© 2026 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—they are the four accounts of the one gospel. Together, they all tell the same story—the unified good news of Jesus Christ—but each evangelist tells it in his own way. Writing in the second century, about a hundred fifty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Irenaeus of Lyons stressed, “It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are.” Those groups of so-called Christians who remain devoted to only one account of the good news, Irenaeus wrote—like the Ebionites who only read Matthew or the Valentinians who only like John—end up “totally in error” because the true gospel of Jesus Christ is the four-pillared foundation of the world, breathed and bound together by one Spirit (Against Heresies, III.11.7-8).
You probably know that the first three gospel accounts—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are fairly similar to each other. They are called the “synoptic” gospel accounts because they share the “same” (syn) “view” (optic). They share most of the same stories—so many, in fact, that it’s usually more interesting to note the relatively few episodes of Jesus’ life that are found in only one of them. John, on the other hand, does something very different. Instead of giving us the breadth of Jesus’ teachings and miracles, he focuses on a handful of encounters, which he mines deeply for their theological significance. It’s like the difference between going to Crystal Bridges and walking through the entire collection versus deciding to spend all day looking at the paintings in one gallery.
One of the reasons today’s gospel lesson is so interesting is that it is one of only six stories that are found in all four gospel accounts, and, if you lump the stories from Holy Week into one shared encounter, the feeding of the five thousand is one of only three moments from Jesus’ life that is recalled by all four evangelists: Jesus’ baptism, the sequence of events surrounding his death and resurrection, and today’s miracle story. Not even Christmas or the sharing of bread and wine as Jesus’s body and blood make it into all four accounts. This story, in other words, is as important to the early Christian tradition as any other. So central was it to the life of the early church that all four evangelists agree on almost every detail: the wilderness setting, the number of loaves and fish, the number of people who were fed, and the same number of baskets of leftovers.
What if this story became the basis for our principal act of worship? Sara wondered aloud about that in staff meeting this week. What if the language of this miracle formed the basis for our eucharistic prayer rather than the words Jesus used at the Last Supper—words that don’t even make it into all four gospel accounts? How different would church be? Would we insist on going outside and reclining on the grass for a picnic-style meal? Would all of us eat until we were full instead of snacking on a morsel of bread? What would the altar guild do with twelve baskets of leftovers? And would we include fish every time we gathered for this sacred meal?
Although I don’t think the feeding of the five thousand draws us into the death and resurrection of Jesus as fully as receiving his body and blood in the bread and wine made holy, I do recognize in this miracle the same gift of life and salvation that Jesus offers us through his death and resurrection. In each gospel account, this story is presented as one in which Jesus rescues God’s people by giving them what they don’t have on their own and what they couldn’t have had without him.
Although the miraculous manufacture of sufficient bread and fish for the multitude is itself a statement of Jesus’ power, the establishment of a crisis as the setting from which that miracle arises is just as important to the gospel tradition. A great crowd of people has come out to see Jesus. He is curing the sick and teaching the people about God’s kingdom. As the hour grows late and the impending crisis approaches, the disciples urge Jesus to send the people away. They know that the crowd won’t disperse until Jesus takes a break, and they know that five thousand hungry people who had hurried out to see him without thinking to grab provisions for themselves was a problem they couldn’t solve. “This is a deserted place,” they remind their teacher. “Send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”
But that’s easier said than done. Have you ever walked into a busy restaurant at the peak of dinner service and asked the host for a table for thirty people? This was five thousand people in the middle of nowhere, and the hour was late. There wasn’t enough food in the nearby villages for them to get enough to eat. The disciples didn’t want the people’s problem to become their problem, so they urged Jesus to send them away—to push the looming crisis back onto those who would be hungry. But Jesus didn’t see it like that. “They need not go away,” he said. “You give them something to eat.”
In all four gospel accounts, Jesus places upon the disciples the responsibility for feeding all the hungry people, and, in all four gospel accounts, they come up short. “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish,” Matthew recalls the disciples saying to Jesus. We don’t have enough. There isn’t enough. We can’t fix this problem. Make it go away. Make them go away.
When the Jewish philosopher Philo explained why Moses had led God’s people out into the wilderness before feeding them with manna from heaven, he wrote that it was so the people would know that it wasn’t Moses who had scrounged together enough food for the multitude but so that the people would know that God alone had fed them. Thus, when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai and delivered God’s commandments to the people, they would know that Moses hadn’t come up with the law on his own—that God himself had spoken to God’s people (Life of Moses, I.15.87).
The four evangelists don’t preserve for us this miraculous feeding because they want us to be inspired to share what we have with each other until everyone has enough. They give us this story because they want us to know that the only way we will ever have enough is if Jesus is the one who provides it. Jesus is the one who sustains God’s people. Jesus is the one who feeds them in the wilderness. Jesus is the rock from which the water flowed. He is the bread of life that came down from heaven. He is the one who leads them from the deserted places into the abundance of God’s healing and wholeness. And he is the one who then says to us, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
For us, those words represent a crisis, but for God they are an opportunity for salvation. For those who stock the Little Free Pantry and the Friendly Fridge, there is never enough. There is no amount of food prepared for Community Meals or Sunday Suppers that can satisfy the hunger of our neighbors, even when we have leftovers. There is no food bank or feeding program that can give the people what they truly need. Yet Jesus tells us to feed them because he knows that, in him, something else—something new—is possible.
Let me be clear: although the sustenance Jesus gives to the five thousand is a metaphor for spiritual nourishment and the salvation of our souls, the provision Jesus has in mind is in no way separable from the filling of empty bellies. Jesus does not feed the five thousand simply to display his power to turn a meager offering into an abundant feast or to foreshadow his place at the head of God’s messianic banquet. He feeds them because the crisis of the moment is both physical and spiritual—literal and metaphorical. And he calls us to feed others in the same way.
The crisis we face in this world and in our lives is both physical and spiritual. God’s vision for the salvation of God’s people is not a ticket to heaven on an empty stomach, nor is it a full belly without hope beyond this life. Somehow, we Christians have allowed our hope in God to become either one or the other—either concern for the life to come or concern for lives we have now. But Jesus shows us that it’s always both.
Jesus didn’t come to the earth to inspire us to be more generous, teaching us a way of life in which our best efforts are enough to save us. He came and died and was raised to new life so that our greed and hunger and fear of not having enough could be put to death in his body, and to raise up in the place of what has died within us his new resurrection life. In that Spirit-led, Spirit-filled resurrection life, there is an abundance, and those who are no longer defined by or bound to the limitations and insufficiencies of this world are free to share it with all people.
In God’s kingdom, bread and wine and milk have no price. Those without money are free to come and eat whatever they need. Our world is as far away from that reality as it could possibly be, and the only way it will ever change is God’s transforming love. That kingdom is not possible without Jesus because there is no amount of good intention or inspired generosity that fix us until we have died with Christ and been raised to new life and become channels through which God brings that kingdom to the earth.
Those who share Holy Communion offer themselves to God by participating in the death and resurrection of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. If we die with Christ and are raised with him in the waters of Baptism, Communion is the spiritual meal through which that identity is renewed in us. This sacramental encounter of bread and wine is what renews our ability to accept and respond faithfully to Jesus’s command to feed the world in his name—to ensure that no stomach is empty and no soul remains malnourished. “You give them something to eat,” he tells us. And he is the food we give them.