John the Baptist: the last of the Old Testament prophets, the first messenger of the New Testament’s Gospel, a pivotal figure without equal appearing in the wilderness at the hinge point of God’s relationship with all Creation.
Clad in camelhair, surviving in the remote countryside on locusts and wild honey, John proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin and the repair of brokenness. His caustic voice sounds as crazy as his clothing and diet: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight a path for his arrival. … I baptize with water, but one more powerful than I is coming to baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
John the Baptist – a cousin of Jesus – clearly and firmly stands on the right side of redemption history. And yet he dies a stupid, senseless death – premeditated with a corrupt king’s lusty, liquored-up promise to an exotic dancer, whose lurid provocation clearly arouses Herod on several levels.
John the Baptist – born just months before Jesus – literally loses his head to the executioner’s sword all because a night of heavy drinking goes horribly wrong. And because John publicly scolds King Herod and his family for their equally public immorality.
John dies a violent, bloody death not because he proclaimed Jesus as the Christ – not because of his theology or political bent – but simply because John ticks off the wrong people when he calls them to account for their sordid and lurid ways.
It doesn’t make sense. But so it goes: like a noxious weed, wanton evil sprouts in regular season; like a wildfire, unchecked power and wickedness obliterate everything in their path. The media frequently label such crime as “senseless.” Killings are “random,” “bizarre,” coming out of nowhere. “I never thought something like that would ever happen.” Arguments over the most trivial of things – anxious fears of neighbor or stranger – quickly erupt in gunfire.
Senseless. Random. Bizarre.
And you don’t necessarily expect a figure as important as John the Baptist to get caught up in such lethal drama. But he does. And as the curtain rises on our Scripture lesson from Matthew 14, Jesus reels in grief and shock that so great a figure as his cousin John could be so easily cut down.
Ancient words, ever true; let us pray – Surprise us, O God. Speak your word; startle us with your truth. Re-open our hearts and minds to your wondrous love. Silence within, any voice but your own. By the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ our Lord, keep our souls focused on you – and on the Cross, on the heart of Jesus.
When he heard [news about the execution of his cousin John the Baptist], Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard [of his departure], they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.
When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late. Send away the crowds so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.”
Then Jesus ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. All ate and were filled. And they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, 12 baskets full. And those who ate were about 5,000 men, women, and children. (Matthew 14:13-21)
The ending is so blessed and blissful that it’s easy and tempting to forget its origin story: What gives rise to loaves and fishes is the death of John the Baptist. And Jesus immediately retreats to a private, remote, desert-like space.
Jesus is hurting; Jesus is grieving.
Evil has defeated the prophet whom his Father God made the harbinger for Jesus’s entire existence and earthly purpose! And it is long-held heresy to believe anything other than Jesus being knocked for a loop, anything else but Jesus recoiling in the face of such evil. You cannot call yourself Christian and yet deny that the loss of his kissing-cousin breaks Jesus’s heart as much or more as death and loss break yours and mine.
The Lord comes to save lives, but now his very presence in Creation has cost John his mortal life. It just didn’t make any sense. It’s random; it’s bizarre. “I never thought something like that would ever happen.”
So, Jesus withdraws to wrestle with his thoughts and sorrows. But his alone-time doesn’t last long. The eager crowds hunt him down like paparazzi hounding celebrity. Given his fragile emotional state, the human in Jesus rightly might feel annoyed, intruded upon, ready to turn away and withdraw even more deeply into himself and his barren, wilderness space.
But, no. Jesus being Jesus – fully human and fully divine – responds with compassion. Jesus – Son of both God and man – sees a teeming crowd of 5,000 souls as empty, as hurting, as needy as he is. And so, he cannot possibly let them down.
In addition to being a two-course, double-whopper of miracle, this great feeding of the hungry is an act of compassionate love, its catalyst the realization that the needs of another dwarf the pain of self. Jesus performs this grand miracle by somehow reaching deep into himself – and past his heartache – to find the strength to soldier on, even though so much has gone so horribly wrong in this broken and fearful world of ours. Under the soul-crushing weight of senselessness and disorientation, Jesus summons the courage of compassion and love.
And it’s not a lost art!
Glimpse around our own community and spy exhausted, emotionally drained, and even emotionally scarred saints – moms and dads, medical providers, first responders, teachers and farmers, folks wearing uniforms of varied collar-color – all laboring on in desperate attempt to feed a hungry world; indigenous and immigrant trying their darndest to spawn life in the midst of so much death.
They are the friends, neighbors, and strangers – themselves as mortified and petrified by today’s headlines as everyone else – reaching out to help, to soothe, to comfort, to do what they can for whomever they can, persisting and enduring even if their offerings don’t seem to amount to a hill of beans, mere loaves and fishes.
Like Jesus, most all hearts these days find ourselves metaphorically in lonely, desert-like places of despair and desolation. And even though most of us haven’t voluntarily withdrawn to battle our demons as Jesus does, we nonetheless find ourselves in remote places awash in sorrow. That’s the startling truth God’s Word:
The entire trajectory of our salvation – and of the Gospel that narrates our salvation – starts with the surprise incarnation of God’s own Son as a humble and helpless baby. Salvation thus comes not from the abundance of God’s strength and the flexing of divine muscle but somehow right out of the same poverty and weakness that leads Jesus to identify with us so sharply and intimately.
In this long, agonizing season of uncertainty, doubt, and fear – beleaguered with so much falsehood, stupidity, vile rhetoric, and senseless death, the Lord Jesus again inspires and invites our following. In this season of seemingly endless cycles of bad news, we recognize in Jesus someone who joins us in our remote places, abiding as One who understands how we feel from the inside, up close and personal, with red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks.
With life-giving bread, Jesus takes, thanks, breaks, and gives. And the feeding of the 5,000 bears witness: Five loaves and two fishes really are sufficient. Because grace is sufficient! Because such compassion is precisely the food for which the world so desperately hungers.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on Sunday, June 22, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Lora Copley, Chelsey Harmon, and Scott Hoezee inform the message.
Pastor Grant’s message for the funeral of Karen Milton on Thursday, June 19, 2025, also arises from Matthew 14:31-21