Many of us don’t have much space in our lives for miracles, do we? But, when we were younger, there was so much more openness to that sort of thing. We wanted to believe.
When I was a teen, we were on a trip that was largely about things my parents wanted to do. We loaded up our family van and trekked from Erie to Indianapolis for a convention. I know it was a Christian convention, but I really can’t remember what it was about. I just recall being bored sitting in the arena where the Indiana Pacers played.
To sweeten the deal for us, my parents promised that they’d take us to King’s Island Amusement Park after the convention. So, we bided our time knowing there was still glory to be had.
The evening the convention ended, we loaded the van, and in the dark of night, headed towards Cincinnati. Somewhere in the middle of southeastern Indiana, our van broke down. We were able to get it to a 24-hour truck stop, where we waited for the garage to open in the morning. My parents were sure the water pump was shot. Whatever they poured in went straight through and hit the ground. We weren’t going anywhere.
In our middle-of-the-night fatigue, my parents gathered us around our van and prayed.
The next morning, the mechanic pulled the van in to see what was wrong. He looked it up and down. He poured water into the system to see what where the leak was. Only, nothing happened. The leak had disappeared overnight. He could find nothing wrong with the van.
We made our way to Cincinnati and found a hotel to get some sleep. The next day, we thoroughly enjoyed King’s Island and then headed home. The next morning, the garage floor was covered with fluid that had leaked out from the van!
It was a miracle! Clearly, God wanted us to go to the amusement park and held together my parents’ van just for us! At least, that’s how I interpreted things as a young teen — everything through the eyes of faith.
It’s sad to say that the older I’ve gotten, the less space I have in my life for the inexplicable. I don’t really anticipate the miraculous. When I pray, I aim low. When I visit hospitals, I thank God for modern medicine (as I should!), but I really don’t come expecting something out-of-the ordinary to happen. Over the past year or so, however, my perspective is starting to shift again. I’m finding a renewed openness to the miraculous. I am learning to want and even to expect that the God who made everything out of nothing just might do something surprising even today.
This week I came across a story about Tony Campolo, who was a renowned speaker on faith, particularly for my generation. When Tony was in a church in Oregon, he prayed for a man with cancer. Later that week the man’s wife called. She said, “You prayed for my husband. He had cancer.” Campolo replied, “Had?” Whoa, he thought, it’s happened. My prayer healed cancer!
She continued, “He died.” Campolo sunk.
“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “When he came into church that Sunday, he was filled with anger. He knew he was going to be dead in a short period of time, and he hated God. He was fifty-eight years old, and he wanted to see his children and grandchildren grow up.
“He was angry that this all-powerful God didn’t take away his sickness and heal him. He would lie in bed and curse God. The more his anger grew toward God, the more miserable he was to everybody around him. It was an awful thing to be in his presence.
“After you prayed for him, a peace came over him and a joy came into him. The last three days have been the best days of our lives. We’ve sung. We’ve laughed. We’ve read Scripture. We’ve prayed. Oh, they’ve been wonderful days. And I called to thank you for laying your hands on him and praying for healing. He wasn’t cured, but he was healed.”
Today we are focusing on the “I am the Bread of Life” window, and each scene depicted in it is about a miracle of Jesus. One Bible dictionary defines miracles like this: they are “extraordinary events that manifest divine power, that are wonders to human understanding, and therefore what human beings perceive as signs from God.” There are miracles throughout the Bible, beginning on page 1 with the creation of everything. In the gospels, miracles play an important role. There are around 35 miracles of Jesus recorded in them, and our window depicts six of them.
These miracles are found in each of the gospels. They touch a wide variety of people — young and old, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, men and women. It’s as though the gospels are trying to tell us something about how God’s kingdom and healing is present for any who would receive it!
In the upper left, the healing of blind Bartimaeus is depicted, which is the last healing in Mark’s gospel. He was a blind beggar on the roadside in Jericho. He hears Jesus and recognizes him as the Messiah. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me,” he says. He’s making a scene, and, as you can see, the crowds want him to quiet down. Jesus restores his sight, and Bartimaeus follows Jesus.
In the upper right, Jesus heals a man who had been lame for 38 years. He laid by the pool of Bethesda, which people believed had healing qualities (it was, after all, a place where living water flowed), only he had no one to put him into the pool. Jesus tells him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” And, as we see in the window, the man takes his mat and walks. Over Jesus loom two men who are protesting that Jesus broke the law by healing this suffering man on the sabbath. How sad our legalism can be!
The next scenes are related to each other. On the left side, we see the woman who had suffered hemorrhages for twelve years touching Jesus’ cloak, claiming healing for herself without asking. She had suffered poor medical care for years and spent everything she had. She was desperate, and, in her desperation, she throws herself at Jesus. Power goes out of him (you can see that in the waves above her), and she’s healed. This story is paired with the raising of Jairus’ daughter, who was twelve-years-old. This is in the bottom of the window. Jairus was a synagogue leader. He daughter was so ill, they knew she was dying. Jairus found Jesus, and threw himself at Jesus’ feet (just like the hemorrhaging woman!). Only, before Jesus can get to the girl, word comes that she’s already died. Still, Jesus goes to her and orders, “Little girl, get up!” She obeys, restored to life. Notice the devotion of the women who were praying for the girl and whose eyes are now turned toward Jesus as healer.
On the right of the window, we see a Roman centurion kneeling before Jesus, begging him to heal his servant. What’s so interesting about this one is that the servant needing healing is nowhere to be see, yet the centurion has such faith in Jesus that he believes Jesus can heal even from a distance. And he does! Such faith!
The center of this window truly is its focus. Jesus is dressed in a riot of colors. The window depicts Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the 5000, which is the only miracle told in all four gospels, outside of the resurrection, of course. Crowds have followed Jesus around Galilee because of his teachings and healings. They are so hungry for him that they have forgotten to tend to their own growling stomachs. Jesus seizes this opportunity to feed the crowd, teach the disciples, and stake a massive claim about who he is.
Turning to Philip, Jesus asks, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” It’s not hard to imagine Philip’s reaction to this absurd question. A few weeks back, we hosted several boys for a homecoming dinner. We were told eight were coming. As I pulled into our driveway from picking up the pizzas, I saw four boys I’d never met walking towards our house. I bought food for eight, we had twelve unexpectedly, and I had to stifle my inner Philip that wanted to cry out, “Who’s paying for all this pizza?”
What Jesus really is asking is this, what do we bring to the work of God? Another disciple, Andrew, risks suggesting that he noticed a young boy who had packed his lunch with five small barley loves and two fish. But even he quickly dismisses it as insufficient. I love how our window portrays this boy. Called to Jesus, he comes — barefoot and expectant. It’s as though he’s saying, “I know it’s not much, but I’ll trust you with it anyway, Jesus.” Barley loaves were the bread of the poor, by the way, so this is truly an example of how Jesus can take our small offerings and multiply them.
I’d be remiss not to mention that October is Generosity Month at our church. We mailed out this year’s brochure and pledge cards. There are more lying around the church if you didn’t get one. I’d invite you to imagine yourself as the young boy bringing Jesus what he has in hope. Part of the practice of our faith is learning how to trust God with what we have, giving a portion of it to God, and knowing that God can meet our needs even after we’ve given some of it away. I hope you’ll approach this Generosity Month like this little boy — expectant, hopeful, and trusting.
So, this miracle goes beyond simply filling empty stomachs; rather, it’s also an economic miracle. Exasperated, Philip tells Jesus, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little!” Yet, Jesus takes this offering and makes it not only sufficient to feed them but is so abundant that there are leftovers.
This all takes place near the time for the Passover Festival, so the crowds have God’s saving work on their minds, and they converse with Jesus about how Moses gave them bread in the desert; perhaps Jesus is similar to Moses in this way, they wonder. Jesus then utters the words on our window, “I am the Bread of Life.” “With a stroke of genius, Jesus has done precisely what he has done throughout the Gospel: He exploits some feature of Jewish belief and ritual and reinterprets it to refer to himself. He is the manna from God’s treasury for which Israel has been waiting.”
Two weeks ago, we heard how Jesus met an outcast Samaritan woman at a well, and he offered her living water. “Sir, give me this water,” she said. Today, throngs of people gather around Jesus. “Sir, give us this bread,” they say, and he offers himself, the Bread of Life.
In so many ways, the world is hungry, and God gives us bread. That is a daily miracle. Notice beneath Jesus’ feet are the bread and cup of communion. The wafer. The cup, filled with blood red wine. The sheaves of wheat framing it. The work of Jesus is not simply giving us our daily bread, although he does that too. Rather, it’s the daily call to living eternally today because Jesus died for us, rose for us, reigns in power for us, and prays for us. Communion is that reminder that the miracle of God’s work in us is constant. Notice also how the communion elements point to Jesus’ raising to life Jairus’ daughter. It’s a reminder that God is in the business of bringing life out of death even in your life today.
Even now we ask, sir, give us this bread, but Jesus drives us to more than the smaller miracle of enough food for today. We should want the one behind the bread — Jesus himself. He is the Bread of Life. He is the One offering himself for the whole world. Notice how Jesus is looking at us from this window. Not the boy. Not the crowd. Us.
Jesus says to us, “I am the Bread of Life.” This window is filled with the miraculous works of Jesus, but I wonder if you’ve opened yourself up to receive the miracle of Jesus in your life. I wonder if you’re like I am sometimes, where life feels too normal, too mundane for Jesus to do much. I wonder if you’ve grown immune to awe and wonder. I wonder if you’ve stopped hoping.
Jesus steadfastly looks at all of us, offering us himself, bread that will never go bad and that will sustain us through all of those things in our lives and world that need healing and hope.