Mark 6:31-44 It’s Easy with Jesus

First Things: Devotions in Mark’s Gospel

Mark 6:31-44 It’s Easy with Jesus

It’s going to happen. You heal a lot of people; more people are going to come. And come they did. They came to be healed. They came to hear Him preach. They came to be in His presence. And so there they were, out and away from homes and towns, and it was late in the day. Jesus had compassion on them. The were “like sheep without a shepherd.” The disciples wanted to send them away. Jesus wanted them to be fed.

“You feed them,” he says to his disciples. “Impossible,” they say to Him. “No money, no stores, it cannot be done.” “Go see what the people have,” He says to them. They go through the whole crowd, 5000 men plus women and children. This many people, and no one thought to bring food?! Finally, one boy, just one, is found with a lunch, enough for himself and perhaps a little to share, 5 loaves, and 2 fish. That’s it. Not enough.

Our title is, “It’s easy with Jesus,” and I suppose that it’s not completely true. The learning process is difficult. But the task at hand, not that hard. It’s easy, with Jesus. If the disciples had not allowed their consternation to rule their hearts, they could have watched to see how Jesus was going to do the impossible. It was in His hands all along, but they recognized it late. While they still supposed that it was in their hands, they found the responsibility to be miserable.

Don’t we do the same thing, over and over? Don’t we get knotted up about how things are going to get done, when, in the end, it’s going to be God that works it out? Why can’t we just follow along and enjoy the story as it plays out?

One danger with these questions is that we retreat into a kind of passivity where we say that we won’t be involved at all; where we suppose that we can be mere spectators. This was not Jesus’ plan for His disciples, and it is not His plan for us. They were called on to go and investigate the possibilities, though they could have done so without all the “impossibility thinking.” They were to survey the crowd to assess their ability to contribute, though they could have done so without despairing over such a bunch of people operating without a plan. No, they could have said to Jesus, “We’ve discovered that we have few resources available to us, whether to procure food, or to gather from the people. What do you suggest we do next.” And then Jesus would have said, as He in fact did say, “Have the people sit down.” And they would have actively obeyed, as they did, and then watched the most amazing thing happen - the feeding of a great crowd of people, out of almost nothing. And, for Jesus, it was easy.

I need to remember that today, and this week, and this year. It’s easy with Jesus. Jesus knows me, and you, that we tend toward self-sufficiency, which is hard, even impossible. He knows that we are slow to learn, and that the process of learning is slow and often painful. It’s hard. But He leads us to discover that, with Jesus, it’s easy.