Five Loaves and Somebody Else's Crowd

Grass, a slope, and about two hundred people sitting in groups because it is that kind of afternoon and somebody has organized it well.

She is at the edge with a basket she brought because you bring something.

The need in front of her is enormous. Not this afternoon. Generally. She reads the same things everybody reads and she knows about the families in that estate and she knows the numbers because somebody stood up in February and gave them.

And what she has is one hour a week.

That is the honest audit. She has a job and two parents who are not well in different ways and a house that runs on her, and there is precisely one hour on a Wednesday that is genuinely hers and does not have anybody in it.

One hour, against that.

She has done the arithmetic and it is embarrassing. Sixty minutes into a thing measured in hundreds. It would be, she has decided, faintly ridiculous to offer it. It would look like a gesture. It would look like a woman wanting to be seen doing something.

So she has offered nothing.

For about a year now she has read the appeals and thought about the hour and put it away, every time, on the grounds that it is not worth putting on the table.

And this afternoon somebody said, from the front, the thing about the loaves, and she has heard that story about four hundred times, and something in it caught on the way past and she has not been able to shake it.

If you have something small and have decided it is too small to be worth offering, you know that slope. And you know the exact reasoning: what I have is so far under the size of the need that producing it would be about me rather than about them.

The word, and then a boy at the front of a crowd

Let me sit at the edge with you and say the plain thing while everybody else is eating.

The problem is not the hour. An hour is an hour and it is real.

The problem is that you have done a piece of arithmetic that looks like humility and functions like a wall, and you have been behind it for a year, and nobody has ever checked the working.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean having enough to matter. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. It is on you at the edge of that field with sixty minutes in your hand.

Now the verse, and I want you to notice who says it and how.

There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many?John 6:9

That is Andrew. And he says both halves in one sentence: here is what there is, and it is nothing against this.

Andrew has already done your arithmetic. He does it out loud, in the text, in front of everybody, and he is right. Five and two against five thousand is not a rounding error, it is a joke.

And he mentions it anyway.

That is the thing I want you to see. The disciple who thinks it is absurd is the one who brings it up, and if he had done what you have done for a year, which is decide privately that it was not worth mentioning, there is no feeding in that chapter.

You have something worth mentioning even by somebody who thinks it is absurd, and the mentioning is the whole hinge of that passage. John 6:9 has Andrew state the smallness and produce it in the same sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who prompts a person toward the mentioning rather than the arithmetic.

Barley loaves, and what the boy thought he had

Now the loaves themselves, because John is specific in a way the other Gospels are not.

Barley loaves. John says barley, and nobody says barley by accident.

Barley was the cheap grain. It was what you ate when wheat was not available to you. A barley loaf in that period was a poor person's bread and everybody reading that in the first century would have known it instantly.

So the item on the table is not just small, it is common. It is not a rare thing that happened to be tiny. It is the ordinary bread of somebody who was not well off, carried by a boy who almost certainly brought it because his mother put it in a bag that morning.

He did not bring it as an offering. He brought it as his lunch.

You are holding an ordinary thing that was never packed as an offering, and that is exactly what was on the table in that chapter. John 6:9 names barley on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in what is common and already in somebody's hands rather than in what is set aside as special.

And notice the arithmetic once more, because it never gets solved.

Jesus does not tell Andrew he is wrong. He does not say five is more than you think. The sum stands. Five and two against five thousand is exactly as absurd after the multiplication as before it, and the twelve baskets at the end are not an argument about the original figures.

What changes is whose hands it is in.

You have the sum unchanged and the hands changed, and only one of those was ever your part. John 6:11 has Jesus take the loaves and give thanks and distribute, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work in a thing once it has been put down rather than requiring it to be adequate first.

What I will not tell you about the hour

Now, plainly, because this is where sites like this one start selling something.

I am not going to tell you your hour multiplies. That is exactly the sentence that would turn this into a transaction, and it is the one thing this site will not do. There is no return, no multiplication promised to you, no suggestion that giving sixty minutes generates anything for you or for anybody.

I am not going to tell you that if you offer it, God will use it mightily. He may. I have no access to that.

And I am not going to tell you the estate gets better. I do not know and neither does the woman who gave the numbers in February.

What I am telling you is much smaller and it is the only honest thing available: one hour is a real hour, and an hour that is offered is on the table, and an hour that is kept back on the grounds of arithmetic is a wall with a good coat of paint on it.

You have an hour that is real rather than adequate, and adequate was never a category anybody applied at that field. John 6 records the smallness and the offering in the same breath without resolving the math, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in what is actually handed over rather than in what somebody calculated first.

And do not tell anybody. Not the person you offer it to, beyond the practical arrangement, and not anybody else. Your worry about looking like a woman who wants to be seen doing something has an easy answer, which is not to be seen.