If you have five thousand people and a minimum wage job, can you feed them?
John 6:1-21; Ephesians 3:14-21; Psalm 145:10-18; 2 Kings 2:42-44
Have you ever tried to feed five thousand people? I sure haven’t. I know that five hundred people can eat six hundred hamburgers and four hundred hot dogs fairly efficiently. I also know that a thousand people can be fed with around two hundred pizzas. These are things I know from experience, as that’s how much food we get for Church in the Park and Spring Fling, respectively. If you don’t know what Spring Fling is, it’s a big youth overnight lock-in held in March or so down in Salt Lake. Lots of fun, and lots of tired.
So if six hundred hamburgers and four hundred hot dogs feeds five hundred, and two hundred pizzas feed one thousand, then, assuming I can still make math happen, five thousand people can be fed with one thousand pizzas, or six thousand hamburgers and four thousand hot dogs. That’s an nearly inconceivable amount of food.
There is another side of this of course, the nearly inconceivable amount of food costs a similarly inconceivable amount of money. Now, if I were a disciple, and I was told to feed five thousand people as soon as possible, my first thought would be to order a ton, figuratively and perhaps even literally, of pizza. It comes already prepared, you’ll get it within a reasonable amount of time, and they deliver. Yes, I have witnessed the delivery of two hundred pizzas — it is a sight to behold.
Ok, so we’re ordering pizza for five thousand people. When ordering pizza for a large group, you have to have a certain assortment of pizza types: Pepperoni and Mushroom, Pepperoni-Only, Cheese-Only, Veggie, and Supreme. According to a quick check at a few major pizza place’s web sites, one each of these five pizzas comes to a average total of $65. Because we need a thousand of them, we multiple that number by two hundred, we come to $13,000. For informative purposes, the yearly income before takes of someone who works forty hours a week at minimum wage is $15,080. So in our culture, Phillip’s observation of eight month’s wages is a little low.
You can see why Philip would start to freak out a bit, though. Imagine being near your hometown, and Jesus asking you to find food for five thousand people. Luckily for us, Andrew saw an opportunity. “A little kid has some food, five small barely loaves and two small fish, not that it’ll do us any good — it’s nowhere near enough.” Now, when we think of a loaf of bread, we think of something that will last us a few days. These were more like biscuits or crackers, and the few were likely something like sardines or anchovies. Think of it like one of those Lunchables packs you see in the deli section. That’s barely enough for one person, let alone so many.
But Jesus was hearing none of the disciples’ protests; John already told us that Jesus already had a plan in mind, and it was not to buy food for five thousand people. But we all know what happened next: Jesus had everyone sit down, he gave thanks over the food, and when all was said and done they had twelve basketfuls of bread left over.
I’m willing to guess there was no one more amazed by this miracle than the little kid whose food they started with. His lunch fed five thousand people. Jesus took a meager gift and did amazing things with it, enough that there was more left over than they had to begin with.
This is kind of how God works; He takes what we can offer and does incredible things with it. In Ephesians 3 Paul writes that God “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.” The feeding of the five thousand is just one example. Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing we can bring to the table — that there isn’t anything we can offer to the kingdom of God, just like that little kid with his lunch. But God uses what little we think we have to bring about great things.
In a way, that’s how God has always worked. To reference an email I’ve had cross my inbox more than a few times:
Noah got drunk; Abraham was too old; Jacob was a liar; Leah was considered ugly; Joseph was abused; Moses stuttered; Gideon was afraid; Samson had long hair and was a womanizer; Rahab was a prostitute; Jeremiah and Timothy were too young; David had an affair and was a murderer; Elijah was suicidal; Isaiah preached naked; Jonah ran from God; Naomi was a widow; Job went bankrupt; Peter denied Christ; The Disciples fell asleep while praying; Martha worried about everything; Mary Magdalene was cleansed of seven demons; The Samaritan woman at the well had five husbands; Zaccheus was too small; Paul persecuted the Church; Lazarus was dead.
God consistently uses people with issues who don’t think they have anything to offer, but He takes what little they think they had and did a lot with it. Even if we don’t think we have a lot to offer, God will use what we have. We may think we’re too young or too old; we may think we’re not smart enough or not strong enough — or any of a million other things — but even in the things we think are liabilities, God uses them as strengths. Even if we only have five biscuits and two anchovies, God will use us and there will be an abundance left over.