Sunday, August 2, 2026… Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
“You Feed Them”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 146:1-10; Isaiah 55:1-5; Romans 9:1-13; Matthew 14:13-21
Service Order: Divine Service III with Holy Communion, Lutheran Service Book
Hymns… “All Depends On Our Possessing” #732; “I Come, O Savior, to Thy Table” #618; “Sent Forth by God’s Blessing” #643
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
A pastor I knew, many years ago now, lost his seventeen-year-old daughter to a car accident. A tragedy beyond words. Life-changing. Devastating. Heart-breaking, as only a parent who’s been through such a thing could ever begin to understand. Yet to everyone’s surprise, he took only one Sunday off. The funeral was held during the week, and the following Sunday, he was back to work and back in the pulpit. He told his congregation, “My Jenny is gone and safe with Jesus, but the needs here on earth go on. My people still need me, my congregation still needs me, there’s still work to be done. To honor her, and to honor my Lord, I’ll carry on with the work I’ve been given to do; that is the balm I need for my soul.”
As today’s Gospel reading begins, Jesus and His disciples had just received news that John the Baptist had been beheaded in King Herod’s prison. John was their friend, the disciple’s teacher before they’d met Jesus. Jesus had known him all His life; John was His cousin, a member of His family, His Aunt Elizabeth’s only son. There was “sorrow and great anguish” in His and His disciple’s hearts. So, “When Jesus heard what had happened,” says our Gospel, “He withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.” To mourn, to cry, to take time to somehow try to process it all. (Jesus was God, but He was a flesh-and-blood human being, too).
But “the crowds followed Him on foot from the towns.” They got to that remote place on foot, before Jesus and His friends could get there by boat. The crowds kept coming, tragedy and sorrow or not, thousands of them waiting there for Him on the beach, with needs of every kind, of spirit, body, and soul. The last thing the disciples would have wanted to deal with that day was a crowd. If they’d had a vote, I think they’d have turned around and headed back out to sea. But there would be no time or opportunity this day for them to mourn or rest or cry. Poor John was gone, but the needs go on.
So, says our Gospel, “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, He had compassion on them and healed their sick.” That is an amazing little sentence. That word “compassion” means a feeling that comes from the heart, from the gut, from way down deep inside. Jesus had compassion on all those people, from deep down inside His Holy Self; not just an “Oh, I feel so sorry for you” feeling, but the kind of loving, merciful, heart-wrenching feeling that wouldn’t allow Him to turn the boat back out to sea and leave them all behind.
And the word for “sick” here – the Greek word is arrostos – means “an illness that will not leave,” or one that’s chronic and incurable. Jesus wasn’t just curing sniffles or stubbed toes or paper cuts; He was curing things that no one else on earth could touch. He was healing hopeless illnesses, curing people of things they’d suffered from for years. Those were the things that touched Jesus down to His soul, that made Him weep, that moved Him to put His own needs aside and reach out in love to heal them. (It was that same deep-down love of His that moved Him to go to the cross). He was facing a whole world full of needs, so many needs of mind, body, spirit, and soul; as we face our own community, our own neighborhood, with all their needs, who are all around us still. One after another they were coming to Him, and “Jesus healed them all,” until the sun began to go down and evening was coming on.
Then, says our Gospel, “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.’” It had been a long day for the twelve disciples; they’d wanted some down time, but they weren’t going to get it, were they? They were no doubt getting tired, hungry, and cranky (like we would be). But to “send the crowd away” at that point would have been a cruel thing. They were in a remote wilderness, it was going to be dark soon, and those towns and villages were a long walk away.
In another Gospel account of this story, Jesus says, “No, for they might faint along the way.” We’ve spent the whole day tending to their needs, helping them, healing them, and now you want us to send them off hungry into the dark? How could we do such a thing? You can’t just hand a starving man a Gospel tract, tell him, “God bless you,” and send him on his way again. It’s not one need or the other that needs to be met, but both.
So Jesus tells them, "They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat." That is an audacious, ridiculous, impossible request, by any stretch of their imagination or ours. They had neither food nor funds nor the means to service a crowd of that size; anyone could see that. The need before them was many, many times greater than the few resources they had to meet it. “Us? Feed all of them? O Lord, with what?” "We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish," they told Jesus; “but how far will that go among so many?”
They were only doing the math, being sensible, adding things up, pointing out the “real real.” The budget is what the budget is, right? What we have is what we have. (This is why my mother with her big family to feed made a lot of casseroles. Meat is expensive; you have to stretch it where you can). The disciples were looking at a skimpy enough dinner as it was, if only the twelve of them and Jesus should divide it among themselves. Five little loaves of barley bread and two small fish, divided 13 ways, would have been a small enough meal for them, let alone divided among 5000. They were only being practical, looking at what their eyes could plainly see.
Then Jesus made another astounding statement. "Bring them here to Me," He said. The disciples had been with Him all this time, and now they’d seen Him heal every disease and ailment you could name, sunup to sundown, all day long; and still they seem to have forgotten who it was they were travelling with.
How about all your impossible things? Impossible for us, maybe, but not for Him. We see only little loaves and tiny fish; but He has the power, and also the willingness, to multiply them. We see a bigger crowd than we can feed, but He sees only precious souls in need. He’s the God who created all things out of nothing, after all -- the God who “calls things that are not as though they were,” and the God for whom “all things are possible.” Whatever you have, “bring it here to Me,” He says. Those little bits of yours have great blessings in them, if you’ll trust Him enough to put them to His hands.
“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.” Jesus began the meal He had in mind with a blessing (as we all should). The table prayer that was customary for the Jews at the time was: "Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, the King of the world, who hast produced this food and this drink from the earth and the vine." Maybe He prayed that prayer, or maybe it was, “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest”; who knows? But having blessed the bread and the fish, He began to multiply it. (He’s the God who made the universe and created all things out of nothing at all; He can do that.)
And for our purposes today, we remember that as He multiplied the loaves and fishes, He also multiplies His broken body and poured out blood for us, Sunday after blessed and holy Sunday. If you’ve ever wondered how Jesus could give all of us His true body and blood, week after week and time after time, and never run out of body and blood to give us, now you know how such a thing can be.
The disciples, you’ll notice, are the servants in the story, the waiters, distributing to the people what that Lord had provided. How blessed they were to be the ones to take those blessings from His hands and feed them to the people (and how blessed I am as well!) They’d empty a basket and come back for more – and there was always more to re-fill the basket with. And they served and served and served until the whole crowd had more than enough.
So, “They all ate and were satisfied,” says our Gospel, “and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.” (Good old leftovers! That was Friday night casserole every night I was growing up!) That took care of their own dinner, didn’t it? They got to dine on the blessed and holy fragments of a miracle, and what a feast that must have been.
And did you know there’s a passage in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus does it again? There He fed a crowd of 4000, with “seven loaves and a few small fish.” And afterward, as Jesus and His disciples got back into their boat to go back across the sea, the disciples, probably looking for a bite to eat, realized they’d forgotten to bring bread, and began to argue about whose fault it was. And Jesus (and can’t you picture Him doing a face palm at this point?) told them, “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts so hard? Don’t you remember, when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces you picked up? And when I broke the seven loaved for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of leftover pieces you picked up? Do you still not understand?”
The question, I guess, is do we? One little Communion wafer isn’t much of a dinner, as far as a meal goes; but isn’t it enough? Jesus, with the help of His friends, fed five thousand men, plus their wives and children that day, and then four thousand after that. But the thing is, it could have been ten thousand, or fifty thousand, or a hundred thousand; and there still would have been enough; Jesus is who He is, so the thing just has no limit.
And since we have a Savior who is just that strong and generous and good, who has such compassion on us, and “gives us our daily bread,” and forgives us our sins, and calls us His own, what can we do but look out on the people all around us with compassion and mercy, like He did, and do our best to feed them, too? We’re only the servants in the story after all, and Jesus is Creator and the multiplier and the giver of the bread.
So as we’ve been so graciously invited in prophet Isaiah: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.” So blessed art Thou, O Lord! Come, Lord Jesus! “You open Your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.”
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div.
Trinity Lutheran Church, LCMS, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, LCMS, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com