SAUCIER — A death in the family

It’s the most famous of all of Jesus’s miracles.

Everyone who’s spent some time in church knows the story.

A big crowd. Jesus spent hours curing the sick. It got late, and the people got hungry. Five loaves and two fish.

Invocation. Multiplication. Manducation.

Matthew reports about 5,000 men. While the women and children were not counted, we assume they were fed.

Twelve baskets of scraps.

There is a lot to talk about, but what intrigues me is how Matthew introduces that story.

“When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”

Jesus and John the Baptist were family. After Gabriel’s revelation, Mary went to confide in her kinswoman Elizabeth, who was also pregnant. 

According to Elizabeth, the baby in her womb, the future Baptist, “leaped for joy.”

Jesus was raised in Nazareth, and John the Baptist “lived in the wilderness,” so not many play dates, but there was a bond.

It was John preparing the way of the Lord, and Jesus who went to John for his Baptism at the beginning of his ministry.

Then John got on the wrong side of the Jewish king for criticizing Herod Antipas’s marriage to his half-brother’s ex, Herodias. (Relationships on “The Bold and the Beautiful” have nothing on what you find in the Bible.)

Anyway, long story short, Herod drank, Salome danced, Herodias got even, and John got beheaded. 

It was this news that prompted Jesus to seek some solitude. He just needed to be alone in his grief. 

There was a lot to process: the sudden loss of a friend and family member, the violent nature of that death, and the inevitable feeling that he was on the same path.

He just wanted time alone to remember, to pray and to grieve.

But the crowd found him and, in that moment, compassion outweighed the sorrow. 

He went to them, put their needs first, took the time to sit and eat with them.

But the other thing that Matthew tells us is that after the leftovers were boxed, Jesus sent the disciples away and dismissed the crowd.

“After doing so, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray.”

Grief is a tricky thing. We need to sit with our anguish, but not so much that we cut others out. 

We need to be with others, but not so much as to suppress that pain.

Jesus showed a way to do both.