I remember the day that I left my comprehensive exams. I had just passed what felt to me like a grueling contest between me and my committee. In my corner was me, the guy who had been invited to come into this institution as a scholar, and who left his family, his friends, and his region of the country in order to accept that invitation. In their corner was a mixture of professors, each with a different area of expertise, each with her or his own ideologies, and each – at least this is how it played out in my nightmares prior to the event – with any number of good reasons to look at me and say, “Well, you gave it a good try, but we’re sorry to say that you just haven’t cut the muster.” My advisor had tried to assure me by telling me that they simply wanted to hear what I know, not what I don’t know. But there is so much that I know that I don’t know, that I was fairly certain that they were going to invite me to consider a life that was not related to academia.

And yet, somehow, I passed. The written parts came back well enough and the oral part was not as bad as it could have been and in the end they said, “Well, we’re interested in seeing how your dissertation shapes up.” And that was that. I had not wasted 4 ½ years of my life in classes, writing papers, and reading book after book. I was relieved and I was ecstatic. Now, if this were a movie or a television show, the scene would have ended with me smiling and shaking hands and breathing a big sigh of relief – maybe even doing a fist pump or something like it. But, it was not a television show; it was real life, and that meant that I had to walk down three flights of stairs, walk across campus to the bus depot, wait for the bus, ride the bus home, and then walk from the stop to my house. And during all that time, life just kept going. People were walking by, as if it weren’t one of the happiest days of the world. Nobody on the sidewalk said, “Say, why are you so happy?” Nobody on the bus said, “Well, tell me about your day, stranger.” They just looked down or away or read their book, like they always did. It was an odd experience, because what I was feeling on the inside had nothing to do with what was going on in the lives of the folks all around me. A very significant thing had just happened in my life, but nobody else seemed to perceive the enormity of the moment at all. The world as it was inside of my head and the world as it seemed to be to everyone else, seemed like two different worlds.

There seems to be something like that day going on in our Scripture text that we have read together from Matthew’s gospel. The “world” of the crowd – what they want, what they need, and what they are pursuing is one thing. The “world” going on in Jesus’ head is quite another. In the end, our story today is a miracle story, one of the memorable stories of Jesus feeding the crowd with fish and loaves. We will hear next week about how significant this story is in reality and in its meaning. But first, Matthew goes to great lengths to tell us, from the very start, something about the world going on inside of Jesus.

This chapter begins with the dreadful story of the death of John the Baptizer. It was a hideous, senseless death. John had been imprisoned for speaking truth to power, because he rightly condemned Herod for committing adultery as a means of gaining political influence. So, Herod shut John up in prison. And the only reason Herod did not order John’s death is because the crowd regarded John as a prophet. And yet, while John was imprisoned, Herod made a stupid, public oath that forced him to have John beheaded. This chapter begins with Herod hearing about Jesus, and fearing that John had returned from the dead to haunt him.

John’s death came as a shock to every Jew. To the crowd, John was unmistakably someone who stood in the tradition of the prophets of old. To those whom he criticized – those whom he called a “brood of vipers” and who in turn called him “demonized” – he was insufferable. But, they could not deny the power of his message. To his followers, he was the promise of a new day. He was calling for a thorough cleansing, a renewal that would begin with the end of many things, but it was a ray of hope. Even to Jesus’ followers, John was an enigmatic figure, whose forcefulness made many wonder if he were the messiah and not just the forerunner as he claimed. John’s death was a significant event, this death of a real prophet. I imagine it was the kind of event where people would ask one another in later years, “Where were you when you heard that John the Baptizer had been killed?” And the other could surely answer it.

John’s death came as a shock to his followers, to the crowds, and – as Matthew is deliberate in pointing out – to Jesus himself. John’s and Jesus’ ministries followed parallel tracks and of all of the other public figures found in Matthew’s gospel, John is the only one whom Jesus never criticizes. In fact, from the two occasions when Jesus directly speaks about John, it is clear that he considered John a true prophet (Mt 11:7-19; 17:9-13). After John’s death, John’s disciples took his body and buried it, then went straight to Jesus to tell him what had happened. Jesus did what he seemed to need to do in such moments. He sent the disciples ahead of him by boat while he himself went away in a boat to a deserted place. As Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have argued, Jesus seemed to be in the mold of a “desert mystic,” whose habit was to go to a deserted place and be present with God there whenever he needed sustenance. If any of the other moments when Jesus goes off by himself to a deserted place are any indication, we can suspect that this was going to be a time of contentious prayer, where Jesus lived up to the name “Israelite,” which literally means, “one who wrestles with God.” [Stopping here to ask the congregation to describe what they imagine Jesus’ state of mind must have been.]

Alas, the time alone in the deserted place would have to wait. Matthew says that when Jesus came ashore, the crowds had emptied out of their towns and had traveled there on foot, waiting for him. And, however we imagine Jesus’ state of mind to have been at that moment, Matthew says that when Jesus saw the crowd, he had compassion on them and cured their sick.
Jesus saw the crowd and had compassion on them - literally, he was “moved in the bowels,” because the bowels were thought to be the place of love and pity. He had compassion on them and he “healed their sick” – literally he gave “therapy” to “those who were without strength.” So that we understand the import of this moment: Jesus’ own grief was interrupted. [Drawing here on the suggestions from the congregation to describe Jesus’ state of mind]: Jesus’ own need to get away from the crowds – even to be apart from his disciples, to have his moment of wrestling with God in the solitude of the wilderness in response to the devastating death of John the Baptizer – was interrupted when he saw the confused and distraught crowd and had compassion on them.

So, while this is indeed a miracle story waiting to happen; while this is indeed one of those significant moments when we see that part of Jesus’ ministry that attends to the groaning and weaknesses of human life; this is – first of all – a story that marvelously illustrates what the Apostle Paul once said, that “God’s power is made perfect in weakness.” In Jesus’ own despair, he saw the crowd and had compassion on them, healing their sickness.

When you and I profess that “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior,” we are not saying that we are following a magic man, who always floated slightly above all of life’s problems and serenely performed amazing deeds with ease. What we profess is that God was made known to us most explicitly in this suffering servant, whose strength to heal the weak was given out of his own devastation. And when we presume to call ourselves “the church,” the “body of Christ” now present in the world, we profess that even in our own weakness, our own struggles, our own fears and confusions, we long for that singularly Christ-like ability to see the weak in others and to have compassion on them.

I suppose that many of us have been intrigued by the drama that is playing itself out in Washington, D.C. this week over the financial solvency of our nation. I have a friend, who challenged those of us who are preaching this Sunday, to preach about the debt ceiling. So, here I go: So far as I can tell, there is no single Christian answer to how high or how low a nation’s “debt ceiling” ought to be. So far as I can tell, there is no single Christian answer to whether taxes on the wealthiest among us spur growth or increase poverty. Heck, so far as I know, there is no single Christian answer to whether a people’s economy ought to be capitalist or socialist or feudal or dictated by the local medicine woman. But, there is a Christian virtue at stake, particularly in times when we feel the most vulnerable and anxious about our future. If the word “Christian” means “Christ-like,” then our story today speaks directly to us: Even in the midst of our genuine anxieties, the Christian virtue is that ability to have compassion for those who are weak, to have the stomach to see their vulnerabilities and to minister to them. That capacity for compassion is more important than any loyalties, any strategic advantages, and even more important than our own beloved opinions, particularly in times of anxiety, when our first impulse is to consider what we need first.

Our story today is a powerful witness to who Jesus is, to the God whom Jesus makes known to us, and particularly to our calling as the Body of Christ in the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.