Spanning the gap

This week's mysterious Bible goodness is from Matthew 14:15-21:

As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”

Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

“We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered.

“Bring them here to me,” he said. And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children.

This is an oldie but a goody. I think everyone teaches on it at some point or another. Jesus, here, has traveled to some remote location, where he's spent a bunch of time ministering to the needs of a crowd of people. It gets to be around dinner time, and nobody delivers pizza out that far, so they need to do something about food. All they have is enough for a couple people, and there are five thousand men, plus women and children. It's a caterer's nightmare.

What can you do with a situation like that? What could you possibly expect would happen? All you can do is tell people you can't help them, that there's no hope of you being able to provide what they need, and then send them on their way. That's not what Jesus did though.

Jesus provided for the people's needs, not just spiritually, but physically. Not that healings and things aren't totally awesome, but people need to have their stomachs filled too. Jesus did that.

What's more cool is that he didn't just snap his fingers and have manna fall from the heavens. This wasn't made up food. This was Jesus taking what little the disciples had to offer, and stretching it to be sufficient to cover everyone. He does that with a lot of things, but here he does it with food, actual food the disciples had with them.

In areas where we're insufficient to do what he requires of us, he can stretch us to be sufficient. In areas where our resources just won't measure up, he can stretch that as well. He can span the gap between what we can do and what he needs.