All four of the Gospels tell the story of Jesus feeding over 5000 people with a boy’s lunch comprised of five barley loaves and two fish. On our best day this stretches our imagination, doesn’t it? We call it miracle because that is the only word we have for it.

The apostle John called it a sign. For him, the mind-boggling size of the miracle wasn’t as important as was the One who worked the work. The sign pointed to Jesus. The issue wasn’t that everybody got a free lunch. The issue was the authority and power that were at work in the person of Jesus. This is quite an issue.

John said that when “the people saw the sign…they said, ‘This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world’” (John 6:14). What Jesus did that day evoked a response of faith and the people saw something they had never seen before. They didn’t understand it fully, but they knew they had witnessed an act of God, an act that led them to believe that something very unusual and different was afoot. Could it be that this one is the One we’ve been looking and waiting for?

People, being people, they wanted to make this wonder working fellow their king but Jesus would have nothing to do with that kind of thinking. They didn’t need a powerful king; they needed a powerful Savior. He didn’t come to pontificate monarchical strategies; He came to redeem a broken and hungry world.

I look at this sign and realize that the best thing we can do in our lives is to be as faithful to God as we know to be and to let Jesus do what Jesus does. He can make something out of nothing, a lot out of a little, and He does it all just because of Who He is. Truth is we don’t need a miracle so much as we just need Jesus.