Pastor Thanael Certa-Werner
Scripture | Luke 9:10-17 (NIV)
10 When the apostles returned, they reported to Jesus what they had done. Then he took them with him and they withdrew by themselves to a town called Bethsaida, 11 but the crowds learned about it and followed him. He welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed healing. 12 Late in the afternoon the Twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away so they can go to the surrounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging, because we are in a remote place here.” 13 He replied, “You give them something to eat.” They answered, “We have only five loaves of bread and two fish—unless we go and buy food for all this crowd.” 14 (About five thousand men were there.) But he said to his disciples, “Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each.” 15 The disciples did so, and everyone sat down. 16 Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke them. Then he gave them to the disciples to distribute to the people. 17 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.
In the late 5th century A.D., the Roman world was crumbling. Power had shifted to its new capital in the east and Rome was under constant threat of siege and capture. In many ways, this was leading from a shift – a shift from one way of living to another. In fact, so influential and ground shattering is this shift that it ends the Classical Era in time and begins the Early Middle Ages, what some would call the Dark Ages.
Before this period, the Roman world was built upon stability, military power, and classically trained philosophers and thinkers. Now, in this transitionary period between the height of Rome’s power and the looming Dark Ages, the first thing to go was the classical education system. This is not to say that people were not educated in the Dark Ages, or that they were stupid. Rather, the way in which they were taught and their ability to engage with the great thinkers of their past was completely changed.
Classical training included the likes of Plato, Socrates, Virgil, and Cicero. These were some of the greatest thinkers and writers of the ancient world and in this transition the ability to read them and understand them was almost lost. No longer were they taught or understood – in fact, by the middle of the 300’s A.D., they were almost completely vanished from education.
The man who is considered to be the last classically trained person was born in 354 A.D. in the African city of Hippo. He was a great thinker and had received the full classical education. He loved to read and to engage with the great philosophers of antiquity. One of the things he was especially interested in was what it meant to live a moral life. For years, he explored the great thoughts of those who had come before him, and those who were his contemporary, seeking what it really means to live a good life. This tortured him, as what he sought never seemed to appear.
His readings of Cicero and Plato showed him the minds of some of the greatest thinkers, but their thoughts on morality seemed to be disconnected from the reality of life. They taught that morality was essentially either aligned with getting others to do what is right through persuasion – although the definition of what is right is up to the persuader – or with doing more good than evil. In the end, their thinking was based on the fact that morality was subject to human knowledge and that a person’s logic could dictate what morality was. This was the greatest thinking of the classical world, yet for him, it was not enough.
And then, in the midst of this battle of philosophy, fell the writings of a little man, a fanatic, from Tarsus. He was a Jew, a Pharisee, who wrote letters that the Christians had been using as scripture and who was signing his letters “Paul.” His writing was nothing exceptional – nothing like the writings of Plato and Cicero – but then the man read, “For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.” Could it be? Could it be that this little nobody from the rebellious state of Judah had something to teach about real Truth that all of the great philosophers had missed? Could it be that knowledge did not equal virtue, but that virtue was only attained by faith?
After this moment, the man started to study Paul’s letters in earnest and grew to discover more and more about what real morality looked like. This man’s name was Augustine of Hippo, one of the early church fathers. He would go on to write some of the most important documents of the early church. He became bishop of Hippo and would defend the Church against heresy. He is considered one of the great saints of the Church. He is almost the last Classical man, almost the first Medieval man. And his story has a lynch pin in it.
In the middle of this faithful man’s life, smack dab in the center, between his life before Christ and after Christ is an important moment that we might miss if we don’t look too closely. The detail so small it changed his life, he read one verse from Galatians and his life was on a different path. One verse. One verse is the lynch pin between faithlessness and faithfulness.
Many of the stories of the faithful have these kinds of lynch pins in them: small little details which are often overlooked and yet have everything to do with the change in the story. In our story for today, there is a crucial one. The twelve disciples have come back together after a time apart going through the countryside, preaching and teaching that the time of repentance was here. They’ve come back together and a crowd has gathered around them and Jesus. So Jesus has been teaching the crowd.
Luke recounts the story saying: Late in the afternoon the Twelve came to Him and said, “Send the crowd away so they can go to the surrounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging, because we are in a remote place here.” He replied, “You give them something to eat.” They answered, “We have only five loaves of bread and two fish—unless we go and buy food for all this crowd.” (About five thousand men were there.) But He said to His disciples, “Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each.” The disciples did so, and everyone sat down. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke them. Then He gave them to the disciples to distribute to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.
It’s an incredible story which shows the wisdom, faithfulness, and power of Jesus. So important is this miracle that it’s the only one, beside the resurrection of Jesus on Easter, that is told in all four of the Gospels. And when you read the story in the Gospels, it’s pretty much the same throughout. But John adds in a couple of extra details. Let’s read and see if you can spot them:
When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward Him, He said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” He asked this only to test him, for He already had in mind what He was going to do. Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!” Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish. When they had all had enough to eat, he said to His disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
What is shocking is that John is the only one of the four Gospels who gives a full account of where the two fish and five loaves of bread come from. It’s from a little boy who was in the crowd. We don’t know why he was there, we don’t know what the disciples had said to him, we know almost nothing about him – except this: he is the lynch pin of this story. Without this little boy, there would be nothing to eat. It was his faithfulness – even if he didn’t understand everything that was about to happen, even if he didn’t really know what sharing was going to do – his faithfulness which helped Jesus perform a miracle. Through his selflessness, 5000 men and countless women and children were fed. This little boy helped to change the course of history and bring thousands of people to faith just by trusting Jesus with what little he had.
There’s so much we can learn from this. Firstly, it’s clear that children can have an enormous impact on the faith even when they don’t necessarily understand everything that’s going on. One of our great mistakes as a church is keeping the kids from Jesus and the practices of the church because they don’t understand the gravity of what’s happening. But the reality is, neither do we. We might think we understand more, but in truth we know more about the faith intellectually but miss the essence of the faith which is trust – and trust comes almost instinctually for children.
The boy in the story did not understand the full breath of what was happening, yet he trusted Jesus and His disciples to do what was right. The adults in that place – even the disciples themselves – did not know what was happening. The disciples had a hard time trusting that everything was going to be okay. Yet what both the disciples lacked, and the adults there shared was what the boy had: trust. We can learn a lot about trusting in God by looking to our children.
The second lesson we can gleam from this story is the importance of our children being in the presence of God and the assembly of the church. It’s likely that the boy of our story was not there by himself – or at least not without permission. He might have been in the crowd with his family or been allowed to be there with some of his friends by the permission of his parents. In either case, his parents allowed for him to be present and in the presence of Jesus Christ. This is why its so important for our kids to be a part of worship, to be a part of the church, and a part of the church’s life. Not only through their participation are we presented with an example for our own lives, but do they have the chance to interact with the Almighty, Everlasting, and Ever-loving God. That’s one of the reasons we have our church camps, so that our kids can spend time in the presence of our Savior and that they might have the chance to be the lynch pin in someone’s life.
It is impossible to know how each of us affects another person. It’s impossible to know how the Holy Spirit of God is using us to change the world in His Name. Yet, what we can know is that our stories all have lynch pins – little things that most people might miss – that have fundamentally changed the story. Throughout the scriptures, we see that one of the greatest lynch pins is trusting God. For Augustine, it came in the form of a man who trusted God enough to leave his authority and safety to teach others about his Savior. For the 5000, it was the trust of a little boy who gave what he had that the Savior might transform the lives of thousands. Our lesson for today is to allow that kind of trust to be a lynch pin in our stories, and to allow for our kids to be before the Savior that they may be the lynch pin for someone else. May it be so. Amen.