Jesus’ contemporaries, flabbergasted by what they had just witnessed in the feeding of the five thousand, were about to believe that this Jesus really was the promised Messiah and to start a “Jesus-for-king” movement that would put Jesus on the throne and establish Israel as a great and powerful nation once more. Jesus then set about to disabuse their foolish, fanciful notions of his Messianic ministry and attempted to tell them something of what it really meant to believe in him, to embrace him as their Messiah, and follow him as their King.

As with the people of Jesus’ day, so our concept of what it means to believe in, worship, and follow Jesus is often too small, too immature. What our Lord is saying, in today’s terms, is that the key to authentic Christianity is faith and commitment. The disciples never really understood this until after Jesus’ resurrection; some of us still have to discover it. The faith and fervor of those first followers of Jesus, the devotion and drive manifested in the waking hours of the church, are hard to come by in our generation. 

The Christianity that some of us have been a part of is a kind of streamlined, plush-lined facsimile of the real thing, a kind of defensive, crawling-into- our-holes-to-lick-our-wounds Christianity, an escapism, a running away from reality, a place of refuge and hiding. The soft faith that characterizes the religion of our day is obviously not sponsored by Jesus but is the invention of the minds of men and women who want the pearl without paying the price; who don’t really understand that there is a price to pay, a battle to fight, a life to lose, in the great business of following Jesus.

Maybe our God is too small, a sort of spiritual concoction that offers no threat to our self-centeredness. We do well to ask for forgiveness for making our God too small.