We were recently looking at the feeding of the 5000 in our men’s breakfast. They key point for our purposes was to note that Jesus got tired, his disciples were tired, but that didn’t stop the Lord from having compassion on the crowd as they ran round the lake to be with him. In the end, the needs of the people overruled Jesus’ need to rest.

One of the other points we noted – which seems significant concerning Jesus’ humanity – is that he made plans which didn’t always work out. It is pretty clear from each of the gospel accounts of the feeding of the 5000 that Jesus intended to get away privately with his disciples, but the crowds would not leave them alone. Jesus did not supernaturally foresee what was going to happen and plan accordingly. He made a plan using his normal, human mind in response to his normal human needs that simply didn’t pan out as he intended. The crowd saw to it that he would not get any privacy nor have any rest at that particular time. Jesus’ human plans were not perfect and did not always go as intended.

These observations on Jesus’ life and ministry are not new ones. They are often highlighted to address the issues of tiredness, whether we can serve people when we aren’t feeling it and that kind of thing. The usual line is that Jesus was tired, Jesus needed to retire to a quiet place, but Jesus loved the people and had compassion on them so served their needs. Just as he did, we ought to go and do likewise.

I’m not here to undercut application. It is true that, at least some of the time, we ought not to let our felt-needs, our tiredness, our sense of inability stop us doing what the Lord would have us do. Just as the disciples were to trust Jesus to do what seemed impossible to them – both in terms of how they felt and in terms of the task before them – we likewise need to trust Jesus to do what he calls us to do even when we feel inadequate and unable in and of ourselves. We can trust Jesus to give us the desires, energy and anything else we need to do the work he has for us to do and we must trust him as we do it.

However, it is clearly true that Jesus didn’t always do this. He did still get away privately. He may have served the crowds through his tiredness at the feeding of the 5000, but it is equally true that he didn’t always do that. He did get away privately sometimes. He did leave the crowds some of the time. You can see examples of him doing so at other points in the gospels. Then, of course, there are all the times we simply aren’t told about because they’re not significant to the gospel narratives. Jesus did loads of things that aren’t recorded (it is obvious enough, but John explicitly says so). It is hard to imagine a significant chunk of those unrecorded, but not that significant, events involve Jesus having a rest, getting away for a break, trying to recharge or generally chilling out a bit. We know Jesus got tired, we know he rested, it shouldn’t surprise us that some of what is not recorded about him will involve necessary, but not hugely consequential, rest periods.

The reason I mention this is because we have to be careful in applying an A to B this is what Jesus did so we must copy it exactly hermeneutic principle. Few of us, for example, think we must copy Jesus and give up our houses (another point for another day, but the middle class Christian obsession with owning your own home is called into question by Jesus expressly not having one!) Perhaps more clearly still, none of us think we need to be crucified literally on a wooden cross in order to truly follow Jesus. In both cases, we seem quite happy with metaphorical crucifixion of self and sacrificial use of our possessions. We tend to see what Jesus did as exemplary, specifically and uniquely necessary for us, but not exactly replicable by us. You can decide for yourself whether we are treating these things legitimately or not.

So then, back to the feeding of the 5000. Clearly we aren’t going to replicate the miraculous act of feeding thousands with a few loaves and fish. In terms of specific A to B – Jesus did it so we must copy it – hermeneutics, I think we can rule that out. But what about the stuff about him being tired, trying to get away and yet still serving the crowds? I think, as I said earlier, this must mean – at least some of the time – we should push through our tiredness, our felt-needs, and accept that we need to serve the needs of others. We shouldn’t let our apparent inability or otherwise legitimate needs stop us doing specifically what Jesus has commanded us to do (of course, he hasn’t specifically commanded us all to feed 5000 people out of thin air!)

But we similarly have to contend with the fact that Jesus did not have a smartphone. Jesus did not have all the demands on his time of modern life. That’s not to say he had no demands on his time. It is simply to acknowledge that the pace of life was different. The pace of Jesus’ ministry was different. The tiredness Jesus’ felt when he fed the 5000 was not necessarily an ongoing, non-stop, standard situation. It seems the tiredness was noteworthy because it was not usual.

Again, we must be careful not to draw A to B lines from Jesus to us. The truth is, there are demands on us in our ministry that Jesus did not have. To be clear, I am not saying ours is harder than his. His ministry was the hardest of all because of what it uniquely entailed. What I am saying, however, is that the demands on our time are different. Not only are there masses of books on everything that most pastors are expected to read these days – none of which existed nor would have been expected of Jesus and his apostles – we have the internet in our pockets constantly demanding our attention, giving us information that we often are expected to be across that simply would have been unknown in the ancient world. On top of that, the direct access to us throughout phone, email and messaging services mean that it is much harder for us to ever meaningfully get away from the crowds demanding our time. That’s not to say we should always insist we’re tired so there’s no access. Clearly Jesus didn’t do that. It is to say, the 24/7 access to us that now exists was not known during Jesus and his apostles ministry. They had a level of downtime away from people that the modern world doesn’t tend to afford.

Again, the point here is not that we have a harder ministry than Jesus. Don’t mishear what I am saying. What I am saying is there are necessarily features of the world we live in that are different to the world Jesus lived in. That means there are features of our world that will be harder for us than for Jesus and the apostles. Clearly, the reverse is true as well and there are aspects of the world they lived in that were harder for them than for us (travel and the dissemination of ideas through writing would be two obvious examples). This isn’t a question of whose ministry is harder. It is a matter of understanding the respective worlds we inhabit and recognising that copying the ministry patterns exactly is both impossible to do given the chronological chasm and very possibly detrimental given the significant differences between the Roman Middle East then and the modern West today.

Jesus was not on call 24/7 like many pastors in the modern West are often expected to be. Jesus did not have a mobile phone in his pocket whereby every person could contact him at any given moment and demand a response from him. Neither Jesus nor his Apostles were expected to read a dozen books on a particular ministry issue just to satisfy the niche questions of a few people in their congregation. Given the range of books to be read, Jesus and the Apostles were not expected to spend 10 hours or more in sermon prep for every sermon and the simultaneously told they must preach three time per week, and visit the congregation and potentially run various ministries of the church.

In fact, quite a lot of Jesus’ time was spent walking from place to place. This would have given a reasonable amount of regular mental down time. In travelling with others, there would be a slower pace to life and the ability to talk as you walk. Again, unless you want a specific A to B hermeneutic at play again, Jesus tended to teach both extemporaneously and with an ‘I say to you’ authority (neither are things encouraged for most pastors today). Sermon prep time was simply not the same. Indeed, lots of things were not the same.

All this is to say, we need to be very careful before we draw straight lines from the ministry of Jesus 2000 years ago in Roman-occupied Judea to those of us in ministry today in the 21st century Western world (or, indeed, anywhere else for that matter). It is not to say there are no principles for us to glean. Clearly there are things we should do because Jesus either commands them to modelled them to us. But it is equally true there are many things he did that we can’t replicate. There are also things he did that we might draw principles from but are not for us to simply appropriate and copy in exactly the same way. There are demands on us in the modern world that did not exist for Jesus and his apostles. There were demands on them – both cultural and practical – that do not exist for us. We shouldn’t be too quick to draw straight lines and forget that what is often demanded of us today in the modern world is nothing like the world Jesus operated in.

What of the specific principle in the feeding of the 5000? Clearly, we ought to lay aside our tiredness and serve people some of the time. But we shouldn’t forget that we live in a world that is liable to make us more tired more of the time and that Jesus sometimes chose to get away nonetheless. What we have – as in lots of parts of scripture – is two competing principles. On the one hand, to love others, prefer their needs, have compassion on them and serve them; on the other, to rest, to trust the Lord is sovereign, to not burn out quickly but to setup sustainable ministry patterns for the long term.

The Bible doesn’t give us a specific how-to on balancing those things. It simply tells us they are both important and need balancing. But we shouldn’t forget that the pace of the world Jesus inhabited, the nature of the lives of most people during that time, was necessarily different to ours. This means how we balance these principles may look decidedly different to a simple A-B, Jesus-did-this-so-I-must-do-the-same formula. You might have grounds for doing that if Jesus had a smartphone; but he didn’t. Which either means you need to get rid of yours or accept that ministry patterns today, the pace of life and what is possible will necessarily be different.