The Miracle of Giving Without Calculation

In this insightful sermon, Daniel McInnes explores the profound lessons from the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000. He reflects on the importance of giving selflessly and how God's power can multiply our efforts beyond imagination. Through biblical examples, McInnes emphasizes that true giving requires no calculation, only faith.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today, we heard the gospel reading of the feeding of the 5,000. If people don't know any other story from the New Testament, they're going to know the feeding of the 5,000, right? It's in every gospel. Sunday school kids always learn that story. Everyone knows it, right? It is a huge miracle. It's a major miracle in the life of Christ, and so when all four gospels tell about this story, they'll give us something slightly different. I'll bring a few things in as we go.

But this is not the first time that food has been multiplied for people. It's not the first miracle where this has happened. It actually happened in the Old Testament. So we should look back at the Old Testament and see what happened there and what that tells us about what's happening here.

Now in the Old Testament, we have a number of different occasions when food is multiplied. The first one is actually the prophet Elijah. There's a wicked queen Jezebel. This is Ahab, the king of Israel's wife. Jezebel introduces Baal worship to Israel. She basically kills the prophets and does all kinds of terrible things. Elijah goes, because God has told him to go to the king, and says there'll be no rain for three years, and there's no rain.

He goes to a town called Zarephath, and there's a widow there. The widow, because there's no rain, has no food. He says, "Make me some bread to eat and give me some water." She says, "I've got just a little bit of oil and a little bit of wheat. I was going to bake that for myself and my son, and then we're both going to eat it and die." He says, "Just make me the bread." She does. She takes everything that she has, all of the sustenance for her and her son, makes the bread, gives it to Elijah, and miraculously she finds that for the whole period there’s drought with no food, that wheat and oil never runs out. She has enough to last for her and her son for all the time it's needed.

That's the first time. That's only one person. The next occasion is actually with Elijah's disciple Elisha. There's an occasion where someone brings about 20 loaves of bread and some grain to Elisha, and there's about 100 men there who are hungry. Elisha says, "Take that and give it to the men to feed them," to his servant. The servant says, "How is this food going to go for 100 people?" Elisha says, "Just do it. The Lord has said there will be enough for everybody and leftover." That's exactly what happens. Everybody there, the whole 100 people, get fed and there's food left over. You can see how this is very similar to what we see in the gospel here, where everyone is fed and there's food left over.

But it's done on a scale with Jesus. It's done on a scale which is completely different. In the Old Testament, we're talking about 100 people. Here we're talking about 5,000. We're told elsewhere 5,000 men besides the women and the children. There were perhaps 15, maybe even 20,000 people there. All those people were fed and there was food left over.

We're also told that this bread and the fish came from a small boy who has his lunch and gives that in the Gospel of John. He gives everything to the disciples and they take it to Jesus. Jesus multiplies that for everybody there.

In all of these occasions where something is multiplied, what has happened? Something has been brought, something has been given completely. The widow of Zarephath gives all that she has, the oil and the wheat. She gives everything to Elijah. When Elisha says to feed those 100 men, he tells the servant, "Give all the food. Give it all." When we come to feeding the 5,000, the boy gives everything. He gives all of that food and doesn't hold anything back.

We have a few comments in one of the other gospels, I think it's John, where one of the disciples says to Jesus it would take half a year's wages to feed all these people. Jesus is like, "No, no, no, you can, I'll feed them." But the point was there's no calculation. Jesus is saying don't calculate. There's no calculation involved where God is concerned. As long as we give what we have, calculation doesn't come into it. If God can increase food for the widow of Zarephath for 100 people or for 20,000 people, the scale doesn't matter. This is God's power at work.

Part of what we're being shown in this gospel story is that when we give, when we give for the purposes of helping others, when we give of our substance without calculating what could happen or what might return, or anything like that, God can take whatever is given and he can multiply that beyond all possible calculation. There was all those people were fed and there were 12 baskets left over. It was more than just feeding just the people. It was like an overabundance. That's what God does. No calculation is required.

So we see that's how God works. He needs something from us. Our involvement is necessary. We give what we have, but God can multiply that far beyond anything we can possibly imagine.

Another aspect of this story is that when we see the 5,000, what's happening? Jesus could have said, "Bring me the bread and the fish." He could have prayed, and miraculously every single person there suddenly could have had bread and fish sitting on their lap. Could have done that. He's God. Certainly could have done that. What did he do? He actually prayed, broke the bread, and gave it to the disciples to distribute. So their involvement was necessary here as well. This is part of how God works.

We're seeing here a prefiguring of what happens with the Eucharist because, with the Eucharist, Jesus is the priest, but he's also the bread. He's the bread of life. He's the one that's being offered. The disciples are those who are giving that bread of life to the people, all of those who are hungry. You see there's another level here. We're seeing a prefiguring of Christ giving his own body as life for us through the hands of the disciples, through the apostles, and then through the bishops and the priests of the church. That's how it works. God uses people. He uses other people's hands to do this work. So we need to be willing to be used in that way wherever we're called to do so. Either in the giving of what we have or in the giving to other people.

This is not just the context of the Eucharist obviously because that's a job for priests but in every other way. In every other way, it's part of how our Christian life should be. We give and we are part of the distribution. We're part of the giving to others as well.

It can be hard to think about giving. Giving is difficult. In the stories I've spoken about, the people gave everything. If we look at the history of our church, we look at the lives of the saints. There are people who gave away literally everything and then they went and became monks. St. Anthony the Great, I think, did something like that. He went to a church service and heard the sermon saying "give everything" and so he did. He gave everything away and went out and lived in the wilderness. He became the greatest monk, the beginning of monastic life in the Orthodox church. Maybe not the first but he was certainly the greatest in the early church. So we see that people have done that. People of great faith, very faithful people, gave up everything to serve other people.

Now, I'm not sure about you, but I don't think I have that much faith. I don't think I live on that kind of level of faithfulness myself. I can't say that I do. But Metropolitan Anthia Sos when giving a sermon about this said something really important. He said, "Of course, God requires everything of us." But he said, "We faithless, weak people, maybe we can't give everything because of that." But he said, "Okay, but I can think about in my own life all the things that I waste, all the time I waste, all the money that I have, which I don't really need, that I could give away, food, etc., because of our affluence all the extra—all the things we don't need—I could think about that and I could say at the very minimum I should be willing to give the things that I actually don't need."

That's the very least, the minimum is that I could be willing to say, well if I'm not faithful enough to give everything at least I can give out of the overabundance, at least I can give out of the stuff that I really don't need. I think we're being called through this story to give and to think about what do we really need? Over and above that, what can we give to help other people?

Ministering to other people is not just a spiritual thing. We think of spiritual as woo-woo airy fairy things. Spiritual life has very practical outworkings. Very practical outworkings. Including feeding the hungry, giving to the poor, and all those sorts of things. These are all spiritual activities. Giving to the church of our time and our money and so on. All those things. We're being told to do that. We need to think about, okay, what do I really need in this life? What can I give? and to be part of the giving, to be part of the service, to be part of that as our work in the community for the members of the body of Christ, but also those on the outside as well whom we come across.

May the Lord help us to look at our own lives, look at our own resources, and be thoughtful about what we really need and what we can actually give, to give abundantly. Because when we give with the purpose of helping other people in the service of God, God comes and he does with whatever we give far more than we can possibly ever imagine is possible.

So may the Lord help us to do so. Amen.