Compassion

Text: John 6:1–15 ESV

Today, we are talking about compassion. We have defined Mutual Care as the church caring for each other. Now we are going to talk about compassion, which extends the church’s reach into the community. 

Your classic forms of compassion are soup kitchens, international relief work, feeding hungry children, etc. There are, of course, hundreds of other examples of compassion, but today I am not going to try and detail all the ways Table Rock can be a compassionate church. 

Instead, I want to focus on the relationship between compassion and salvation. I hope that we all catch a love for compassion by the end of this so that each of us can brainstorm the handful of ways we can serve each other and the community. But I hope you catch a vision of it as it is related to the call for us to care for others in a way that helps them receive a gift in order to fall in love with the giver of all great gifts. 

So that’s my one sentence summary of Table Rock’s goal in compassion: We want to serve others in such a way that as they receive the gifts, they feel the call, not to love the gift, but to love the giver of all great gifts—Christ. 

Feeding Twenty Thousand 

Last time I talked about how Mutual Care follows naturally from what we believe. Compassion is no different. It simply extends that care to those outside of the church. So, we are going to turn to a famous act of compassion done by Jesus—the feeding of the 5,000.

First, in this passage John recounts Jesus feeding 5,000 men so probably about 20,000 people. As we read through this, you can imagine the enormousness of the crowd and therefore of this act of compassion.

Now let’s get into the story. 

John sets the scene for us in verse 1. Here John tethers this story to a moment in time. Some time has passed since the last scene and a few verses later we will see that it is the Passover. It’s spring, and the grass is green, we find out later. So it’s probably March or April about 2,000 years ago. We find the scene taking place out in the “wilderness”, and the teacher who has been instructing them and performing many miracles is about to give them bread. 

So what do you think the crowd is thinking? I mean, all these Jewish men and women have gone to Sunday School. They know the stories of the Bible. They know that after the Passover a prophet named Moses led them into the wilderness and brought manna from heaven. Now here they are. They have been waiting thousands of years—waiting for a Prophet like Moses. 

Now in verse 2, we meet the crowd. As these 20,000 or so people march towards Jesus, John pauses to describe why they have made this trip. They were following him 

“because they saw the signs he was doing on the sick” (John 6:2 ESV). 

This may seem like a passing thought, but it’s setting the tone for where this story is going. They saw miracles, and they want more. 

So this large crowd is on the way, and we zoom into the conversation that takes place between Jesus and his disciples. Jesus has sat down with his disciples on the mountain as we see in verse 3 and now in verses 4–6 we see Jesus spotting the large crowd and having compassion. Here is where we can go to Mark and get a little more detail. 

“When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34 ESV). 

So Jesus feels this overwhelming need to feed these people who he’s been teaching. 

Now before we see the miracle, let’s just pause and take a sneak peak at where this is going. Jesus knows where this is going, and he still has compassion on the crowd and feeds them. Most of us know the famous verse in John 6:35: “I am the bread of life,” but let's keep reading: 

“Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me” (John 6:35–37a). 

Jesus is about ready to feed this huge crowd, and he knows what the end result is going to be—most of them will see him and not believe. He knows this ahead of time because he knows that only the ones whom the Father will give him will come to him.

So now let’s get back to this act of compassion. 

Peter sets up the tension in verse 7 for us. Two hundred days worth of wages, or as it says in verse 7, 200 denarii, would not buy enough bread for this crowd. So let’s get the perspective right. That’s about 8 months worth of wages, so let’s say about $12,000 in today’s money. Then Andrew, another disciple spots a boy with 5 barley loaves and 2 fish. We get his honest assessment at the end of verse 9 when he says, 

“but what are they for so many?” (John 6:9 ESV)

Essentially, he says, “That might feed us, but it’s not going to feed the crowd.”  Jesus now comes through with the promise hinted at in verse 6 “that he knew what he would do.” 

In verses 10–12 he has the people sit down, he blesses the food, and so much food comes that he requests that the disciples pick up 12 baskets of leftovers. After the miracle, there is more bread than when they started. Verse 12 makes it explicit that this large crowd now has full bellies when it says, 

“they had eaten their fill.” (John 6:12 ESV)

The crowd, rightfully so, thinks this is no ordinary man. 

Now that’s the account of the miracle, but it functions just like other biblical stories. The story sets the scene, but the commentary after the story is the main event. John has told this story to point our eyes to these next verses and the commentary that follows in the rest of chapter 6. So verses 14–15 detail how the crowd reacts. The crowd proclaims in verse 14, 

“This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14 ESV)

Then they follow that statement up, in verse 15, with an attempt to take Jesus and make him king. The crowd reacts in three incorrect ways to Jesus’s miracle:  

(1) because they missed that Jesus was the bread of life, they imagined the wrong kind of prophet; 

(2) because they had the wrong kingdom, they tried recruiting the wrong kind of king; 

(3) because they missed who Jesus is, they never got the benefit of him being their high priest. 

The conclusion of this whole act of compassion is summarized well in verse 66: 

“After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.” (John 6:66 ESV)

Let me read that one more time: 

“After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.” (John 6:66 ESV) 

After Jesus fed 20,000 hungry people, the response to his gospel presentation was a hearty, “No thank you.” He feeds the crowd, and then points them past the gift to the giver of all gifts. And the result: they all leave. 

Pursing Salvation 

Now when I think about compassion, it feels like the very obvious fact (that can almost go without saying) is that a Christian act of compassion has people’s salvation as the goal. Here is the classic way to state it: If we do help people meet their needs, but they go to hell, can we say that we really helped them? It continues, “Why should we worry about helping them find a home, buy a car, feed their family, etc. The only thing that really matters is where they will spend eternity. If I give them all these good gifts, but they are heading to hell, what have I really given them?” 

You may think you can hear something like this, for example, in how we have written about compassion: 

“Because there are myriad needs we approach all aspects of compassion with prayer, seeking the insight only God can give us through the Holy Spirit. First and foremost, we want people to receive mercy through Christ Jesus. Any effort to mitigate a temporal need while neglecting eternal salvation is ultimately cruel, not compassionate.” (Table Rock Priorities, Compassion)

So when I thought about salvation as the goal of compassion, I was wondering, “Did Jesus get it wrong in this act of compassion? Did it not work as it was supposed to? And I look at Table Rock’s statement and begin to wonder the same thing, “Did we get this wrong? How can salvation be the end goal when Jesus’s incredible act of compassion failed to achieve that end?”

Well this is a very carefully worded statement on purpose. Notice we do not say, “Why should we worry about helping them find a home, buy a car, feed their family, etc? The only thing that really matters is where they will spend eternity.” 

Instead, what we said when we talk about compassion is: “First and foremost, we want people to receive mercy through Christ Jesus. Any effort to mitigate a temporal need while neglecting eternal salvation is ultimately cruel, not compassionate.” The key word here is neglecting. 

Intentional

Now neglecting is something that Jesus did not fail to do. He was clearly concerned for this crowd's salvation. He wasn’t neglecting it. See, the goal of our compassion is not fruitfulness, its faithfulness. 

We are to give and give and give and then ask if we were faithful in our giving. We ask if we were faithful in meeting real, tangible needs and then call people to look past the gift to the giver of all good gifts. 

This is what Jesus did. He was faithful to meet the real need and then faithful to point them from the gift to himself—the one who will ensure that they will never hunger and never thirst. He was after faithfulness. He left the fruit to God. You see this clearly in verse 65: 

“And he said, ‘This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.’” (John 6:65 ESV)

You also see it a few verses earlier in John 6— 

“All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” (John 6:37 ESV)

So we see here the model that we are after in our compassion at Table Rock. We are simply trying to follow our God’s example of compassion that gives gifts to those in need in order that they might be drawn to the giver of all good gifts. But we don’t need to shoulder the responsibility of making them respond to the good news. We can be tireless givers, like our God, and trust him to move hearts to respond to him. 

Think of the examples of tireless compassion we have from our God. 

• He took his people from slavery and as he brought them through the wilderness he showered them with bread from heaven; they rebelled. 

• He brought them into the promised land—a land flowing with milk and honey; they rebelled. 

• He brought them from exile back to the promised land; they refused to return to him. 

• He sent a prophet in the wilderness to proclaim the coming Messiah; they refused to listen. 

• He sent his own Son, who here feeds over 20,000 people; they rejected him. 

• He sent his own Son to the cross; they nailed him to it instead of bowing down before him. 

Our God is a God who is compassionate to sinners who never turn and worship him. He pours out blessing upon blessing, knowing that the end result will be rejection. This is our model of compassion. We can pour out to love others, knowing they may not respond, but doing whatever can be done to point them from the gift to the giver of all good gifts. 

Released and Free to Serve

Our heart for compassion comes directly from knowing our great God, a God of tireless compassion. God has shown over and over how he gives generously to sinners even though many of them do not turn from their sin and follow him. This model of compassion challenges us not to make salvation the main measure for success in compassion. We can serve others knowing that our aim is salvation, but God will ultimately decide if that is the fruit of our labors. In short, we are called to faithfulness. God is the one who will decide what fruit will come. 

So what does our faithfulness in serving look like? We want to serve others in such a way that as they receive the gift, they feel the call not to love the gift but to love the giver of all great gifts—Christ. 

For example, if we help someone find a job, we want to help them not love the bread they can buy with the paycheck, but to love the very bread of life who gives food that endures to eternal life. If we help someone fix their car, we can call them not to cherish their new running car, but to love the God who offers far greater treasures than a vehicle. We want to be a church that is happy to help meet real needs, in order to point to the one who can satisfy every need—to God, the giver of life.

Since we know that God is the one who does the work to bring people to himself, we are free to serve in the way that Jesus served this crowd of twenty thousand people. We can have compassion and point people to the giver of all gifts while trusting that God will take care of the rest. 

This means that we can be compassionate in a way that genuinely meets the needs of people around us. We don’t have to hold back in meeting real needs, but we can’t stop at just meeting these needs. We are called to not only give good gifts, but to point people to the giver of all good gifts. In short, we want to serve others in such a way that as they receive the gifts, they feel the call not to love the gift but to love the giver of all great gifts—Christ.