A Diverse Dinner Party, Pt. 1

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Jesus famously fed a crowd of 5,000 men with 5 loaves of bread and two fishes.  Then just a couple chapters later, Mark tells us that Jesus encountered another group of hungry people.  This time he fed 4,000.  Pastor Nick Gatzke explains what’s different about these miracles and three valuable lessons we can learn from them.

I wonder if you’ve ever flown first class on an airplane. I’m happy to say that I’ve been afforded the opportunity to fly first class just one time. Flying first class is quite an experience. At that time, when you walk onto the airplane, they would offer you champagne or orange juice. And as you settle into that large, comfortable leather chair, you realize just how different this experience is. Back in coach, for that six-hour flight, they would get a small bag of pretzels and a soda. But for this overnight flight in first class, they served a full three-course meal.

And backing coach, when you recline in the chair for that six-hour red-eye flight just to try to get some shut-eye, the person behind you gets really angry, and they start grunting, and they’re breathing right on your face, and they can’t even actually help it because you’re practically laying your head in their lap. But up in first class, you don’t even know there is somebody behind you. And something curious happens as the flight takes off. The host or hostess goes to the threshold that separates first class and those flying in coach, and she draws a curtain because they don’t want the people back there to see what is happening up here.

They don’t want people to notice the difference in service. That curtain is like the Great Wall of China. It’s like the Iron Curtain. It’s like the Berlin Wall. No one is allowed to cross the threshold. No one’s even able to see past the curtain. There’s a clear separation in that moment between the haves and the have-nots. And the question might be raised for those that just catch a glimpse. They might say something like, what would it take for me to be included in what they have up there? I want what they have.

I want… comfort, the food, the blessing that is theirs. What would it take? How do I get there? You know, that’s a question. That question is a question that many Gentiles could have asked when they met Jesus and heard about the kingdom and the promises of God. That’s the question. of the majority of the world that the world could or should ask. How can I get the blessing that they have? Who’s included? How can I make sure that I’m one of them? How can I cross the threshold? And that question seems to be addressed in Mark chapter eight.

Starting at verse one, this is what it says. “It says, in those days when again a great crowd had gathered and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples to him and said to them, I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way. And some of them have come from afar away. And his disciples answered him, how can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?

And he asked them, how many loaves do you have? And they said, seven. And he directed the crowd to sit down on the ground. And he took the seven loaves and having given thanks, he broke them and gave them to disciples to set before the people. And they set them before the crowd. And they had a few small fish and having blessed them, he said that these also should be set before them. And they ate and were satisfied. And they took up the broken pieces leftover, seven baskets full. And there were about 4,000 people and he sent them away.

And immediately he got into the boat with his disciples and he went to the district of Delmanutha. And the Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation. And he left them, got into the boat again and went to the other side. Now they had forgotten to bring bread and they had only one loaf with them. And he cautioned them saying, watch out, beware the leaven of the Pharisees and of the leaven of Herod.

And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes, do you not see? Having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the 5,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up? And they said to him, 12. And the seven for the 4,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?

And they said to him, seven. And he said to them, do you not yet understand?” Here we are again, another feeding. And similar to the first one, it would seem that the desire of the people motivated them to stay with Jesus to the point of dangerous hunger. It says that they had not eaten for three days. And if Jesus sends them away without food, they might collapse. Three days. That desire is profound. Many of us have a hard time getting through a church service for just like an hour or two without collapsing of hunger.

But he was speaking to them in such a way that held them captive without food for three days. And it begs the question of desire, doesn’t it? I think we all want to desire the Lord like that. We know we should have a desire for the Lord like that. And yet we might say, I want it, but I just don’t feel it. So how do I get it? And I think a practical observation between the lines here might be helpful. How do you grow in a desire for something that you should want, but that your feelings are ambivalent toward?

And the answer is very simply, you make a decision for what is right. and you trust that your desires will follow. That’s what happened with these people. When they showed up because they heard Jesus was in town, many of them hadn’t had access to him yet, and they thought they would see what would happen. They decided for what was right. But what ultimately happened is their desires to be with him followed. You know, someone in our extended family has this kind of history with food. He hears of a restaurant that’s really good, let’s say a pizza place, and he makes a choice to try it.

And he likes it. He doesn’t love it, but he likes it. And so the next week he orders it again. And now he really likes it. Pizza hasn’t changed, but his tastes have changed. And so the following week he orders it again. And now he’s hooked. And what started out as a decision, a mental decision to try something, evolved into a moderate desire, which then turned into a passion. that results in ordering the same pizza from the same place two or three days a week. Friends, that can be true in your relationship with God.

You don’t feel anything, but you know you should want him or maybe you should want him more than you do. So you make a decision to do the thing that pursues him. You come to church and hear God’s word spoken. You don’t waver. You go to your growth group and function in community and you’re there consistently. And over the course of time, you make a choice to do it again and again and again, and you might start to like it. In fact, you do because the spirit of God is starting to speak to you through his word and through these other ordinary means.

And what started out as ambivalence becomes a moderate like, and over the course of time, that moderate like becomes a deep passion. Before you know it, you would do anything to stay faithful to the Lord. You would sacrifice greatly for him. You know him. You love him. You want to serve him with your life. What started out as ambivalence that was met with obedience grew into intense desire. Sometimes our feelings just take a little bit of time to catch up to obedience. That seems to be what’s happening here.

And now the people are at a place of growing physical desperation. And this is the second feeding of the masses in just a few chapters in the gospel of Mark. You might remember a handful of weeks ago, back in chapter six, Jesus fed 5,000 people and women and children. Here in chapter eight, he feeds 4,000. Why does Mark include them both? I mean, we’ve already seen that Jesus can multiply food. So why do we need to see it again? In fact, that question has caused some to argue that these two miracles or these two feedings so close together might just be the same thing, might be the same event told from a different perspective or a different person.

But when you look at the details, And what those details inform us about the meaning, it’s almost impossible to come to that conclusion. Let’s just contrast the two. The 5,000 people were with Jesus for one day. The 4,000 were with him for three days. Jesus ordered the 5,000 people to sit in groups on the green grass because there was Old Testament symbolism there. There’s no green grass where the 4,000 gathered. Jesus offers a prayer of thanks for the food for the 5,000. He offers two prayers of thanks for the food with the 4,000.

Jesus multiplies the food with five loaves and two fish for the 5,000. But with the 4,000, it’s seven loaves and a few small fish. And finally, we see that the 5,000 had leftovers that were in 12 baskets symbolizing the 12 tribes of Israel. And for the 4,000, the leftovers were seven baskets, which is often used to symbolize the idea of completion. And the miracles, of course, happened in two different spots among two different types of people. The 5,000 was among the Jews out in the wilderness and it was laden with imagery of Moses and Old Testament Israel.

And the 4,000, well, that happened in the Decapolis among the Gentiles. And so Jesus is continuing to feed people with physical food and it points to spiritual realities of provision. And it’s really interesting to see now how these feedings are starting to stack up on top of each other. This is the third one he’s actually done in a row. He fed the 5,000. Then you might remember in chapter seven, he fed or talked about food with a woman. With the 5,000, it says they all ate and were satisfied. With the woman, the Gentile woman, he said, let the children be satisfied first, meaning the Jews.

And now with the 4,000, it says, they all ate and were satisfied. So there’s a progression that’s happening here. Jesus meets the Jews and he provides for them. He meets a Gentile woman, gives her crumbs. And now he meets 4,000 Gentiles. and provides for them. You see, with the feeding of the 5,000, we see that Jesus is the bread from heaven. He is the provision of God to meet the needs of his people because he is the divine king whose kingdom has come and is sufficient to satisfy all of the needs of God’s people.

Jesus isn’t just partially sufficient. He’s not halfway sufficient. He’s totally and completely sufficient to meet their needs. Even their greatest need to satisfy the deepest hunger of our lives, which is on the level of the soul, our desire for the eternal, our desire and our need for God. Jesus is sufficient to satisfy the greatest hunger of God’s people. But the question that remains is what about those who aren’t God’s people? What about the God haters? What about the ones whose ancestors have stood against God’s people?

What about those who aren’t Jewish? Does Jesus have anything for them? For the Gentiles? After all, it was the children of Abraham who were promised that God would be their God and they would be his people. They were given the promised land. They were promised the blessing. They were promised the Messiah, Savior. The Gentiles were promised nothing and they deserved nothing. And yet we see in that little interaction in chapter seven with the woman who seeks Jesus out to cast out the demon of her daughter, he answers her with language about food again.

She’s talking about the fight for the very soul of her child and he’s talking about food. And… “says to her, let the children be fed first, for it’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But her response indicates faith for the provision of all kinds of things, physical, food, spiritual food, the greatest satisfaction of the soul. “She says, Yet, Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” And the indication is the crumbs are enough. The point was that this Gentile woman knew that she didn’t deserve anything from the Jewish Messiah, and her humility and faith, evidenced for all to see, resulted in Jesus healing her daughter anyway.

But that begs the next question, which is, Would Jesus be sufficient to satisfy all of the hunger of the Jews and some of the hunger of the select Gentiles? Or would he satisfy the hunger of all of the Gentiles as well? Now that question might not be… immediately apparent to most of us because most of us as modern readers presume that the Gentiles were always included in the blessing of God. We tend to presume that they always had an equal share in God’s salvation. But in the Old Testament, that was not the case.

Let me remind you. God saved the family of Jacob from the famine in Egypt, creating 12 tribes, preserving himself for a people called Israel. And he then delivered those Jews from slavery against the Egyptians. He parted the sea for the Jews. He met the Jews at Mount Sinai. He gave the Jews victory at the battle of Jericho over the Canaanites as the walls fell down. He gave the Jews victory over the Philistines as David slayed Goliath. It was the Jews who built the temple in which God would dwell and reside among them.

And it was the Jews that had the great kingdom of Solomon. And it was to the Jews that the prophets came. to foretell of the Messiah that was come. It was certainly not a given that the Gentiles would be included in anything or saved from anything. And so you might start seeing and thinking just how big of a deal it is for those who aren’t Jewish. Food critic Paul Grinberg set out to eat at the world’s top 100 restaurants. That sounds like a project I’d like to be invited on. For those of you who are foodies, this guy is your guy.

Between 2011 and 2018, he had meals at 99 out of the top 100 restaurants in the world. He traversed mountain roads, been lost in fog, snowed in, stranded. He had secured speeding tickets in Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany. He had crisscrossed time zones and caught flights that led him to exhaustion. And yet there was one last restaurant that remained on the list. It was a small, members-only sushi house in Tokyo, Japan. And it remained maddenly out of touch for him. He had told the Wall Street Journal in 2018, I can’t get into one restaurant in Tokyo.

This is crazy. The problem was is that the restaurant called Sushi Saito was an eight-seat restaurant that had a private membership. Outsiders either had to dine with a member or had the reservation made by a member, but tracking down that connection was not easy. So Mr. Grinberg had tapped pals at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and other investment banks. He had tried contacts at American Express and Japanese car makers and hedge funds. And yet, even among the elite, he had no luck. He said he can’t understand it.

To reach his top 100 goal, other restaurants and chefs around the world had gone out of their way to accommodate him by staying open after hours or squeezing him into… Crowded and fully booked rooms. He documented the meals on Instagram, where he also begged for the hookup. Can anybody get me in to number 100, Sushi Saito? And then in 2019, it finally happened. Paul Grinberg hit number 100. He was able to have lunch in Tokyo at Sushi Saito. But it wasn’t the connections that got him there. He couldn’t buy a pass or influence his way into the table.

The restaurant owner had to come to him. Similarly, we don’t get into God’s presence by our own connections or influence. There’s no sneaking into the kingdom, no back door to the presence of God. God has to come to us. And it’s based purely on his grace in the person of Jesus Christ.

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This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.