Four or five years ago, a story came out about a hiker in Colorado who got lost in the mountains. Rescuers were sent to save him, and they had his phone number. They called his mobile, but he kept rejecting their calls. He assumed that—because he didn’t recognise the number—they were spam calls. So he kept rejecting the calls and ended up lost on the mountainside for twenty-four hours before eventually finding safety. He should have seen the sign and trusted the phone-calls.
That’s pretty typical of our response to the Lord Jesus. It’s a very simple Sunday-school answer to say that Jesus is the one we need to look to, and yet it is true. Even though he meets us very explicitly in the Bible—as we hear the Bible read and preached—we meet Jesus, but, instead of accepting his help and crying out to him for help, we tend to reject him. And instead, we respond with a mix of fearfulness, pragmatism, self-righteousness, panic, and other more complicated solutions.
This is certainly what Philip and the other disciples do here in this crisis in John 6, where five thousand and more people need to be fed, and the one who can help them is standing right in front of them—but he is not their first port of call.
