When the disciples reached the other side, they had forgotten to bring any bread. Jesus said to them, "Watch and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." And they began discussing it among themselves, saying, "We brought no bread." But Jesus, aware of this, said, "O you of little faith, why are you discussing among yourselves the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive? Do you not remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? How is it that you fail to understand that I did not speak about bread? Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." Then they understood that he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
[Matthew 16:5-12]
Here we go again. Jesus and his disciples retreat across Galilee to a desolate place. Robertson’s “Harmony of the Gospels” suggests that this is the fourth trip recorded. (Thomas & Gundry’s Harmony doesn’t specify the number). Whether there were four trips, or more than four trips, there is clearly a pattern that develops. When ministry becomes too intense, Jesus takes his disciples away until things calm down.
And ministry had been intense. Just prior to this trip, Jesus fed the four thousand in a desolate place with seven loaves and a few small fish. And the Pharisees and Sadducees had demanded a sign from heaven!?!?! His popularity, and the accompanying opposition, required him to withdraw. Why? Because neither those who praised him nor those who opposed him understood his mission. That should not surprise us, because neither did his disciples.
Jesus’ disciples were concerned with getting through the day. Amidst a busy schedule, it is easy to forget the basics. Like the plate spinner, we can begin to focus on the thing that is wobbling, without taking time to step back and see what is actually the priority. It is easy to make things complicated. The secret to success is to make the complicated simple.
There has been a running joke within our ministry about my idea of what it takes to run a conference. With conferences of hundreds of students turning up, the issues are quite complex and there are many, many details to keep track of. With the way we run our Mid Year Conferences, an error in the budget of a dollar or so per student can be the difference between breaking even or making a huge loss. But I have said for many years, the key to a successful conference is to have a good venue, a good speaker, and to have students turn up. Keeping the principles simple allows us to make good decisions about the details.
The disciples were worried about the “here and now”, but Jesus had brought them on retreat in order to train them for future ministry. So, he gives them a warning, but it goes straight over their heads. He is warning about dangers posed by outsiders, they think he is pointing out their own failing. (I have done that too – taken a general comment as a personal criticism).
Why warn his disciples about the Pharisees and Sadducees? The religious leaders looked like the good guys. As one commentator put it, no one needs a warning that the guy coming at you with a knife is dangerous. But the Pharisees and Sadducees were the “good guys”. They were religious. They taught the Bible. They sought to honour God with their whole lives. In many ways, the differences between Jesus and the Pharisees, at least on paper, were quite subtle.
The big difference was in their picture of what God was doing in the world. Their teaching, which is what Jesus warns about, reflected their understanding of how God was working and how he was going to work. It was in direct conflict with Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God.
How we view God and his work in the world directly impacts our thinking and our actions and our emotions. The challenge Tom Wright poses is,
“If we are beginning to understand what Jesus’ mission was all about, and to make it the foundation of our faith and hope, do we understand what he is doing right now, not only in our lives, but in our world?”
Tom Wright “Mark for Everyone” p.105
We need to get our big picture of God and the kingdom right if we are going to make wise and godly decisions about life and ministry in the detail.
One illustration of this comes from the business world. Many companies have moved, over recent decades, to a more flat organisational structure. The employees on the “frontline” – at the retail store, or on the factory floor – have been given more and more responsibility to make decisions that used to rest with middle management. Now there are two ways of helping those frontline employees make the right decisions.
The first way is to think of every possible scenario that they might face, decide ahead of time what the best response would be (from an organisational point of view) and develop a system – a training program or a manual – which would then empower those employees to respond appropriately. The weakness of this high control approach is that it is well nigh impossible to anticipate every possible scenario. And the multitude of scenarios and variations result in manuals that are like a series of phone books that no one can really absorb.
The second way is the impart a clear and compelling vision of what the whole organisation is working towards, and a set of values that the organisation wants expressed as it works towards that vision, and then release the employees to make up their own responses within those parameters. This is incredibly motivating for employees who are given real power to make real decisions. The greatest challenge for the organisation is to keep the vision fresh and at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
Some people, when warned to watch out for the teaching of the Pharisees, want to go through the details of their “training manuals” and query whether each proposed solution was right or wrong. But what I think Jesus is doing here with his disciples is warning them that the Pharisees’ whole vision and values were coming from a wrong place. If the disciples followed the details of the Pharisees teaching it would eventually lead them to adopt a wrong picture of God and how he worked in the world.
Now let’s return to the moment when the disciples took Jesus comment as a personal criticism. Obviously it was because they were focussed on the here and now issue of the bread. And Jesus rebukes them for that too. Over and over again he has taught them not to worry about their physical needs. Twice now in Matthew’s gospel he has turned a few loaves into enough bread to feed thousands, with basketfuls left over. And still the disciples are concerned that they haven’t adequately provided for themselves.
We experience anxiety when we fail to recall God’s previous acts of provision. How many times, and in how many ways, has God provided for you? And yet with each new challenge, do you immediately respond with anxiety and fear? One of the things I admired about Dr Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade) was his faith. As I read his biography it became clear to me that he was not born with an amazing faith. It was not bestowed upon him in a unique moment by a benevolent God. It was like a muscle that he exercised. God called him forward into the unknown and each step was an adventure into the unknown that required faith in the God whom he did know. His first efforts at fundraising were for thousands of dollars, but within a few years of launching the ministry they needed to acquire a headquarters that meant raising millions of dollars. No one sets out initially to raise millions of dollars. You have to build up to it. As you learn to trust God to provide a little, he will then challenge you to trust him for more.
When you are surrounded by plenty, you don’t need to trust God. But God’s vision and values for the world invite you to engage with something much bigger than the resources you currently have, or can access yourself. That’s the life of faith. If you are living within your current resources – time, money, influence, ability, knowledge – and if you think that is all that God expects of you, I wonder if you have accepted some view of God that is not the one revealed in the Scriptures. Faith means living out trust in God. If we are relying on ourselves, we aren’t trusting God. If we aren’t trying things which are beyond ourselves, we are relying on ourselves. But the reed will splinter in our hand. We need to, and we are called to, trust in God.
And what about those times when we try to trust God and it all falls flat?
Firstly, consider whether we are still in the desert. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be satisfied” was Jesus promise. But when will they be satisfied? Unlike the crowds who had a bit of a tummy rumble as the sun was setting, Jesus endured 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness and he was HUNGRY! I’d hate to last 1 day or 7 days or 39 days in the desert, and then conclude that God wasn’t going to provide and give up.
Secondly, consider what provision we are hungering for. What is “righteousness”? JP Moreland describes two contrasting views about the goal for our lives. He begins,
“From Old Testament times and ancient Greece until this century, the good life was widely understood to mean a life of intellectual and moral virtue. The good life is the life of ideal human functioning according to the nature God Himself gave to us… the successful person was one who knew how to live life well according to what we are by nature due to the creative design of God…. So understood, happiness involves suffering, endurance and patience because these are important means to becoming a good person who lives the good life.”
[Love Your God with All Your Mind, JP Moreland, P.35]
Then he continues,
“According to the modern view, the good life is the satisfaction of any pleasure or desire that someone freely and autonomously chooses for himself or herself. The successful person is the individual who has a life of pleasure and can obtain enough consumer goods to satisfy his or her desires.”
[Love Your God with All Your Mind, JP Moreland, P.37]
Let me finish this part with one final quote, from Tom Wright. In Mark’s account of this episode, Jesus quotes from Jeremiah 5:21 saying,
“Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?”
Tom Wright says that the Pharisees and Sadducees in Jesus’ day reminded Jesus of the people of Jeremiah’s day,
“People were so caught up in their own concerns, and so unconcerned about injustice and wickedness in their own society, that God had no alternative but to abandon them to their fate at the hands of foreigners”
[Tom Wright, Mark for Everyone p.105]
[Matthew 16:5-12]
Here we go again. Jesus and his disciples retreat across Galilee to a desolate place. Robertson’s “Harmony of the Gospels” suggests that this is the fourth trip recorded. (Thomas & Gundry’s Harmony doesn’t specify the number). Whether there were four trips, or more than four trips, there is clearly a pattern that develops. When ministry becomes too intense, Jesus takes his disciples away until things calm down.
And ministry had been intense. Just prior to this trip, Jesus fed the four thousand in a desolate place with seven loaves and a few small fish. And the Pharisees and Sadducees had demanded a sign from heaven!?!?! His popularity, and the accompanying opposition, required him to withdraw. Why? Because neither those who praised him nor those who opposed him understood his mission. That should not surprise us, because neither did his disciples.
Jesus’ disciples were concerned with getting through the day. Amidst a busy schedule, it is easy to forget the basics. Like the plate spinner, we can begin to focus on the thing that is wobbling, without taking time to step back and see what is actually the priority. It is easy to make things complicated. The secret to success is to make the complicated simple.
There has been a running joke within our ministry about my idea of what it takes to run a conference. With conferences of hundreds of students turning up, the issues are quite complex and there are many, many details to keep track of. With the way we run our Mid Year Conferences, an error in the budget of a dollar or so per student can be the difference between breaking even or making a huge loss. But I have said for many years, the key to a successful conference is to have a good venue, a good speaker, and to have students turn up. Keeping the principles simple allows us to make good decisions about the details.
The disciples were worried about the “here and now”, but Jesus had brought them on retreat in order to train them for future ministry. So, he gives them a warning, but it goes straight over their heads. He is warning about dangers posed by outsiders, they think he is pointing out their own failing. (I have done that too – taken a general comment as a personal criticism).
Why warn his disciples about the Pharisees and Sadducees? The religious leaders looked like the good guys. As one commentator put it, no one needs a warning that the guy coming at you with a knife is dangerous. But the Pharisees and Sadducees were the “good guys”. They were religious. They taught the Bible. They sought to honour God with their whole lives. In many ways, the differences between Jesus and the Pharisees, at least on paper, were quite subtle.
The big difference was in their picture of what God was doing in the world. Their teaching, which is what Jesus warns about, reflected their understanding of how God was working and how he was going to work. It was in direct conflict with Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God.
How we view God and his work in the world directly impacts our thinking and our actions and our emotions. The challenge Tom Wright poses is,
“If we are beginning to understand what Jesus’ mission was all about, and to make it the foundation of our faith and hope, do we understand what he is doing right now, not only in our lives, but in our world?”
Tom Wright “Mark for Everyone” p.105
We need to get our big picture of God and the kingdom right if we are going to make wise and godly decisions about life and ministry in the detail.
One illustration of this comes from the business world. Many companies have moved, over recent decades, to a more flat organisational structure. The employees on the “frontline” – at the retail store, or on the factory floor – have been given more and more responsibility to make decisions that used to rest with middle management. Now there are two ways of helping those frontline employees make the right decisions.
The first way is to think of every possible scenario that they might face, decide ahead of time what the best response would be (from an organisational point of view) and develop a system – a training program or a manual – which would then empower those employees to respond appropriately. The weakness of this high control approach is that it is well nigh impossible to anticipate every possible scenario. And the multitude of scenarios and variations result in manuals that are like a series of phone books that no one can really absorb.
The second way is the impart a clear and compelling vision of what the whole organisation is working towards, and a set of values that the organisation wants expressed as it works towards that vision, and then release the employees to make up their own responses within those parameters. This is incredibly motivating for employees who are given real power to make real decisions. The greatest challenge for the organisation is to keep the vision fresh and at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
Some people, when warned to watch out for the teaching of the Pharisees, want to go through the details of their “training manuals” and query whether each proposed solution was right or wrong. But what I think Jesus is doing here with his disciples is warning them that the Pharisees’ whole vision and values were coming from a wrong place. If the disciples followed the details of the Pharisees teaching it would eventually lead them to adopt a wrong picture of God and how he worked in the world.
Now let’s return to the moment when the disciples took Jesus comment as a personal criticism. Obviously it was because they were focussed on the here and now issue of the bread. And Jesus rebukes them for that too. Over and over again he has taught them not to worry about their physical needs. Twice now in Matthew’s gospel he has turned a few loaves into enough bread to feed thousands, with basketfuls left over. And still the disciples are concerned that they haven’t adequately provided for themselves.
We experience anxiety when we fail to recall God’s previous acts of provision. How many times, and in how many ways, has God provided for you? And yet with each new challenge, do you immediately respond with anxiety and fear? One of the things I admired about Dr Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade) was his faith. As I read his biography it became clear to me that he was not born with an amazing faith. It was not bestowed upon him in a unique moment by a benevolent God. It was like a muscle that he exercised. God called him forward into the unknown and each step was an adventure into the unknown that required faith in the God whom he did know. His first efforts at fundraising were for thousands of dollars, but within a few years of launching the ministry they needed to acquire a headquarters that meant raising millions of dollars. No one sets out initially to raise millions of dollars. You have to build up to it. As you learn to trust God to provide a little, he will then challenge you to trust him for more.
When you are surrounded by plenty, you don’t need to trust God. But God’s vision and values for the world invite you to engage with something much bigger than the resources you currently have, or can access yourself. That’s the life of faith. If you are living within your current resources – time, money, influence, ability, knowledge – and if you think that is all that God expects of you, I wonder if you have accepted some view of God that is not the one revealed in the Scriptures. Faith means living out trust in God. If we are relying on ourselves, we aren’t trusting God. If we aren’t trying things which are beyond ourselves, we are relying on ourselves. But the reed will splinter in our hand. We need to, and we are called to, trust in God.
And what about those times when we try to trust God and it all falls flat?
Firstly, consider whether we are still in the desert. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be satisfied” was Jesus promise. But when will they be satisfied? Unlike the crowds who had a bit of a tummy rumble as the sun was setting, Jesus endured 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness and he was HUNGRY! I’d hate to last 1 day or 7 days or 39 days in the desert, and then conclude that God wasn’t going to provide and give up.
Secondly, consider what provision we are hungering for. What is “righteousness”? JP Moreland describes two contrasting views about the goal for our lives. He begins,
“From Old Testament times and ancient Greece until this century, the good life was widely understood to mean a life of intellectual and moral virtue. The good life is the life of ideal human functioning according to the nature God Himself gave to us… the successful person was one who knew how to live life well according to what we are by nature due to the creative design of God…. So understood, happiness involves suffering, endurance and patience because these are important means to becoming a good person who lives the good life.”
[Love Your God with All Your Mind, JP Moreland, P.35]
Then he continues,
“According to the modern view, the good life is the satisfaction of any pleasure or desire that someone freely and autonomously chooses for himself or herself. The successful person is the individual who has a life of pleasure and can obtain enough consumer goods to satisfy his or her desires.”
[Love Your God with All Your Mind, JP Moreland, P.37]
Let me finish this part with one final quote, from Tom Wright. In Mark’s account of this episode, Jesus quotes from Jeremiah 5:21 saying,
“Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?”
Tom Wright says that the Pharisees and Sadducees in Jesus’ day reminded Jesus of the people of Jeremiah’s day,
“People were so caught up in their own concerns, and so unconcerned about injustice and wickedness in their own society, that God had no alternative but to abandon them to their fate at the hands of foreigners”
[Tom Wright, Mark for Everyone p.105]
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