimes there’s a difference of opinion about what the passage means and what the symbolism is.

I was amazed that there’s really very little controversy about this. The symbolism, the significance, and the meaning of this passage are not controversial. The symbolism is relatively plain, very rich, and very wonderful. My real challenge is: how do I get it all across in a nice, clear, and comprehensive way? And here’s how I’m going to do it.

This passage is, number one, about a revolution. But secondly, it’s about a revolution that no one expected—a completely unexpected kind of revolution. Number three, it’s led by impossibly unqualified revolutionaries. And number four, it’s based on a shocking revolutionary act.

This is about a revolution, but a completely unexpected revolution led by unqualified, impossibly unqualified revolutionaries and based on a shocking revolutionary act.

This Is About a Revolution

I know that’s probably not what it looks like. Even as you read through it, even as certainly if you’ve ever studied it in Sunday school or something like that, this is a warm fuzzy, isn’t it? It’s a warm fuzzy. Jesus at a picnic. See? Everyone’s sitting on the green grass and eating, and you can almost see the red checkered tablecloths spread out on the ground.

But let’s not visualize it that way because that’s not what this is about at all. The textual and historical context tells us about something quite different.

When Jesus Christ left the villages and towns of Galilee to go across the lake in order to find peace and quiet, he was going to the remote part. He was going to the rural part, the hill district. When he went there, he was on his way to the hotbed of revolutionary resistance to the Roman imperial rule. It was in the hill country, it was in the remote and rural regions that all the freedom fighters, that all the guerrillas were holed out and hiding out. This is the place where everyone was sympathetic to the zealots. This was the center of the zealot movement, and the zealots were represented. They stood for the violent overthrow of Roman rule.

And so they come to the other side of the lake, and here’s this enormous crowd literally out in the middle of nowhere. It’s a very unpopulated region. It’s like the whole region has turned out. And when it says 5,000 men, it probably means heads of families. So there were actually 15 to 20,000 people there. But it might mean that only the men showed up. Because why were they there? Why was this crowd gathered in the middle of nowhere?

John, in his gospel account of this incident, in John 6:15, comes right out and says what Mark hints at here. And that is, John 6:15, they came to make him king by force. This is the place where everyone wanted a revolutionary leader. Jesus shows up, and they come out. Why? They want a revolution.

I mean, don’t forget, if you’ve been with us through this walk through the book of Mark, just immediately before this is the story of Herod and the murder of John the Baptist. What a vivid depiction of the most oppressive, exploitative kind of imperial rule. No wonder they yearn for a king. Jesus goes to the part of the country that’s the center of all the revolutionary fervor in that whole region of the world. They wanted him to be a revolutionary leader. They wanted him to be a king. They wanted a revolution. That’s what they were after.

This Is A Totally Unexpected Revolution

Some of you are really excited. Point two already? Don’t get your hopes up. Alright. Okay, just kidding. This is wonderful. Point two already.

This is a totally unexpected kind of revolution. When Jesus looks at them in verse 34 and sees them as sheep without a shepherd, it’s a very significant phrase. Oh, of course, when you and I think—and this is right—when you and I look at what the Bible says about shepherds and sheep, it’s generally a pastoral image. So, Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd.” The shepherd loves the sheep and nurtures and cares for the sheep. Yes, yes, yes.

However, Jesus is actually quoting here Moses’ prayer to God at the end of his life, in Numbers 27, where Moses says, after me you must give the children of Israel a political and military leader. So Jesus is actually quoting Numbers 27. It goes like this: it says Moses praying to God and saying, “May the Lord appoint a man over this community to go out and lead them so that the Lord’s people will not be like sheep without a shepherd.” And almost every place in the Old Testament that talks about sheep without a shepherd is talking about the need for a political military leader.

So when Jesus looks out and sees them coming and says they’re like sheep without a shepherd, he knows what they’re after. They want him to be the revolutionary leader who liberates them from oppression. They want him to be another Moses, another Joshua.

And now that you know that he sees them that way, you realize what an incredibly weird and strange and almost shocking verse, verse 34, is. Because verse 34 says, when he saw that they wanted a revolutionary leader, sheep without a shepherd, when he saw they wanted liberation from oppression, he began to preach and teach the gospel. Do you see that? That’s how he responds. He begins to preach and teach the gospel.

Now look, guerrilla revolutionary leaders in remote rural parts of the Middle East, when their disciples come to them and say, “You know, liberate us from oppression,” they give out weapons and they start weapons training. They’re doing that in those places to this very day. They’re doing it today. They give out weapons and they do weapons training. Jesus Christ gives out his word and bread, and he gives the disciples bread distribution training. And that’s his response to their calling for a revolutionary leader and liberation from oppression.

And that’s the reason why the commentators know that what Jesus is doing is a radical repudiation of the liberation models of the day. So here’s one commentator who says, “It is clear from this account that Jesus will not march to the populist and militarist drumbeat. Here in Mark 6, he disavows the zealot model of liberation.”

But he doesn’t disavow a model of liberation. When he gives the word and he gives bread, what is he saying?

Now look, to you and I, in our modern culture, what does bread mean? When you look at bread, you know what it means to us? It means carbohydrates. That’s the deep symbolic meaning of bread to us. But in ancient times, when there weren’t quite as many options in food and when it wasn’t as certain that the food would be there when you needed it, bread meant life. Bread was a symbol for life, and Jesus is saying, “I’m a revolutionary leader, but other revolutionary leaders come dealing out death. I come dealing life.”

So when he starts giving out his word and bread, he’s actually saying, “I’m bringing you life in two ways.” He says, “I’m a revolutionary leader. I’m bringing you life, but in two ways: life through word and life through deed, through word and life through deed.”

Led by Unqualified Revolutionaries

Now that’s a third and very important point that this passage makes, and everybody saw it as you went through. Jesus goes out of his way to make this point. How does he do that? Well, like this: I love doing conferences in New York because I don’t have to feed people at the conference. There are all these restaurants right around the corner, far more variety, far better food than we could possibly provide at the conference. So what you say is you have your conference, and you’re going through the agenda, and you’re teaching, and you’re doing that sort of thing, and then comes lunch, and then the little agenda says, “Lunch on your own.” Okay? Lunch on your own. So I said, “Okay, 12 o’clock, lunch on your own, be back here at 1:30,” that kind of thing.

Alright, well, that’s what the disciples very reasonably thought should be the agenda. Here’s this bunch of people, and they’re out in the middle of nowhere, right? And Jesus is having the conference, and he’s teaching them. He’s wonderful. He’s a great conference speaker, Jesus Christ. Think about it. And then we get to lunch, and the disciples make a perfectly reasonable suggestion. They say, “Okay, Lord, lunch on their own. Send them out and let them go to the towns.”

So they make a perfectly reasonable suggestion, and Jesus deliberately makes an absolutely irrational suggestion. He says, “You feed them.” In Greek, you don’t need underlinings. The grammar, you can put the subject and predicate in such a way that you know where the emphasis is, and the emphasis is on “you.” “You feed them.”

And of course, they get their backs up. They make a very—this is the most, you know, I think Matthew and Luke and John kind of tone down a little bit what they say, and Mark is a little more honest about the sarcasm. They say, “You’re asking us to do the impossible.” Of course, that’s Jesus’ whole point. Jesus Christ says, “Until you see what I’m calling you to do is impossible, you are absolutely unqualified to do it.”

A Shocking Revolutionary Act

See, all revolutions start with a shot, with some revolutionary act. You invade the city, or you storm the fortress, or you storm the Bastille, or you do something. That’s when the revolution starts. And therefore, revolutions start with acts of violence. So do Jesus’. You say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I thought you said that Jesus is a revolutionary leader who brings life, not death.” I did say that—life for us.

What is the revolutionary act on which this whole thing is based? You can see it in verse 41. It’s a hint, but it’s such a broad hint that it’s hard to miss. In verse 41, he says, “Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven,” literally in the Greek, it says, “He blessed and broke.” Two verbs. He blessed and broke. And in Mark chapter 14, verse 22, just a little later in the book, when Jesus is at the Lord’s Supper, the night before he’s about to die, it says, “This is my body…” he says. ==Same two verbs. He blessed and broke. This is pointing to that.==

Jesus is saying to everybody who’s coming after him, trying to make him king, he says, “You want a new Moses. You want a Moses that will feed you with bread in the wilderness. You want a Moses who will liberate you from oppression. You want a new Moses, a new Joshua. Well, I am not just a new Moses. I’m the ultimate Moses. I have come to do ==the ultimate exodus,== not to liberate you just for a while from political oppression, but from sin and death itself.”

Conclusion

If you want to become a revolutionary, you have to do it the way Jesus did, and that is you have to lose power, not take power in his name. You say, “What do I mean by that?” You have to become vulnerable. What do you mean by that? Let me give you three examples to close.

Giving

If you give a minimum of 10% of your income away to charity, to the poor, to the community, to the church, and maybe more—maybe 12%, maybe 15% as time goes on—if you’re plowing your money in that kind of proportion out into people’s lives, boy, does that bring healing. Boy, does that bring liberation. Boy, does that change the community. Does that make the community better? But you’re vulnerable. You don’t have it all socked away. My goodness, we live in an economically unstable world, don’t we now? Yeah, of course, if you give like that, if you give the way Jesus calls you to give, if you give like that, you’re becoming vulnerable. You’re losing power for the sake of other people, but if you don’t do it, you’re no revolutionary. You’re part of the problem. You’re part of the culture out there we’re trying to subvert.

Relationships

Jesus says we have to forgive everybody who wrongs us. We have to work like crazy to keep our relationships right. If you see somebody over there who’s got something against you, or if you have something against them, you have to go to them again and again and again and say, “I don’t think we got it right yet. We’ve got to get this thing straight.” You have to forgive. You have to reconcile. You can never give up. You can never just stew. You can never let a root of bitterness grow. And boy, if you’re in a community where people are doing that all the time, oh, what a great community that can be in the long run. But in the short run, oh my gosh, what hard work it is. And it makes you vulnerable, emotionally vulnerable. I don’t want to go and talk to people about my feelings. I don’t want to go and let people know that I’m having struggles with them. It makes you vulnerable. It’s a loss of power. It’s often a loss of face. But if you don’t do it, you’re no revolutionary. You’re part of the problem.

Career

If you’re just like most people in New York City, and that is you come here to work on your career. And you know what? If you really give yourself to volunteer work at the church or volunteer work out in the city with the poor, or if you really give yourself just to care about your neighborhood, if you really, really try to make this city a great place, you’re not going to do as well in your career. Of course, you’re not. It would be much better if you spent all of your time working on your career, but then you’re not part of—you’re not a revolutionary, not Jesus’ kind of revolutionary. No way.

And you ought to kid—don’t kid yourself. Inside, you are still in bondage to fears, the need to prove yourself. You haven’t experienced his liberating power.

If there’s anybody here who’s not even sure, you say, “I don’t think I’ve ever really embraced Jesus like you’re talking about.” Just remember what he said: “I’m the bread.” He doesn’t say, “I am the teacher who will show you how to save yourself.” He says, “I save you. I live the life you should have lived. I died the death you should have died. I was broken for you.” And to really embrace him is not just to try to be like him, it’s to see what he’s done for you and ask God, “Please accept me because of what he has done,” and that will change you.

And if there’s anybody here who says, “Well, I’ve embraced Jesus and I’m trying to do his work, but oh my goodness, it’s hard,” remember: only the inadequate are adequate.