This Woman Is Bold
McConnellsburg Lutheran Parish
8/20/2017
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 15: 21-28
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
It is not right to give the children's bread to the dogs.
But this woman is bold. Her response to being ignored was to keep on asking. Her response to overhearing that He came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel was to fall down and worship Him. Her prayer for her daughter's demon possession had been distilled down to simply, “Lord, help me.” Then He says, “It is not right to give the children's bread to the dogs.”
But she is bold. She does not quit. She has the promises. She has the Scriptures. She waits on the Lord, for Him to show His mercy, to bare His arm, to reveal Himself. She does not want the children's bread. She wants more. She wants His bread.
“Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the Lord's table.” Put me in your lap, Lord. Scratch behind my ear. Throw the ball. And let me eat what falls from the loaf of which You eat. I want a part of Your bread.
Better to be a doorkeeper in the House of God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. Better to be a dog in the home of the Lord than to be the play thing of demons.
Now, some would say that we should not see in this bread anything of the Holy Communion. They tell us that every instance of bread or wine in the Scriptures is not a sacrament, does not bestow the forgiveness of sins, and is not the Body and Blood of Jesus. Sometimes, they say, bread is just bread.
Is that so? Is bread, from the perspective of heaven, ever “bread?” Does God ever feed us, provide for all that we need to support this body and life, in a casual, even accidental way? Is there any providence from heaven, any feeding, any love or mercy of God apart from the Body and Blood of Jesus crucified and raised?
No. Everything goes back to the cross and the Holy Communion brings the cross back to us.
But this isn't the feeding of the five thousand or turning water into wine. There is no actual bread even as there are no actual dogs. These are metaphors. There is only the Lord, His disciples, the woman, her daughter, and the demons. The demons are not metaphors. They are real, and so is the daughter sorely vexed and the mother full of fear. Jesus is not a metaphor either, nor are His disciples. They are real. They are there.
The Lord acts strangely. What the disciples want of Him, I do not know. They ask Him to release her or send her away because she is crying after them. Is this because they are annoyed, tired of the cries? Or are they embarrassed that He ignores her? Are they moved by compassion? Does His silence, His ignoring of her valid cry, concern them? Are they helpless and heartbroken or just annoyed? I don't know, but I suspect it is a complicated mixture of things. In this, at least, I feel at one with them. How many times has it seemed to me as though the Lord ignored the prayers of people sorely in need? In any case, the apostles are not metaphors. But they are helpless. And though they are not metaphors they are prototypes of the Ministry. They can't do a thing for the woman or her daughter, who are prototypes for the laity. The apostles and the woman stand before demons as helpless as we stand before cancer, war, and poverty. All they can do is pray.
But this is the Lord's intent. He is the fulfillment of all the prophecies and types, of all the hopes and dreams of the world, of all creation. His intent is that His pastors would pray and that the people would pray, that they would come to Him with the boldness and confidence of dear children asking their dear father. The woman puts the apostles to shame. She is better at prayer than they are. She is bold. She is confident. She wants not the children's bread, she wants to share in His bread.
Is this only a metaphor? Does she really mean only something other than bread? She wants more than bread, but she also wants bread. She wants to eat with Jesus, to be in fellowship with Jesus. Her prayer has grown from, “Have mercy on me for my daughter is possessed by a demon”; to “help me”; to “share Your bread with me.”
In asking for bread, is she actually asking for what Our Lord gives in the Lord's Supper? The bread we break is His Holy Body, crucified and risen, given to us to eat with our mouths to forgive our sins. Doesn't her plea for bread have something to do with how the Lord helps us, has mercy upon us, delivers us and our children from demons? Of course. Then the bread that our Lord speaks of is certainly Holy Communion.
But here is really why it is Holy Communion, not simply because she mentions bread, but because the Lord is constant and unchanging. He did not one day decide to try something new and invent the Holy Sacraments. This is how He always is, always interacts with His people. He feeds. The sacrifices were mainly meat for eating. The Mannah in the dessert was also food. But man lives not by bread alone, even by Mannah alone, but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God. So the Lord does more than feed the Body. He provides for the soul through the body. You can't wash a soul. So you wash the body with water and the Name of God and the soul is thereby washed. We call that baptism. You can't touch the soul or feed it apart from the body, so Jesus feeds our bodies with physical food that conveys food for the soul, with what the soul needs to be strengthened and cleansed. He does not sit in heaven and think nice things toward us. He actually enters into creation. He speaks through human words, in a human voice. He feeds with bread and wine. He washes with water.
Food is not a metaphor. It is real. So is God's grace. God's Word has taken up flesh to be our Savior, to walk among us, to suffer as us, to be punished and killed in our place. He has accomplished what He was sent to do. He has pulled us out of Hell that we would have communion with Him. He enters into us by way of the mouth, feeds us with Himself and thereby consumes us, makes us a part of Him, while taking residence in us. It is not the children's bread He gives. That would not be right for us, mere dogs, Gentiles. But He came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He is not lying when He says that. So the woman must be transformed. She must join the house of Israel, become a son of Abraham, an heir of promise. The Lord does this. He transforms her through His Word. But still He gives more than the childrens’ bread, to her and to us. For He gives out of His affection and generosity. He gives Himself, the Bread come down from heaven, the Bread of Life.
He hears the woman's prayer. He gives Himself to her. The demons depart, banished. He hears your prayer as well. He gives Himself to you in His Bread. The demons cannot have you. They depart. You, O House of Israel, are His. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“True Satisfaction”
McConnellsburg Lutheran Parish
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
8/6/2017
Matthew 14: 13-21
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
In our Gospel lesson today, we hear St. Matthew’s account about a miraculous feeding of a large crowd along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, an event commonly known as The Feeding of the Five Thousand. We know, however, that a much larger number was fed, because the Gospel writers record that those who ate included 5,000 men, and Matthew explicitly tells us that this did not include the women and children who were present.
Jesus and the disciples are attempting to go off on their own, to get away from the crowds. The Feeding of the Five Thousand coincides with Jesus receiving news of the execution of John the Baptist. It is also about the time the disciples have returned from their mission to drive out demons and cure diseases.
It’s little wonder, then, that both Jesus and His closest friends could use a little time alone. John’s death by beheading would have been gruesome and troubling news for all of them. The disciples were probably physically exhausted, too, from all of their preaching, and from meeting the demands of the many they had encountered along their way. So Jesus withdraws by boat to a “desolate place,” as it is described.
But His solitude is not to be. Eager, desperate people follow Jesus and His disciples out to this “desolate place.” They are gathered on the grassy hillside near the shore, eager to hear the words of Jesus and to have their physical ailments healed.
In Matthew’s account, as in the others, both Jesus and the disciples express or demonstrate concern and compassion for the large crowd. Jesus does it by preaching about the kingdom of God, and healing the sick. But now the day is spent, and the sun begins to set. People have come a long way from where they usually dwell in order to be with Jesus. The disciples then demonstrate some concern for the crowd as well. They suggest to the Lord that the people be dismissed to seek food, and perhaps even shelter for the night.
Jesus will have none of that. He knows that they have come to see and hear Him. They have journeyed a great distance on foot to have their hearts and minds filled with the wisdom and encouragement of His words, and to have their bodies made whole by the power and healing of His touch. They aren’t likely to voluntarily walk away from Him, even to quiet the rumble of their empty stomachs.
The crowd need not go away, Jesus says. Instead, the Savior issues a gentle challenge to those who are His closest followers: “You give them something to eat.” It’s a challenge they aren’t up to, any more than you or I would be. And just like you and I do when we’re faced with difficulties—physical, emotional, or spiritual—instead of turning to the Lord and trusting that He will meet all our needs, the disciples make excuses: “It’s a long way into town to get food.” “We don’t have enough money.” “The food we have here is barely enough for us.”
Such statements are true, of course. It was a long way to the towns and villages. They almost certainly didn’t have enough money to buy food for 5,000 people. And the five loaves and two fish wouldn’t have been much of a dinner for 13 grown men. They had no doubt worked up quite an appetite themselves in the course of the day’s travels and activities.
It’s here that Jesus does what Jesus alone always does: He takes charge of a bad situation, and makes everything not only good, but beyond good. When the disciples say, “We have only five loaves here, and two fish,” Jesus replies, “Bring them here to me.” It is as if He is telling them, “You might not think very highly of these small, seemingly ordinary gifts of God. You might think them inadequate for the task. But bring them to me, for I’m going to do something remarkable with the ordinary.”
Jesus took the loaves and the fish, and He looked up to heaven and spoke to His heavenly Father over them, and suddenly—in the speaking of His words—where there had been inadequacy, there was fullness. Where there had been insufficiency, there was abundance. So much abundance that—after 5,000 men had eaten their fill; after all the women and all the children had taken everything that they needed and wanted—there remained plenty. Indeed, there remained far more at the end than what they had even started with!
Jesus had taken the ordinary, spoken His word, and the miraculous had happened. People who had been hungry had been fed, it’s true. But more than that, they had been satisfied.
That’s a concept that is somehow foreign to many of us today. Fueled by the competitiveness of our society, encouraged by the murmurs and shouts of advertisers, dazzled by the extravagances of wealth that the media celebrates, being satisfied isn’t something we’ve come to either expect, or accept. Instead, we have individually and collectively developed an insatiable appetite in nearly every area of life.
Our employers demand greater and greater productivity to stay ahead of other organizations. Our families and our jobs both want more time than we have to give them. Our parents demand better grades, better performance on the field or on the stage, cleaner rooms, cleaner language.
We want our minds to have less stress; our bodies to have less weight, more muscle, and just the right contours. Our egos seek out clothes with the right labels, houses with the right zip code, cars with the right hood ornament, vacations to the right destination. We’re never satisfied, and others are never satisfied with us.
Is it any wonder that we’re frazzled? Is it any wonder that we feel worn out, that we feel stressed, that we feel that we have lost control? We live unsatisfying lives, among others who live unsatisfying lives. We constantly are looking for something beyond what we have, that little “edge” that will get us past that gnawing feeling that what we’ve got now isn’t quite all there is, or isn’t all it should be. If ever there was a people whose motto was: “Bigger, Faster, Better, More,” it’s right here in 21st century America.
You’ve tried, and you’ve tried, but perhaps it’s time to stop chasing the illusion of worldly satisfaction.
Take a step back. Take a deep breath. Sit down on the grassy hillside. Sit in the house of God. Kneel before the cross of Jesus. Be still. Be quiet. Listen to the words of God. You’ll be reminded that you are never going to be able to fulfill all your own wishes and desires. You will never meet all the expectations and demands of others. You most certainly will never satisfy the perfection which the Law of God demands in order to be reconciled with the perfection of His holiness.
That might sound rather defeatist, or at least discouraging, and if that’s all we hear, it would be. But Jesus doesn’t leave you sitting on a figurative hillside, tired and hungry. Jesus became incarnate and came into the world for you for the same purpose He came to the people gathered that day on the shores of the Sea of Galilee: Jesus comes to provide true and complete satisfaction.
Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the means which God chose to address the great chasm that had been torn open between man and God by sin. That infinite, humanly unbridgeable gap is what causes the alienation and dissatisfaction we experience with others, with God, and sometimes even with ourselves.
In sin, we are never truly satisfied with anything. Instead, we look for ways to be satisfied that can really only dull the pain, avoid the confrontation, or substitute false sources of satisfaction.
The eating of the greatly-multiplied loaves and fish on a Galilean hillside may have satisfied the appetite of the crowd that followed Jesus that day long ago, but it was the shedding of the blood of the one-and-only-begotten Son of God on another hillside in Judea several months later that satisfied the wrath of God against the sin of you and all people—not a one-day or temporary satisfaction, but a satisfaction of the condemnation of the Law for all time.
That satisfaction is complete. It is eternal. It is perfect. Most important, that satisfaction of God is your satisfaction, also. It was done on your behalf, and if God is now satisfied with you for the sake of Christ, then you most certainly can be satisfied with Him and all He has done and all He provides. In Christ, all that you need has already been accomplished and given.
And now, when we gather together as God’s chosen and favored ones, it is not simply to be reminded of that accomplishment. Rather, in coming together here in this place, we hear the
declaration of His forgiveness. We are immersed in the same Word which accompanied the waters of our own baptisms. We are fed at the altar with food more divine and powerful than miraculous fish and loaves. In all these things, we have that accomplishment—that satisfaction—applied and distributed to us, as real and as fresh as the first time, every time.
We look instead to the lasting satisfaction—a satisfaction that meets the needs of both man and God—in the miracle of the Death of the One on the cross. It is there where the divine power and the compassion of Jesus come into sharpest focus and have their greatest implication for your life. It is there, where the living bread of heaven was broken and bled for you, that you will find all you need for the complete and eternal satisfaction—and salvation—of your body, mind, and spirit. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
McConnellsburg Lutheran Parish
8/20/2017
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 15: 21-28
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
It is not right to give the children's bread to the dogs.
But this woman is bold. Her response to being ignored was to keep on asking. Her response to overhearing that He came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel was to fall down and worship Him. Her prayer for her daughter's demon possession had been distilled down to simply, “Lord, help me.” Then He says, “It is not right to give the children's bread to the dogs.”
But she is bold. She does not quit. She has the promises. She has the Scriptures. She waits on the Lord, for Him to show His mercy, to bare His arm, to reveal Himself. She does not want the children's bread. She wants more. She wants His bread.
“Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the Lord's table.” Put me in your lap, Lord. Scratch behind my ear. Throw the ball. And let me eat what falls from the loaf of which You eat. I want a part of Your bread.
Better to be a doorkeeper in the House of God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. Better to be a dog in the home of the Lord than to be the play thing of demons.
Now, some would say that we should not see in this bread anything of the Holy Communion. They tell us that every instance of bread or wine in the Scriptures is not a sacrament, does not bestow the forgiveness of sins, and is not the Body and Blood of Jesus. Sometimes, they say, bread is just bread.
Is that so? Is bread, from the perspective of heaven, ever “bread?” Does God ever feed us, provide for all that we need to support this body and life, in a casual, even accidental way? Is there any providence from heaven, any feeding, any love or mercy of God apart from the Body and Blood of Jesus crucified and raised?
No. Everything goes back to the cross and the Holy Communion brings the cross back to us.
But this isn't the feeding of the five thousand or turning water into wine. There is no actual bread even as there are no actual dogs. These are metaphors. There is only the Lord, His disciples, the woman, her daughter, and the demons. The demons are not metaphors. They are real, and so is the daughter sorely vexed and the mother full of fear. Jesus is not a metaphor either, nor are His disciples. They are real. They are there.
The Lord acts strangely. What the disciples want of Him, I do not know. They ask Him to release her or send her away because she is crying after them. Is this because they are annoyed, tired of the cries? Or are they embarrassed that He ignores her? Are they moved by compassion? Does His silence, His ignoring of her valid cry, concern them? Are they helpless and heartbroken or just annoyed? I don't know, but I suspect it is a complicated mixture of things. In this, at least, I feel at one with them. How many times has it seemed to me as though the Lord ignored the prayers of people sorely in need? In any case, the apostles are not metaphors. But they are helpless. And though they are not metaphors they are prototypes of the Ministry. They can't do a thing for the woman or her daughter, who are prototypes for the laity. The apostles and the woman stand before demons as helpless as we stand before cancer, war, and poverty. All they can do is pray.
But this is the Lord's intent. He is the fulfillment of all the prophecies and types, of all the hopes and dreams of the world, of all creation. His intent is that His pastors would pray and that the people would pray, that they would come to Him with the boldness and confidence of dear children asking their dear father. The woman puts the apostles to shame. She is better at prayer than they are. She is bold. She is confident. She wants not the children's bread, she wants to share in His bread.
Is this only a metaphor? Does she really mean only something other than bread? She wants more than bread, but she also wants bread. She wants to eat with Jesus, to be in fellowship with Jesus. Her prayer has grown from, “Have mercy on me for my daughter is possessed by a demon”; to “help me”; to “share Your bread with me.”
In asking for bread, is she actually asking for what Our Lord gives in the Lord's Supper? The bread we break is His Holy Body, crucified and risen, given to us to eat with our mouths to forgive our sins. Doesn't her plea for bread have something to do with how the Lord helps us, has mercy upon us, delivers us and our children from demons? Of course. Then the bread that our Lord speaks of is certainly Holy Communion.
But here is really why it is Holy Communion, not simply because she mentions bread, but because the Lord is constant and unchanging. He did not one day decide to try something new and invent the Holy Sacraments. This is how He always is, always interacts with His people. He feeds. The sacrifices were mainly meat for eating. The Mannah in the dessert was also food. But man lives not by bread alone, even by Mannah alone, but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God. So the Lord does more than feed the Body. He provides for the soul through the body. You can't wash a soul. So you wash the body with water and the Name of God and the soul is thereby washed. We call that baptism. You can't touch the soul or feed it apart from the body, so Jesus feeds our bodies with physical food that conveys food for the soul, with what the soul needs to be strengthened and cleansed. He does not sit in heaven and think nice things toward us. He actually enters into creation. He speaks through human words, in a human voice. He feeds with bread and wine. He washes with water.
Food is not a metaphor. It is real. So is God's grace. God's Word has taken up flesh to be our Savior, to walk among us, to suffer as us, to be punished and killed in our place. He has accomplished what He was sent to do. He has pulled us out of Hell that we would have communion with Him. He enters into us by way of the mouth, feeds us with Himself and thereby consumes us, makes us a part of Him, while taking residence in us. It is not the children's bread He gives. That would not be right for us, mere dogs, Gentiles. But He came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He is not lying when He says that. So the woman must be transformed. She must join the house of Israel, become a son of Abraham, an heir of promise. The Lord does this. He transforms her through His Word. But still He gives more than the childrens’ bread, to her and to us. For He gives out of His affection and generosity. He gives Himself, the Bread come down from heaven, the Bread of Life.
He hears the woman's prayer. He gives Himself to her. The demons depart, banished. He hears your prayer as well. He gives Himself to you in His Bread. The demons cannot have you. They depart. You, O House of Israel, are His. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“True Satisfaction”
McConnellsburg Lutheran Parish
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
8/6/2017
Matthew 14: 13-21
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
In our Gospel lesson today, we hear St. Matthew’s account about a miraculous feeding of a large crowd along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, an event commonly known as The Feeding of the Five Thousand. We know, however, that a much larger number was fed, because the Gospel writers record that those who ate included 5,000 men, and Matthew explicitly tells us that this did not include the women and children who were present.
Jesus and the disciples are attempting to go off on their own, to get away from the crowds. The Feeding of the Five Thousand coincides with Jesus receiving news of the execution of John the Baptist. It is also about the time the disciples have returned from their mission to drive out demons and cure diseases.
It’s little wonder, then, that both Jesus and His closest friends could use a little time alone. John’s death by beheading would have been gruesome and troubling news for all of them. The disciples were probably physically exhausted, too, from all of their preaching, and from meeting the demands of the many they had encountered along their way. So Jesus withdraws by boat to a “desolate place,” as it is described.
But His solitude is not to be. Eager, desperate people follow Jesus and His disciples out to this “desolate place.” They are gathered on the grassy hillside near the shore, eager to hear the words of Jesus and to have their physical ailments healed.
In Matthew’s account, as in the others, both Jesus and the disciples express or demonstrate concern and compassion for the large crowd. Jesus does it by preaching about the kingdom of God, and healing the sick. But now the day is spent, and the sun begins to set. People have come a long way from where they usually dwell in order to be with Jesus. The disciples then demonstrate some concern for the crowd as well. They suggest to the Lord that the people be dismissed to seek food, and perhaps even shelter for the night.
Jesus will have none of that. He knows that they have come to see and hear Him. They have journeyed a great distance on foot to have their hearts and minds filled with the wisdom and encouragement of His words, and to have their bodies made whole by the power and healing of His touch. They aren’t likely to voluntarily walk away from Him, even to quiet the rumble of their empty stomachs.
The crowd need not go away, Jesus says. Instead, the Savior issues a gentle challenge to those who are His closest followers: “You give them something to eat.” It’s a challenge they aren’t up to, any more than you or I would be. And just like you and I do when we’re faced with difficulties—physical, emotional, or spiritual—instead of turning to the Lord and trusting that He will meet all our needs, the disciples make excuses: “It’s a long way into town to get food.” “We don’t have enough money.” “The food we have here is barely enough for us.”
Such statements are true, of course. It was a long way to the towns and villages. They almost certainly didn’t have enough money to buy food for 5,000 people. And the five loaves and two fish wouldn’t have been much of a dinner for 13 grown men. They had no doubt worked up quite an appetite themselves in the course of the day’s travels and activities.
It’s here that Jesus does what Jesus alone always does: He takes charge of a bad situation, and makes everything not only good, but beyond good. When the disciples say, “We have only five loaves here, and two fish,” Jesus replies, “Bring them here to me.” It is as if He is telling them, “You might not think very highly of these small, seemingly ordinary gifts of God. You might think them inadequate for the task. But bring them to me, for I’m going to do something remarkable with the ordinary.”
Jesus took the loaves and the fish, and He looked up to heaven and spoke to His heavenly Father over them, and suddenly—in the speaking of His words—where there had been inadequacy, there was fullness. Where there had been insufficiency, there was abundance. So much abundance that—after 5,000 men had eaten their fill; after all the women and all the children had taken everything that they needed and wanted—there remained plenty. Indeed, there remained far more at the end than what they had even started with!
Jesus had taken the ordinary, spoken His word, and the miraculous had happened. People who had been hungry had been fed, it’s true. But more than that, they had been satisfied.
That’s a concept that is somehow foreign to many of us today. Fueled by the competitiveness of our society, encouraged by the murmurs and shouts of advertisers, dazzled by the extravagances of wealth that the media celebrates, being satisfied isn’t something we’ve come to either expect, or accept. Instead, we have individually and collectively developed an insatiable appetite in nearly every area of life.
Our employers demand greater and greater productivity to stay ahead of other organizations. Our families and our jobs both want more time than we have to give them. Our parents demand better grades, better performance on the field or on the stage, cleaner rooms, cleaner language.
We want our minds to have less stress; our bodies to have less weight, more muscle, and just the right contours. Our egos seek out clothes with the right labels, houses with the right zip code, cars with the right hood ornament, vacations to the right destination. We’re never satisfied, and others are never satisfied with us.
Is it any wonder that we’re frazzled? Is it any wonder that we feel worn out, that we feel stressed, that we feel that we have lost control? We live unsatisfying lives, among others who live unsatisfying lives. We constantly are looking for something beyond what we have, that little “edge” that will get us past that gnawing feeling that what we’ve got now isn’t quite all there is, or isn’t all it should be. If ever there was a people whose motto was: “Bigger, Faster, Better, More,” it’s right here in 21st century America.
You’ve tried, and you’ve tried, but perhaps it’s time to stop chasing the illusion of worldly satisfaction.
Take a step back. Take a deep breath. Sit down on the grassy hillside. Sit in the house of God. Kneel before the cross of Jesus. Be still. Be quiet. Listen to the words of God. You’ll be reminded that you are never going to be able to fulfill all your own wishes and desires. You will never meet all the expectations and demands of others. You most certainly will never satisfy the perfection which the Law of God demands in order to be reconciled with the perfection of His holiness.
That might sound rather defeatist, or at least discouraging, and if that’s all we hear, it would be. But Jesus doesn’t leave you sitting on a figurative hillside, tired and hungry. Jesus became incarnate and came into the world for you for the same purpose He came to the people gathered that day on the shores of the Sea of Galilee: Jesus comes to provide true and complete satisfaction.
Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the means which God chose to address the great chasm that had been torn open between man and God by sin. That infinite, humanly unbridgeable gap is what causes the alienation and dissatisfaction we experience with others, with God, and sometimes even with ourselves.
In sin, we are never truly satisfied with anything. Instead, we look for ways to be satisfied that can really only dull the pain, avoid the confrontation, or substitute false sources of satisfaction.
The eating of the greatly-multiplied loaves and fish on a Galilean hillside may have satisfied the appetite of the crowd that followed Jesus that day long ago, but it was the shedding of the blood of the one-and-only-begotten Son of God on another hillside in Judea several months later that satisfied the wrath of God against the sin of you and all people—not a one-day or temporary satisfaction, but a satisfaction of the condemnation of the Law for all time.
That satisfaction is complete. It is eternal. It is perfect. Most important, that satisfaction of God is your satisfaction, also. It was done on your behalf, and if God is now satisfied with you for the sake of Christ, then you most certainly can be satisfied with Him and all He has done and all He provides. In Christ, all that you need has already been accomplished and given.
And now, when we gather together as God’s chosen and favored ones, it is not simply to be reminded of that accomplishment. Rather, in coming together here in this place, we hear the
declaration of His forgiveness. We are immersed in the same Word which accompanied the waters of our own baptisms. We are fed at the altar with food more divine and powerful than miraculous fish and loaves. In all these things, we have that accomplishment—that satisfaction—applied and distributed to us, as real and as fresh as the first time, every time.
We look instead to the lasting satisfaction—a satisfaction that meets the needs of both man and God—in the miracle of the Death of the One on the cross. It is there where the divine power and the compassion of Jesus come into sharpest focus and have their greatest implication for your life. It is there, where the living bread of heaven was broken and bled for you, that you will find all you need for the complete and eternal satisfaction—and salvation—of your body, mind, and spirit. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.