Jesus Loves You...the Bible Tells Me So!

I was at a minor league baseball game with my family recently and we did something we don’t always do; we stayed till the end of the game. Ninth inning, 3 up, 3 down, ballgame ovah! I was telling a friend about it the next day and he asked me how many fans were left at the end. “Oh, about a hundred,” I said. But later I realized I had no idea, so I asked my wife. “How many people do you think were left at the end?” She estimated two hundred. So maybe it was one hundred and maybe it was two hundred, for that matter, it could have been one thousand. I will freely admit I am terrible at estimating crowd sizes! Which got me thinking about the narrative from the gospels that we often refer to as the feeding of the five thousand (read it, it wasn’t five thousand…but more on that in a bit!) Who counted that crowd? How did we, that is to say how did the gospel writers come up with this number? I can just see Jesus miraculously turning a few small loaves and fish into a banquet and then saying, “OK, I want you eleven to pass out the food and Peter please get a head count.” Peter seemed to have a lot of energy; he is the logical counter in my mind. It’s like in John 21 when the disciples catch 153 fish…you better believe that Peter was the one hopping up and down with excitement on the beach, counting trout.

But seriously how do you estimate a crowd that size. Now Mark helps us a little bit because he tells us that the crowd sat down in groups of fifty or a hundred. But Luke only mentions groups of fifty. And even if the groups are all the same size, someone had to count the groups! But it is actually Matthew who provides us the most important detail because while all three synoptic writers tell us that the number five thousand refers to the men who were present, Matthew spells out for us, there were also women and children! And if it’s difficult to estimate the size of a crowd, it’s even harder to look at a crowd and estimate how many are men. If my friend had asked me how many men stayed to the end of the baseball game I would have looked at him as though he were crazy and would not even have taken a stab at a guess. Now please understand I get it that in the first century it would have been entirely normal to talk about a crowd’s number in terms of the men only, but someone still has to do the counting! Do you count everybody and then decide that half the adults are men, half are women and each family there has approximately 2.5 kids and then come up with a figure for men only? My brain hurts just thinking about it! And don’t tell me that the crowd was mostly men so that the small number of women and children who were there didn’t change the 5,000 estimate too much. I’ve read the rest of the gospel and I know there’s no way that’s possible. So what happened?

Well here’s what I think. I think Jesus knew how much food he had made. And furthermore I think Jesus knew how many people he had made. If we had been there on that day and had asked Jesus, “How do you know there are 5,000 men here?” I think he would have smiled and said, “How much time do you have? Because that’s Jonah over there. He brought his wife Mary, and their son Joseph. And there’s Simeon, you see he still has the scar from when he fell out of the tree as a boy. And there’s Barabbas, and Judas and Bartholomew…” Jesus knew. Jesus counted. But not just people, or men, Jesus had counted hairs on heads. Jesus had counted days of lives. And somewhere along the line Jesus told someone there were about 5,000 men in the crowd that day. But he also told someone, I don’t just care about the men, I care about the women and children too. He knew they wouldn’t be added to the first century head count – the world can only handle so much revolution at one time – but he made sure that we knew about them. How many women and children were there that day? I don’t know. Even if I had been there I wouldn’t, remember I’m not good at estimating crowd sizes. But I also know Jesus does know how many there were. And he cares for and loves every single one of them. So you know what the punch line is right? Because it’s huge, wonderful, awe-inspiring, and it needs to be heard. Jesus cares for and loves you too!