Trinity 7 – Sloth and God’s Challenge

Sloth and the failure to recognise God’s challenge

by Gianluca

 

“Taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps 34:8)

 

We all know how refreshing it can be to spend some time abroad - away from home, and away from all its cares. The rest we experience isn’t just from taking a break from work. It’s also a break from the countless obligations that fill our everyday lives - like the constant flow of messages we need to answer, even in our free moments. When we’re away on holiday, we can let go of those distractions. We can breathe, slow down, and recharge our batteries.

Today’s gospel describes just such a moment of refreshment. Jesus and his disciples had gone abroad. They were in the region of the Decapolis - a non-Jewish, Greek-speaking area on the northeastern edge of the Sea of Galilee. There, they sought out a quiet, desolate place. But why did they go there? There weren’t any cities Jesus planned to visit. It wasn’t on the way to somewhere else. So what was the reason?

The Gospels don’t tell us explicitly. However, when we examine the context, a plausible explanation becomes apparent. Jesus had been working tirelessly in Galilee. And the most recent events had been especially difficult. A conflict had erupted. A special delegation of scribes and Pharisees had come all the way from Jerusalem to evaluate Jesus – that is, His teaching and actions.

Before I tell you what they concluded, let me ask: what would you have noticed if you had been part of that delegation?

If you’re someone who pays attention to people’s medical conditions, like I do, you would have noticed the desperate state of those who came to Jesus. And then, you would have seen them walking away - healed. You’d be amazed.

If you're someone who cares about the truth of Scripture, you would have been equally amazed. You’d have heard Jesus speak and felt the depth of His insight. He taught with unusual authority. He didn’t need to quote others to support His message. When He spoke, people felt they were hearing God’s word straight from His mouth.

If you’re someone who picks up on the mood in a room, you would have sensed something too. In Jesus’ presence, the air was filled with gratitude, peace, and joy. These are just a few things you might have noticed. There were so many reasons to be amazed. I don’t know what would have impressed you most, but we do know what the delegation from Jerusalem saw as the most noteworthy. Do you remember?

Brace yourselves. While lives were being changed, while people were discovering God, the religious investigators had made a startling discovery. Through their careful observation, they noticed… that Jesus’ disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating. Yes, that was their big finding. Seriously, that was it. It’s almost comical. But at the same time, it’s deeply saddening that they found this a worthy topic to speak about.

And Jesus didn’t take it lightly. His response was one of the strongest rebukes we find in the New Testament. Now, His rebuke isn’t the topic for today. However, it serves as a sobering reminder that being religious, being part of God’s people, doesn’t make us immune to losing sight of what truly matters to God. It’s all too easy to get our priorities wrong, focusing on details and human rules rather than on God’s will.

As you can imagine, the religious experts weren’t too pleased. The apostles reported back to Jesus: “They were offended.”

To prevent further escalation, Jesus withdrew. He left Galilee and entered foreign territory, trying to stay under the radar. But that didn’t work well. Matthew and Mark both describe the famous encounter with a Gentile mother who recognised Jesus and begged Him to heal her daughter. She called Jesus ‘Lord’ and ‘the Son of David’ and was so loud that the group ran the risk of being discovered by the masses. At first, Jesus seemed reluctant to respond. He hesitated, saying that the bread was destined for the children of Israel, and not for the dogs. Please take special notice of the word ‘bread’ and keep it in mind. Although harsh words were uttered, the woman wasn’t offended, but instead admitted her lowly position and replied humbly: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Thus, this extraordinary woman had correctly acknowledged that Jesus was ‘Lord’, even her Lord, and the Son of David, that is ‘the Messiah’, now she also showed great faith, humility and understanding of her own wretchedness. This was quite something. By provoking her, Jesus had demonstrated that she was more discerning and noble than the haughty religious authorities from Jerusalem. He complimented her publicly, ensuring the disciples took notice, and then healed her daughter.

After this, they left and following the lake’s shore, Jesus and His disciples arrived in the quiet, foreign territory east of the Sea of Galilee.

Unfortunately, word got out. And soon, people came pouring in - from everywhere. As usual, they brought their sick family members and friends. But this time, something was different: these were not Jewish people. They were Gentiles - at least a significant part of them, likely even the majority.

And not long after, many Gentiles were healed. Matthew tells us that “they glorified the God of Israel.” That phrase - the God of Israel - makes it clear these were not Jews. When Jews glorified God after a miracle, Matthew simply wrote, “they glorified God” (e.g. Matthew 9:8).

And now, we arrive at today’s passage. We read that “Jesus called his disciples to him.” He wanted their attention. He already knew what He was going to do, but before He acted, He wanted them to understand what was on His heart. He said, “I have compassion on this crowd. They’ve been with me for three days now and have nothing to eat. If I send them home hungry, they’ll collapse along the way. Some of them have come from far away.”

Three days! No one had planned to stay that long. If they had, they’d have brought food. But they lingered, captivated and absorbed by what they were hearing and experiencing. And now, they were in danger of collapsing on the way home. Jesus explained all this to His disciples. And really, who could argue against the urgency of the matter?

But why did He explain it in such detail? Clearly, He wanted to draw the disciples in. He wanted them to see the situation the way He saw it. Because what He was about to do could easily be misunderstood. It was about to be controversial. But first, He let them respond.

The apostles replied: “How can anyone feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?”

Now, at first glance, that seems like a fair question. The situation looked impossible. But is it really a fair response? Let’s rewind for a moment. Just a few weeks, or at most a couple of months earlier, these same disciples had seen Jesus feed five thousand men, women, and children, not counted, with five loaves and two fish. So imagine how they could have responded. They could have said, “Master, here are seven loaves. If you are willing, you could use these to feed the crowd.” But they didn’t. And that raises the big question: why not?

I think we can safely rule out one explanation: that the apostles were suffering from memory loss. Let’s not assume they had suddenly forgotten what Jesus had done just a short time earlier. No, we need to look for a different explanation.

The easy answer, of course, is to say they were just slow learners. That they lacked faith. That they simply couldn’t believe the miracle could happen again. But is that really a fair conclusion? Healing miracles had happened a few moments before Jesus asked the question. Even if they doubted, was it really so hard to say, “Lord, you did it once, could you do it again?”

I think we need to give the apostles a bit more credit. I believe something deeper was going on. Something that had to do not with the miracle itself, but with the audience.

You see, the first time Jesus fed the multitude, it was a crowd of Jews. That miracle echoed the story of how God fed the Israelites with manna in the desert after the exodus. When everyone had eaten, do you remember how much was left over? Twelve baskets. That number wasn’t random. In the temple, there were twelve loaves of bread, because there were twelve tribes of Israel. That miracle was a sign: Jesus was providing for the people of Israel, just as God had done in the wilderness.

Even the word for “basket” in that story carries meaning. In Greek, the word used was kophinoi - a type of Jewish basket used to keep foods ritually clean and separate, like meat and dairy.

But now, the situation is different. This crowd isn’t purely Jewish. They are Gentiles, at least many or most of them. We know this from the location, the surrounding context in the Gospels, such as Matthew's remark that they praised the God of Israel, and also from the word used for “basket” this time: spurides. This was a larger basket, commonly used in non-Jewish areas.

So Jesus draws the disciples’ attention to this Gentile crowd and says, “They’ve been with me now for three days, and they have nothing to eat. If I send them home hungry, they’ll collapse on the way.”

What could the disciples suggest as a solution? They were at a loss. Buying food was no option, but it also did not occur to them that God might provide for these people. And maybe that’s not surprising.

For us, it can be hard to grasp just how deep the divide was between Jews and Gentiles at the time. But it was real - and it was profound.

Gentiles were considered unclean. They were regarded as filthy wild dogs, pigs or any other unclean animal that could never be offered on God’s altar. Their false gods, their customs, were all seen as defiling. The idea that God would feed them as He fed Israel? That was unthinkable. Even entertaining that idea would have seemed outrageous.

And yet, Jesus was leading His disciples gently toward that very thought. So He asked them: “How many loaves do you have?” And they gave a simple answer: “Seven.”

By now, the apostles must have had a strong suspicion about what Jesus was going to do. And really, what else could be done in that situation? Who would want to send these people home, only for them to collapse on the way? Ultimately, no one objected.

Then, just as He had done the first time, Jesus instructed the people to sit down on the ground. He took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and handed the pieces to His disciples to distribute. He did the same with the fish.

As before, everyone ate and was satisfied. This time, they collected seven baskets of leftovers. And not just any baskets - these were huge baskets. We know that because the same Greek word is used in the book of Acts, when Paul - then still called Saul - was lowered from the city wall of Damascus in one of these baskets to escape (Acts 9:25).

As you are aware, the number seven carries deep biblical meaning, just like the number twelve. Seven symbolises completeness, wholeness - the completion of God’s work, the fullness of God’s creation. Some commentators have noted that during the time of the Exodus, seven Gentile nations inhabited the land of Canaan. This miracle seems to carry a message: just as Jesus had fed the twelve tribes of Israel, He now feeds the Gentile nations as well. He provides for the whole world, all of creation. Think about the story we read as the First Lesson, another feeding miracle in the Old Testament, which was also performed for the Gentiles, in this case, the widow of Zarephath and her son. It reminds us that the Old Testament teaches the same lesson, that God provides for the Gentiles.

I asked you to pay particular attention to the word ‘bread’ when Jesus spoke with the Gentile mother. Here we have it again, during the miracle of the miraculous multiplication of bread. Note that Jesus fed the Gentiles not just with crumbs. For them, He performed the very same miracle as for the Jews: bread and fish. Nothing less. He had compassion on both Jews and Gentiles. He also healed their sick. Jesus wasn’t just the Saviour of the Jews. He was - and is - the Saviour of all. His body was broken not for some, but for all.

Now, today is the seventh Sunday in the Trinity season. As Father David has taught us, many of the readings during this season point to the passions we must learn to master if we are to grow into the likeness of Christ. Today’s theme is the deadly sin of acedia - also known as sloth, laziness, or spiritual negligence.

Sometimes, sloth looks like what we expect: apathy, depression and a lack of motivation. As Christians, we can become lazy in our pursuit of God. We may choose what’s easy or comfortable instead of what’s faithful. When sloth looks like that, it’s easy to recognise - though still hard to overcome. But sloth can also be much more subtle. And that’s where today’s gospel sheds light. Let’s look again at the apostles.

Why didn’t any of them think about the needs of the crowd? Three days had passed! Did it really require divine insight to notice they were hungry? And when Jesus finally pointed it out - spelt out the problem and the consequences - why didn’t anyone suggest the obvious solution? What was going on in their minds?

Could it be that, deep down, their hearts were still closed to the Gentiles? That they still saw them as outsiders, unworthy of God’s attention? Despite all of Jesus’ teaching, despite the compassion He modelled again and again, perhaps they still couldn’t believe God’s care extended that far. Or worse, that they despised them and didn’t want them to share in God’s blessings?

In the first miraculous feeding, Jesus gave the bread to His disciples, who in turn gave it to the Jewish crowd. It was a picture of their calling: to bring Christ to the people of Israel. But now, in this second feeding, Jesus gave them the bread again - only this time, for the Gentiles. The message is clear. Jesus was calling them to be His hands, not just to their own people, but to all people.

But how reluctant they were to embrace that message! Even after Pentecost, after the Holy Spirit had been poured out, they still considered Gentiles unclean. It took a vision from heaven showing unclean animals that represented Gentiles and God commanding them not to regard them as unclean, Peter’s encounter with Cornelius, Paul’s tireless witness, and James’ fresh reading of the Old Testament before they finally began to understand: In Christ, the Gentiles are no longer outsiders. They are co-heirs of the promises made to Abraham. And this, I believe, is where we see the subtle face of sloth.

Time and time again, Jesus said and did things that challenged the apostles’ assumptions about the Gentiles. He pointed out that some Gentiles had more faith than anyone He found in Israel. He praised the Good Samaritan - someone they would have considered an idolatrous pagan - as more righteous than their own religious leaders. He warned that many of the first would be last. That many from among God’s chosen people would not enter the kingdom, while Gentiles would be welcomed in. But despite all these teachings, the message still didn’t fully sink in. And I believe that’s because of a subtle form of sloth.

You see, truly changing your thinking and your feelings - especially concerning issues you’ve held dear your whole life - is hard work. It takes effort. Deep, unsettling effort. And often, when our core ideas are challenged, we see it as an all-or-nothing situation. Either we were right, or we were wrong. But here’s the thing: often, we know for sure that most of the things that seem to be challenged aren’t wrong. Much of what we believe is true. This may tempt us to ignore the challenge, which leads to a failure to grow in knowledge and wisdom.

The real difficulty lies in finding the third way. Not the way that says “I was right,” and not the way that says “I was wrong,” but the way that says: “God is leading me deeper.” That middle path is often invisible at first. And it takes faith, courage, and diligent seeking to find it. That’s what the apostles were facing.

Their identity as Israelites, God’s chosen people, was deeply intertwined with seeing themselves as separate from the Gentiles. And they had good reasons for believing this. They were Abraham’s descendants - not the Gentiles. True. They had the covenant with God - not the Gentiles. True. They were trying to live holy lives, avoiding idols and impurity - unlike the Gentiles. Again true.

After these truths, what room was left for the Gentiles? Hardly any. In the eyes of the disciples, there remained only one way: they could only be accepted if they went through the long and difficult process of becoming fully Jewish. As long as they hadn’t done that, they were like unclean animals.

So when Jesus challenged their attitude towards the Gentiles, He wasn’t just presenting some new idea. He was shaking the very foundations of how they saw themselves and what they thought about the criteria to be included among God’s people. And here’s where sloth crept in - not as laziness in action, but as a reluctance to do the hard inner work, to find a way to reconcile what they knew and what Jesus was teaching them. And the hardest work of all was perhaps to overcome their deep feelings of disgust that they had developed towards the Gentiles.

They needed to see the Gentiles for who God revealed them to be: not as unclean animals, but as fellow human beings, children of Adam and Eve, created in the image of God. The emotional disgust they felt towards them was not from God. They needed to learn to separate sin and the sinner. Furthermore, they needed to discover that God had revealed in the Scriptures that the Gentiles would be accepted as people of God, not by becoming Jews first, but as pious Gentiles who accepted the God of Israel.

Jesus' call to his disciples wasn’t to abandon the truths that were revealed before. His call was to delve deeper, to gain an understanding of everything God had revealed, not just a small part of it, and ultimately to get to know the heart of God. He wanted to show the higher way. The third way. The way they hadn’t yet seen, and that was beyond the way they knew. As the prophet Isaiah says: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts,” declares the Lord. (Isaiah 55:9)

I must confess that I can personally relate to the experience of the disciples. I grew up in a denomination with unique convictions and characteristics, surrounded by a significant number of members who viewed their denomination as superior to all others. Although I was instructed that we, as individuals, are never superior to others and that other denominations also have true believers, it felt nearly impossible to accept that God could genuinely work through someone outside our special group. Why? Because it seemed obvious that if God led a person, that person would first become part of our denomination or at least come to accept its most critical insights. I am deeply ashamed to confess that this way of thinking had, for some time, crept into my mind.

I share this to illustrate how easy distrust, boundaries and limits on God’s work can develop in our minds. Deep down, we may feel distrust towards those who don’t share our views on topics we find essential. Unless others come to accept the same conclusions as we do, join our group or become like us, we may not be able to believe that God would use them as His instruments. Additionally, we may feel disgust towards other people simply because of their background or the denomination they belong to, or for any other reason. What I’m trying to say is this: we may not be as different from the disciples as we like to think.

One of the most subtle forms of sloth is the refusal to examine our hearts and assumptions when God is nudging us to do so. We comfort ourselves by saying that there is no need for re-examination, because we know we are right and have good reasons to believe so. We also have good reasons to feel the way we do, and there is no need to overcome our disgust.

But God may be nudging you to reconsider. If you have been ignoring these, it may be wise to step away from your routines - to have a break, even if only for a little while. Space, distance: in those moments, we hear God’s voice more clearly. I hope that all of us may experience this blessing.

What seemed unthinkable and abhorrent to the apostles, such as the inclusion of Gentiles, turned out to be a huge blessing. What joy it eventually gave the apostles to see the Spirit of God moving among people they never expected. Their inclusion and contribution have also greatly enriched the faith. What blessing could be waiting for us if we listen to His voice?

Maybe He’s calling you to seek the higher way – the way you haven’t seen before. God’s truth is like that. It’s refreshing. It doesn’t bind us; it sets us free from the thoughts that keep us captive. So I pray that in the week ahead, we may each ask God to open our eyes. To help us notice the lessons He’s been gently trying to teach us. Go to Him boldly and let Him be your refuge. As the psalmist says: “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.” (Psalm 34:8). Yes, blessed is that one: both Jew and Gentile.

Amen.