The miracles of Jesus reveal him to be a person who cares about the well-being of people. He seeks to make people whole in heart, soul, mind, and strength. His miracles also reveal his extraordinary power as one who is able to exercise the very power of God. But when Jesus does that which God alone can do, this tells us something more . . . much more about Jesus.
And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. And all ate and were filled. What was leftover was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces. Luke 9:16-17 (NRSV)
Jesus often did extraordinary things, things beyond the ability of ordinary mortals. Even those who did not acknowledge his messianic identity knew that Jesus was something special. Ancient Jewish rabbis, for example, accused Jewish of doing “magic” or practicing “sorcery.” His amazing works revealed that he was either a trickster or someone who wielded demonic power.
Those of us who acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah see his actions from a different perspective. Consider, for example, the story in Luke 9:12-17. Jesus had been teaching a crowd of over 5,000 people. As evening approached, his disciples told Jesus to send the people away so they could get something to eat. But Jesus told the disciples to give the people something to eat.
Unfortunately, they were short on rations. “We have no more than five loaves and two fish – unless we are to go and buy food for all these people” (Luke 9:13).
I wonder if the disciples expected Jesus to say, “Oh, that won’t work. That’s way too much food. Let’s send them away.” Instead, he did a puzzling thing, instructing his disciples to organize the people into groups of about fifty. Then, blessing the five loaves and two fish, he broke them and gave them to the disciples to pass out to the crowd. Yet Jesus didn’t run out in a minute or so. As he broke the food, it kept multiplying. After everyone had eaten, they gathered up twelve baskets of leftovers. Amazing!
Don’t you wish you could have seen all of that with your own eyes?! I know I do. If nothing else, it revealed that Jesus had awesome superpowers. Yet there is something else. At least two “somethings” actually.
First, we see here, Jesus’s concern for the physical well-being of people. This is consistent, of course, with his regularly healing people. Jesus wanted them to be physically well and, as we see in this story, well-fed. Surely Jesus cared about the souls of people. But he wasn’t concerned only for the immaterial. As the Incarnation of the God who created the physical world well, Jesus valued the world and especially its people.
Second, let me encourage you to put yourself in the place of the Jewish people who had gathered to listen to Jesus. There you were, out in a “deserted place” (Luke 9:12). The Greek word translated as “deserted place” is often rendered as “wilderness.” So, you’re out in the wilderness and very hungry. All of a sudden, Jesus produces food for you to eat in a most exceptional way. What might this remind you of? It’s likely that you would have remembered a time when your Jewish ancestors were in the wilderness and God fed them miraculously, in that case, with manna (see Exodus 16). If you were to reflect on this, you would surely have wondered what it said about Jesus. You considered him an inspired teacher, a prophet, a miracle worker, perhaps even the Messiah. But if Jesus miraculously fed you and the rest of the crowd in the wilderness, could it be that he was more than all of these?
The miracles of Jesus reveal him to be a person who cares about the well-being of people. He seeks to make people whole in heart, soul, mind, and strength. His miracles also reveal his extraordinary power as one who is able to exercise the very power of God. But when Jesus does that which God alone can do, this tells us something more . . . much more about Jesus.
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