Daily Java: 

After this, Jesus crossed over to the far side of the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Tiberias. A huge crowd kept following him wherever he went, because they saw his miraculous signs as he healed the sick. Then Jesus climbed a hill and sat down with his disciples around him. (It was nearly time for the Jewish Passover celebration.)  Jesus soon saw a huge crowd of people coming to look for him. Turning to Philip, he asked, “Where can we buy bread to feed all these people?” He was testing Philip, for he already knew what he was going to do. Philip replied, “Even if we worked for months, we wouldn’t have enough money to feed them!” Then Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up. “There’s a young boy here with five barley loaves and two fish. But what good is that with this huge crowd?” “Tell everyone to sit down,” Jesus said. So they all sat down on the grassy slopes. (The men alone numbered about 5,000.) Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks to God, and distributed them to the people. Afterward he did the same with the fish. And they all ate as much as they wanted. After everyone was full, Jesus told his disciples, “Now gather the leftovers, so that nothing is wasted.” 13 So they picked up the pieces and filled twelve baskets with scraps left by the people who had eaten from the five barley loaves. When the people saw him do this miraculous sign, they exclaimed, “Surely, he is the Prophet we have been expecting!” When Jesus saw that they were ready to force him to be their king, he slipped away into the hills by himself. (John 6:1-15)

The apostles were always worried about things. What if kind of stuff. What if we don’t have enough to eat? What if people don’t like us? What if we get hurt? What if we fail?

There were a lot of people following Jesus around. In fact, there were enough people around him that there came a food shortage. They wanted to hear what he had to say but there just weren’t enough vendors to keep them fed.

And human nature being what it is, you know there had to be a lot of entrepreneurs around to keep everybody fed. But there were just too many people.  This was a huge crowd.

Jesus turned to the apostles and said something like he usually did: perplexing. “Feed everybody.” “We can’t feed everybody! There are too many. We can’t even get that much money together if we tried.”

Andrew points at a kid who had some food probably for sale. He had probably come up to the apostles and offered to sell it. And it is likely that he was one of many that were selling food. I would imagine, though, that he had sold most of it and just had a little left. Andrew said, here’s a little. But there are just too many. What did Jesus expect? They were only human.

Two ideas here. One was that Jesus expected faith. But he also knew that all this was new to the apostles. He knew that they would not be able to do anything and would be confused by his comment. So he would have to show them.

The other idea was that it surprised Jesus constantly that people around him didn’t have the same approach to the power of God that he did. He knew God could just cause this to happen, to just bring food up for hungry people where there was no food before.

I tend to think it may have been a combination of both. Jesus knew the power of God, yet at the same time he was always surprised by the faithlessness of those who were close to him. Not really faithlessness, I suppose, but lack of faith. There is a difference.

But Jesus was ready to just bring up food and the apostles were looking at what they had on hand: a pathetic amount of material for such a large group of people.

So Jesus showed them the power of God. He blessed the loaves and fish the boy had and began to break it up into pieces. And he broke it and broke it and broke it and soon there was a lot of food where there hadn’t been any..

Not only did he feed the crowd, though, he also had twelve baskets left over., one for each other apostles. He was saying, I can feed this huge group of people and still have plenty left over for each of you. I will not let you alone.

Of course, there were problems come from it. Everybody knew he had conjured the food from nowhere and this was a chance to get into something great, as far as they were concerned. Hang around with him and there will be free food. They were ready for an Occupy Jesus rally.

He knew this and ran. He left them because knew they were just looking at him as a free meal ticket. And he would have no part in that.

But one thing he could do, and he showed the apostles this in spades: he could feed everybody and still have some left over.