Jesus, they want help, they want healing, they want miracles, they want some, you know, some new wine. They’re bored.
That’s a good one. Entertainment.
How did it entertain people back then? Storytelling.
Storytelling, yeah. So the number one reason we see this all through Mark up in this point, the number one reason why people went to Jesus was to be taught to learn something new.
We would think they would want to go to a magic show because Jesus could do magic or look like magic, right? That’s not why they went.
They went because what else does this man have to say? So Jesus begins teaching them.
And by this time it’s late, really late in the day, and disciples come to him. Hey, Jesus, you know, they must think Jesus is dumb.
Jesus, this is a remote place. We are out in the boonies, the middle of nowhere.
We’re out in the middle of nowhere. We’re out here in the boonies.
Jesus, they said, and it’s really late. It’s already very late.
Send the people away so they can go to the surrounding countryside and you know, they go shopping in the local villages and they can get something to eat. Jesus, there’s a whole lot of people here.
Let’s get rid of them because then we’ll have a chance to eat and they can go off and get something to eat. And so we’re being nice when we get to take care of ourselves.
Jesus stuns them. He stuns them.
What’s stunned? He made.
He shocks them. He stuns them.
No, no. He said, no, you give them something to eat.
They didn’t have time to eat. They didn’t have the time to go to 711 and get something.
They didn’t have nothing. So what they don’t have, there’s 5,000 men.
We find that out. And then there’s women and children.
So there’s probably 10, 12,000 more, we don’t know. But there’s definitely more than 5,000.
And they don’t. These 12 people don’t have enough to eat.
And they say, well, you want us to go do what to wear for whom? No, we can’t.
No, Jesus, you feed them. And they said, well, that would take.
This is a weird number. This is a weird number.
It would take a half year’s wages. The actual number is 200 denarii.
It would take us 200 denarii. What does that mean?
What’s a denary? Money.
So a denary is the equivalent of one day’s pay. So Jane, you work, right?
Got a part time job? No.
Who’s got a part time Job, Simone. Teacher.
How much do you charge an hour? Make up something we don’t know, 50 bucks an hour.
All right, so 50 bucks an hour. If I worked eight hours a day, how much would that be?
400 bucks. Now, if I had made 400 bucks in one day, if I made 400 bucks in one day and I added that up for 200 days, how much would that be?
$80,000. So the disciples are saying, jesus, what are you nuts?
All we have is $80,000. Now, that’s a very arbitrary.
That’s a number pulled out in the middle. 200.
Now, here’s the thinking. That’s how much money they had in the bag.
So, Judas. Hey, Judas, how much money we got?
We got. We’re good for about 200 days here, right?
There’s 12 of us. We’re good for 200 days.
And so, you know, they look in the bag. Well, this is how much money we got.
We’re going to have to spend the whole wad. We’re going to have to spend everything we got, and we’re still not going to have enough to feed these people.
Well, look at that. Well, what do you got?
No, Jesus speaks better English than I do. What do you have?
He says, how many loaves do you have? What do you got?
What do you got? Go find out.
And they went and found out, and they found five loaves and two fish. What are we going to do with five loaves and two fish and 5,000 men who just ran around the lake?
They just did a 10k around the lake. Well, that’s probably better.
10k. 4k across.
Around 10k. They just ran 10k.
They’ve had run 10k before. You get hungry, right?
5k. Why do it twice?
So these guys. Now this is great, great storytelling.
Jesus directs them, the disciples, to have all the people sit down in groups. This is one of the very, very, very few times, if not the only time in the entire Gospels, the only time in the entire Gospels that we get to see a color sit down on the green grass.
Now, we know that the grass is green because this is April. This is March, Aprilish, you know, this is the spring season, early rains.
What happens when the ground, when it rains a lot, turns green? Right?
It doesn’t get tall. If you wait till the end of summer, it’s all dried out and hay and all that stuff.
So what happens? We’re in April.
This is during the Passover. In the early part of the year, around springtime, it had been raining.
The grass is all green now imagine green grass. Mark tells us it’s green.
And Jesus say, sit him down in groups of hundreds and fifties. Now, this is.
Now you get a little imagination here. Put on your.
Put but on your imaginative eye. We got some creatives here.
I know. He puts them in groups of 50s and he puts them in groups of hundreds on the hillside.
That screen as can be right now. Why would he put them in groups of 1500s?