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S. Pentecost 10.26 Matt. 14:13-21

‘Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself…’

What Jesus has just been told was how John the Baptist had been beheaded by Herod the tetrarch, seduced into it by Herodias’ daughter’s provocative dancing—who then demanded John’s head on a platter and got it. Nice girl!

Does this seem a strange response to you? After his right-hand besties’ brutal murder—for God’s Son to just withdraw into the desert? That’s not what a Marvel action hero would do! No! He’d confront the bad guys immediately, kill them all (very cinematically! 😉 then blow the place up, and emote a little bit about what a great guy John was to draw tears from the audience…

Or, if it was Christopher Nolan adapting it, a scraggly looking Jesus would sneak into Herod’s palace posing as an un-housed man, recruit a couple sidekicks (who’d been dissed by Herod 😉 to hang the bad girls from the rafters, torture Herod, then, in a grand (and very loud!) action scene would fight hundreds of palace guards, chop them all to bits with swords (after shooting them with his bow and arrows 😉 and then spend 10 minutes whining to his old girlfriend Calypso about how bad he felt about not being able to save “his men” before giving John’s headless corpse a more Viking than Bronze Age Mycenaean burial ceremony… 😉

I might be a little off on the details. I went to see the Odyssey Tuesday night, but the power went out with 50 minutes left, so I didn’t see the grand finale. But I’ve read the book and from that and the first bang-up 2 hours, I have a pretty good guess how it ended, I think?

Anyway, I’m sure that Jesus does not fit the modern Hollywood super-hero template in just slinking off into the desert for some “alone time” and zero emoting after his buddy/side-kick gets his head chopped off. And what do we make of that? What’s going on here in this story?

We see that the Son of God does things very differently than the Greek gods and heroes and than modern Hollywood super-heroes. Jesus has way more power—but doesn’t use it at all in the ways we expect to get justice in a world gone very wrong!

Does he not care about getting JUSTICE!(and a proper burial for his buddy John? 😉 And if he doesn’t lift a finger to avenge John, what about us, his disciples, today? How does that make you feel, as a Xn?

I’m fine with it. Happy, actually, that Jesus is nothing like a Marvel or Christopher Nolan superhero! Jesus does things just about opposite from those guys and I love it and I’ll tell you why so that hopefully you will love it (and Jesus!) too…

Our world only understands brute force and coercion as the way to deal with our enemies. If they will submit to our superior power (and work for low wages 😉 be dutiful sidekicks to our Main Character role, we might show mercy to them (but probably not ;-)…

Jesus—with way, way more Power!—takes a completely opposite, indirect approach. He never coerces anyone. He never uses magic tricks to entice us to follow him for the side-benefits (although that’s the way many read this story of the feeding of the 5,000, I’m going to offer you a different take on that ;-)…

Jesus never shows off. He hides his divinity under a humble exterior. Astute readers of the Gospels all marvel at what is known in the trade as “The Messianic Secret”. Instead of calling down fire from heaven and doing spectacular miracles with loud special effects to get us crawling to him on our knees, Jesus hides his identity under the form of a slave who is lowly servant of all…

Jesus’ miracles of healing are done purely out of compassion and done incognito. The lame man lowered down through the roof of the synagogue where Jesus was teaching, he just forgives his sins, and (when everyone is disappointed!) he says, “Why are you laying around like that? Get up and go home!” like the guy was faking the whole time!

The man born blind, Jesus doesn’t shoot rays of lightning into his eyes and say “There! Now you can see!” to thrill the crowd. Nah; he spits in the dirt, makes mud, rubs that in the man’s eyes and goes: “You’ve got mud in your eyes. Go wash it out and see how you see then…” as if the mud were the obstacle not the cure! He insists Jairus’ daughter is not dead but sleeping, takes her by the hand and says “Wake up” and when she walks out, tells the crowd (who’d mocked, him 😉 “See? Just sleeping!”…

Jesus isn’t marketing himself or selling us on the benefits that accrue from following him. He warns would-be disciples that following him means taking up your cross and losing your life, for Christ’s sake! He does everything he can to discourage disciples who are only in it for the Bud Light.

Modern Christendom is baffled by this and will always struggle with this indirect, playing “hard-to-get” approach!

But the light that is hidden in Jesus cannot totally be hidden. It draws us like moths to a flame. So the crowds follow him into the deserted place where he heals them by his word, touch, presence…

Seeing them hungry, Jesus feeds them—with only 5 loaves and 2 fish (which John tells us Peter snatched from a little boy 😉 In Greek, Jesus doesn’t “bless”—he good-words them. He who is the Word, by a word, puts a bit of himself into those loaves and fish so everyone eating them goes away… changed—same but different as Circe’s food changes Odysseus’ men… 😉

The world gains followers by power, coercion, loud special-effects and the promise of greedy gain, worldly pleasures. Jesus eschews all of that, takes an opposite-land approach…

Because divine power is frightening to sinners like us, he hides IT under his ordinary human appearing, gentle words, divine misdirection and indirect communication. He quietly good-words us by his stories from holy scriptures. He good-words the bread, good-graces the wine he gives us to eat and drink so they become something holy and transfiguring for us…

And we are changed by these means of grace in ways we hardly notice. Death no longer has power over us, so the fear of death and suffering slowly lose their power to daunt us. A leonine insouciance grows in us. Marvel super-hero victories are no longer inviting to us. Our gain is to be profoundly vanquished by ever greater things…

We said last week Jesus hides his treasure not to conceal but to reveal IT. Same today! By his word and sacrament, he’s hiding the treasure of himself in you and me, that dying to sin and self, more and more, little by little, it is not we who live, but Christ lives in us…

His light is never totally hidden; it shines in you and me with every step we take, every move we make, as signs, ikons of him, slow burning in a dark world, as Peace, surpassing understanding, guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.