Faith & Insight: The leftovers are the point

Growing up my family was a fan of leftovers. My mom regularly would take parts of one dinner and recreate it the next night as something else. For Thanksgiving, we’d cook two to three times the food needed as at night one of us would ransack the fridge. Even at buffets we’d find ways to bring home leftover prime rib for our springer spaniel, Donald.

We’re not the only ones as most people love having more than they need. And this is biblical as the concept of an abundant meal, and leftovers, points to a greater reality in Christ. The reason is just as food meets a physical need, God’s grace meets a greater spiritual need inside those who know him.

In the beginning God created a world of abundance, enough to support billions of people. But the first two people, Adam and Eve, weren’t satisfied with this abundance and ate from the one tree God commanded them not to eat from. And from this forbidden meal death, war, hunger, and discontentment entered the world. In his book “A Meal With Jesus” Tim Chester says it this way:

“Our world is a world of hunger, pain, suffering, and want. Even in neighborhoods where most people have enough to eat, we still live in want. We're still unsatisfied. We may not long for bread, but we long for meaning, intimacy, fulfillment, community, purpose, and joy. We long for the world to be sorted out.”

We all have a sense of lacking something, and God through Jesus offers us an abundant life. I know some of us can't even imagine what this is like, but God shows us in Luke 9 in the Feeding of the 5,000. But this account is not so much a lesson on generosity but a statement from God that “I will satisfy,” no matter how bankrupt the soul and self-centered we’ve become. Luke 9:11-17 says:

“When the crowds found out, they followed him. He welcomed them, spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed healing. Late in the day, the Twelve approached and said to him, ‘Send the crowd away, so that they can go into the surrounding villages and countryside to find food and lodging, because we are in a deserted place here.’ ‘You give them something to eat,’ he told them. ‘We have no more than five loaves and two fish,’ they said, ‘unless we go and buy food for all these people.’ (For about five thousand men were there.) Then he told his disciples, ‘Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each.’ They did what he said, and had them all sit down. Then he took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he blessed and broke them. He kept giving them to the disciples to set before the crowd. Everyone ate and was filled. They picked up 12 baskets of leftover pieces.”

While there’s a lot Jesus is revealing about himself and God in Luke 9, he is showing that he satisfies us. That through multiplying bread and fish for 5,000 men, and leaving more leftovers than the food they began with, Jesus highlights he can do what no one else can. He can provide the abundant life we desire, he can take the dissatisfaction and sin that comes with it and fulfill and supplant it.

But the point of the Feeding of the 5,000 wasn’t just the miracle but the leftovers. Christ not only gives us the grace, love, mercy and joy we need but enough to give to others. Following him is not a zero-sum game, where we get out what we put in. Somehow with Jesus he takes our need and whatever we bring and we come away with an abundance of leftovers to share with others.

Fred Kingman is the spiritual formation pastor at LifePoint Church in Minden.