What are your expectations of God?
What do you expect God to do for you?
The people who ate their fill of the bread on the grassy side of that mountain came away with lots of expectations of Jesus.
What are yours?
The disciples who saw Jesus walking across the water wanted to grab a hold of Jesus and pull him close.
Do you?
What are your expectations of God?
What do you expect God to do for you?
I know of a couple who, quite a number of years back, expected to get a baby. They prayed and prayed for a baby to call their own.
The man envisioned some hoop time and preemptively bought a basketball. The woman had dreams of her own, buying cute little baby shoes that she saw on an end cap in the baby section of Target.
They both dreamed of the day that their little ones would eventually walk down the graduation and wedding aisles, but, the basketball remained in the closet and the shoes stuffed away safe in their boxes. You see, despite their prayers and the cries of their desires, they did not conceive and have a baby. Their expectations never lined up with reality.
What are your expectations of God?
What do you expect God to do for you?
Have your expectations played out like you had hoped? Have your expectations come about differently? Perhaps, if I even dare ask it out loud, have your expectations been completely ignored…as if Jesus just decided to get up, turn his back, and walk away?
It is OK to venture into that question. It is OK to at least wonder if God has been ignoring your concerns because we see, right here in Holy Scripture, that Jesus does sometimes flee the scene of our expectations.
After feeding the 5000, the people sitting on that soft, green mountain grass see in Jesus the makings of a great king. They have visions of an abundant nation. They have visions of a defeated Rome. They have visions of green pastures and still waters. They have visions of a good king who might shepherd them in all the right ways.
The 5000 get up from their seats and seek to make Jesus the earthly king that they need, and Jesus turnz his back and walks away.
It happens again as the disciples see Jesus walking across the turbulent waters of the sea. They desire to bring him into the boat. They desire to have that power with them. But, as soon as they reach out to grasp him, Jesus sends them straight to the shore. They did not even have a chance to grasp his hand.
It happens again, this refusal of Jesus to be grasped and controlled, at the end of the gospel of John where we find an elated Mary discovering that her teacher, Jesus, is not dead, but has been raised. She wants to grasp a hold of her Lord. She wants to hold tight to the teacher that she loves, but Jesus stops her and asks her not to hold on.
It seems that John wants us to understand that Jesus does not want to be grasped. Jesus does not want to be controlled. Jesus does not want to be told what to do. It seems that John needs us to understand that Jesus is Jesus, and Jesus will decide what is right and good. Jesus will instruct us, not the other way around.
What are your expectations of God?
What do you expect God to do for you?
There is another way to live this thing that we call faith. Rather than defining for God what life should look like and what life should be about, perhaps we could quiet our minds, open our hearts, and, instead, open our eyes to where God takes us in this life. Past experience suggests that some amazing things can be discovered when we allow God to be God, and we simply wait to discover all that God is up to.
If we drop our expectations, we just might find ourselves following Jesus up a mountain towards the divine heavens, sitting down on that promised soft grass that is usually reserved for green pastures, and see the unexpected. If we drop our expectations, we just might see Jesus take the offering of a little boy, (five loaves of bread and two fish) and start handing it out to all 5000 people sitting around. There is even some left over!
If we drop our expectations, we might just see something that we would have never, in our wildest imaginings, considered possible.
If we drop our expectations, we just might see the grace and mercy of our almighty God play out all around us in unexpected and amazing ways.
God’s grace is a gift after-all. And, we all know that the greatest gifts that we get at Christmas are those gifts that were not even on our Christmas lists, but are still, amazingly, just what we needed.
Now, that is not an instruction from the pulpit to abandon shopping from the list. We have all received the amazingly nice smelling candle that we then go and add to the closet of 43 other unwanted, amazingly nice smelling candles. We are not God. We are not so good at making unexpected miracles happen, but God is quite good at it.
God will take 5000 hungry people and surprise them with the gift of unending, everlasting bread. God will take a boat that is floundering in the waves of a troubled sea and immediately send it to safe to shore. God will do the great and unexpected, that is a promise, but we will only be able to see it when we release our expectations into the wind and open ourselves to whatever unexpected gift that God has in store.
Take note: it was when that barren couple had given up all hope of giving birth to a child, and had no expectations of ever giving birth, that they received the call from a friend who worked at the county’s Children and Youth Services asking if they would be willing to take in an infant who needed a home.
The woman scrambled to find those small shoes in the closet.
A quick side note: all that stuff in the closet can come in handy some day...it is not hording...it is preparation.
Back to the couple: getting that first small child soon turned into getting a small family of foster kids. The basketball was soon retrieved and pumped up. And, finally came the day that the woman got to see the man walk not just one, but eventually four beautiful brides down the aisle to their new lives with their new husbands.
The children's own biological parents had not been there for them, but this couple had. This couple had been placed there by God, and they were, for these kids, an amazing and unexpected miracle.
The situation was a miracle for the couple too.
The couple had once thought that God had forgotten them as they struggled with their barrenness. But, God does not forget.
God may walk away from our plans and expectations, that is true, but God does not walk away from us. God just might have something completely unexpected in store. God might have a path in mind that is completely unknown to us.
That is what the feeding of the 5000 is all about. It is about Jesus’ unexpected grace filling up people’s lives.
What are your expectations of God?
What do you expect God to do for you?
Maybe, we should forget those questions and instead ask, “What does God have in store?”
“What does God have in store for us?” To find out, all that is required is that we just wait and see.
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