Year A: Proper 13 | Matthew 13:13-21
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
August 2, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” – Matthew 14:16[1]
Between last week’s Gospel reading and today’s, Jesus has experienced two consecutive setbacks. First, he visited his hometown, where his teaching and efforts at ministry not only fascinated but offended people he had grown up around. That story ends, “And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.”[2]
Immediately after that, Herod hears about Jesus and decides that he “is John the Baptist…raised from the dead, and for this reason these powers are at work in him.”[3] We then hear of Herod’s birthday banquet and oath resulting in John’s beheading. His disciples report the news to Jesus, and our text immediately dives into today’s reading: “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”[4]
Having that context helps me understand why Jesus, who seems quite gregarious overall, might want some alone time. First off, he’s undoubtedly grieving the loss of his friend and (likely) mentor. Second, if Herod suspects he’s John, the attention Jesus is starting to draw is likely going to head the same direction that John’s did, which means it would be an ideal time to take a break while the political heat fades.
But as the saying goes, there’s no rest for the weary, and before his boat reaches a resting point, additional crowds, having figured out where he’s going to land, are waiting. In verse 14 we read that “he had compassion on them,” but the word there is stronger than that sounds. It’s more along the lines of “he found them gut-wrenching.” The last time Matthew used this term was in reference to the crowds Jesus encountered toward the end of chapter nine, which lead directly to his commissioning of the apostles to heal and serve the people of the surrounding towns and villages. Tired and overwhelmed as he may be, Jesus once again follows his gut and begins to serve these people as well.
Recognizing Jesus’ exhaustion, the apostles come to him with a reasonable suggestion: tell the crowds to go get some dinner so you can take a break. Jesus’ response, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat,” must have sounded insane. That’s because they truly couldn’t. It was absolutely impossible. They didn’t even have enough to feed themselves, much less a crowd double the capacity of the Las Cruces Convention Center.
At this point we hit the miracle, and everybody already knows what happened. Jesus miraculously multiplies the five loaves and two fish, well over five thousand people chow down, and the apostles each return with a full basket of food for themselves.
But I’ve been wondering how this might have looked in real life.
I’ve always imagined a Feeding of the Five Thousand as Jesus doing all the breaking and distributing while the apostles act as waitstaff running back and forth to a busy kitchen: break and distribute, break and distribute, break and distribute, seemingly without end. But there’s another way to look at this.
What if “Jesus looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples”[5] only a single time? What if the apostles didn’t spend the whole evening running back and forth while Jesus gave himself carpel tunnel syndrome? What if he gave each of them one piece of bread, and they simply marched out with their own handful? What if the apostles weren’t simply waiters conveying the remnants of a miracle but were active participants in the miracle itself, with the food multiplying as they handed it out?
It fits with the previous “gut-wrenching” scene. The last time Jesus saw the people and “had compassion,” he “summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.”[6] We don’t picture Jesus magically teleporting all over the place as the apostle head out on their mission of healing, so why do we expect that he did everything here?
During July, I lead a session with our Diocesan Discernment Group on prayer. Rather than focusing on common practices and recommendations of how or why to pray, I challenged them to consider embodied prayer. We’ve been talking about Breath and Body in our Romans readings for almost two months now. So what happens when we apply that to prayer? As we pray, first we breathe, becoming as aligned with God’s Spirit as is possible. Connected to and filled with God’s own breath and being, we consider the world around us, seeing it with God’s eyes and experiencing it with God’s heart. But, apart from adding a couple requests for God to fix the problems, that’s where most of us stop when it comes to prayer. However, that kind of prayer isn’t actually complete—we’ve abandoned the cycle just before it becomes effective. A prayer driven to completion involves a bodily response. If we’ve connected with God and God has shown us a need, prayer births itself into reality when we actually do something about that need. By taking action, we ourselves become answers to prayer, not only interceding with God but carrying out God’s own desires.
That isn’t to say there isn’t value to the more still kind of prayer. Most of us need contemplation and worship to connect with God and settle ourselves into God’s Breath. And sometimes there isn’t actually anything we can do in a given situation apart from asking for Divine help. But when we pray about something and recognize God showing us an action we can take toward serving one another or resolving a problem, the prayer is only half-baked until our full selves, including our bodies, join in.
St. Andrew’s has a good history of this kind of thing. People were hungry, and we began serving soup from our kitchen, a ministry that grew into El Cauldito, where many of our parishioners still volunteer each week. We saw a growing problem with people who lacked housing and health services, and we worked with others to establish the Mesilla Valley Community of Hope, where more St. Andrew’s parishioners continue to host Second Sunday Suppers each month. People saw an opportunity to help underprivileged children in Uganda and began to support the Mustard Seed Babies Home. Others have served in building missions. Our Shoebox Ministry and the St. Andrew’s Hospitality House keep growing. Each week parishioners generously offer groceries to stock our food bank and money for the Discretionary Fund where we’re able to help our broader community with their utility bills and other needs.
All of these are ongoing examples of embodied prayer—of receiving from Jesus and continuing to distribute what he’s offered to the greater community.
It’s easy to hope that problems—and the people who have them—will just go away on their own. That’s certainly what the apostles tried to make happen! But if we’re honest with ourselves, most of the time, they aren’t going to. Left unaddressed, the matters tend to compound themselves, leading to a sense of demoralization, confusion over what to do, and even grief. Fortunately, none of us need to face these challenges alone. Jesus didn’t feed all the people by himself, nor was a single apostle trying to run food to more than a high school stadium full of people. Just as parishioners from St. Andrew’s helped create organizations to address specific community needs, other community organizations already exist that have inroads into addressing issues our area actively faces. Two great ones are Border Servant Corps—housed at Peace Lutheran—and, just down Alameda, NM Café—our local branch of the national Faith in Action network. Over in El Paso we have our Diocesan Rio Grande Borderland Ministries as well. There are ministries here at St. Andrew’s attempting to get off the ground as well, like our Creation Care team and Narcotics Family Support Group, designed to serve family members of people struggling with addictions. Contact the office to get connected with those and others!
No matter how much we’d like them to, problems don’t go away by themselves. And the people who have them won’t be going away either: Jesus himself said, “you always have the poor with you.”[7] So don’t just sit there. Pray! Settle yourself in to commune and connect with God. Get in touch with God’s Breath, letting it fill you to the point where you’re able to hear with God’s ears and see with God’s eyes. And then, engage your body! Bring your whole self into prayer! The Church is the body and bride of Christ, so let us, like Jesus, embody God in this world, becoming answers to both our own and others’ prayers!
“They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] Matthew 13:58
[3] Matthew 14:2
[4] Matthew 14:13
[5] Matthew 14:19
[6] Matthew 10:1
[7] Matthew 26:11; Mark 14:7; John 12:8