Not everyone who asked about Jesus’ stories stayed. If you come to Mass, you’re asking, but not everyone who comes to Mass stays – it happens all the time. People get baptized, or have their first communion, or get confirmed, and after that the next time they’re in church, they are the guest of honor at a funeral.

So why would Jesus talk like that? It may be because He wanted the disciples to be clear about the kinds of things crowds would say about them. Maybe He wanted to direct them to the people and places where they would be most effective.

When everyone was safe in the boat, they worshipped Him: “Truly You are the Son of God!” (Matthew 14:33). Easy to say when you’re safe in the boat. Say that with your feet on the water. That’s where the power is.

There is no verse in Matthew that shows Jesus actually teaching a crowd. All of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew was done in smaller venues, with small groups. The same was true for St. Paul. There are no texts showing Paul teaching crowds either. He preferred smaller, more intimate settings for his teaching, too.

But the reality is that there are not enough priests to do the explaining that needs to be done, and even if there were enough, priests don’t have access to all the places where the explaining needs to happen. It isn’t just in Sunday School, but even more importantly at dinner tables, schools, and workplaces – all the places where people don’t understand what Jesus has said, or think they understand, but are dead wrong.

Beneath the superstars, as it were, there was a large community of other people, less gifted perhaps than the superstars, but still people of immense talent, and their working, struggling and striving with each other created the superstars. The superstars come from communities of people who have seen that the harvest is plentiful, and lean into that work. There are no superstars apart from a dedicated community of laborers at work in the fields of the Lord.

Some don’t understand what sort of man Jesus is. They don’t accept what sort of man He is. They don’t come, they don’t kneel, they don’t ask. And so they don’t receive His mighty acts of power. Power happens when we recognize what sort of man Jesus is. He is the man who is also God.

The Truth can be missed when the quiet part is not explained correctly, is not lived correctly.

Do you want the bread from heaven, the water of life? Jesus feeds and strengthens those who trust Him and come to Him.

There is no shortage of signs from God that all point to Jesus as the way to life, the meaning of life, the gate to heaven.

Jesus didn’t do what they wanted. That’s how the crowds hated Him. They wanted the food and the healing, but they didn’t want God.

The problem wasn’t that Jesus had not revealed Himself; it was that people didn’t want Him. They wanted somebody who offered worldly things.

Jesus has power to heal, power to forgive, power to cleanse, power to save – but only for people who will make up their minds to trust Him.

Crowds don’t always mean people are interested in enlightenment. Sometimes they mean just the opposite.

9 February 2024   Mark 7:31-37 Jesus went to gentile territory, the region of Tyre (modern Lebanon), with the intention of not being...

So go to a place where you are likely to find Jesus, and wait.

Jesus didn’t trust crowds because salvation doesn’t happen in mobs.

Healing was a sign of Jesus’ agenda, but it was not the whole thing.