Hunger and Abundance
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Jesus and his people were on overload. They had been working day and night, healing the sick and helping whoever needed help. There was no rest, the gospel says, not even enough leisure time to eat. So they came to him, worn out, telling him about all they had done. Some of the gospels place this story right after the beheading of their beloved friend, John the Baptist, a wild man, and Jesus’ first teacher. And so they were in grief, too. Jesus said, let’s get in a boat, let’s get away from all of this and rest. Just spend some time together. Sometimes when I’ve heard this story, I’ve thought this was where they were going to finally do the spiritual stuff—pray together, study Torah, really learn what God was about. I picture one of those spiritual vacations I see advertised in yoga magazines, with photogenic people in stylish yoga outfits posing on the beach in the Bahamas.
So imagine, you step off your yoga cruise ship, ready for a little retreat on the velvety white sands, and… everybody has followed you there. They all want a piece of you. You or I might’ve found this mighty irritating, and looked for a place to hide. In the midst of our grief, our exhaustion, we probably would have been like the disciples, who were ready to tell everyone to go home. In a nice way. But Jesus can’t. He looks at the crowd of people gathering and feels—he can’t help himself—compassion. I actually think that is the most important sentence in the story—Jesus looked at the crowd with compassion.
There probably were great crowds around him. Why? Well, I don’t think it was for the reasons we are typically interested in Jesus today. I don’t think it was simply because he provided great moral wisdom. Remember that these were people who were incredibly poor, on the edge of survival. Dominic Crossan says that the Greek word used here was more like destitute. They were probably people who worked all day long pressing olive oil or tending sheep, and still struggled to have enough to eat. Why would you follow someone in this case? What did you get? Why did you bring your sick relatives or your own ailing body to be healed?
There was little in the way of medical help for the sick, no hospitals or clinics, and so they were all over the streets. I don’t know what kind of healing Jesus and the disciples practiced. But I have to believe that they did people some tangible, significant good, or why would the people have kept coming? I think going to Jesus and his disciples was like going to a free clinic, worship service, and soup kitchen, wrapped in one. These were people needing to be fed in some significant way. And people always need to be fed.
People today need to be fed, in greater numbers than we have seen in recent history. Within the past decade, dozens of food riots have broken out across the globe, causing political destabilization in addition to the more immediate suffering of starvation. An estimated 800 million people now go to bed hungry each night, a shocking number even for we who have somehow (not to our credit) learned to live with the knowledge of world hunger. The problem escalated to the point that the 2010 UN summit in Rome shifted its topic from climate change to the global food crisis. They came from their meeting urging the world to help. But they did not have much agreement about how to achieve this.
The food crisis comes at a time when we’re already feeling overload about the problems of the world. When there are already several situations where we seem to have either no solution or no collective will to change in ways that would solve the problem. In her book Writing to Change the World, Unitarian Universalist psychologist and author Mary Pipher says that now, more than ever, we human beings go on overload with knowledge of problems of the world. We know about more things outside our immediate experience than ever before. It’s harder than ever to look at the crowd coming at us with their need, to look at them with compassion.
Jesus sat down with the people, the story says, and he taught them many things.
And at some point, he realized how hungry they were. He must have felt the hunger in his own belly, having had “no leisure to eat.” The disciples suggested that perhaps the crowd should be dispersed to the surrounding country and villages to go buy food for themselves. A reasonable suggestion, except that “this was a deserted place and the hour was very late.”
Remember, too, that these were people who probably had no money. Just what did they think people were going to do? Jesus said, “No—you feed them.” And they said, “Are we to go and buy 200 dinarii worth of bread?” One dinarius was a full day’s wages, mind you. This was like saying a million dollars. One should read this line leaning hard on the sarcasm. (Thanks to J. Harry Feldman for this helpful bit of information.) They kept a collective purse—Jesus probably had a pretty good feel for the books for their operation. He would know they didn’t have that much. They were sure they had him here.
He answered their question with a question—standard rabbinical technique—and asked, “How many loaves have you?” They answered, “five,” sure they had him now. And then, the miracle of the story goes, he blessed the loaves, as one would make the motsi, the Jewish blessing on the bread, at dinner on Shabbat. He had everybody sit in neat rows of hundreds and fifties, and handed it all out. And there was enough for everyone, with 12 baskets worth of leftovers.
There are two general interpretations of this story. One is pure magic. Jesus waved his magic wand and it was like turning the place into one big Costco, full of items in bulk.
The other way people interpret what happened is as a miraculous enlarging of people’s hearts. They saw one boy who gave up his food for the crowd, and they reached into their bags, moved to share their own food.
The first one is not as bad as it sounds. It would be nice to believe that by faith in the creator, we could have an end to hurricanes, an end to earthquakes, an end to this food shortage we’re facing now. Alas, though, its violation of natural law simply makes it an untenable interpretation for most rational sorts, and makes it easy for us to dismiss the story out of hand.
I prefer the other interpretation. If I were to choose a miracle, it would be that people were somehow given eyes to see one another, and hearts that were connected by their experience together. But this interpretation has problems, too. If people had truly brought lunch for themselves, why would they have looked so hungry to the rabbi? If they had come to him on impulse, as the story seems to imply, would they really have packed a picnic lunch with enough to share around? Each of the six tellings, in all four gospels, paints an absolutely impossible situation. Each cries out for a miracle.
For some time now, we’ve had some reliable miracles. Economic growth has been our solution to problems of poverty. “We’re going to grow our way out of this mess,” we keep hearing. Improved technology has been our magic wand. Environmentalist Bill McKibben considers fossil fuels to be our greatest “miracle.” They are powerful, remarkably easy to get, and highly concentrated. They replace human and animal effort. We now spend about 11% of our budgets on food—the generations before World War 2 spent 22%. And it comes from the rise of centralized, efficient production demanded by the large grocery stores. The one stop shopping we love. It’s hard for us to understand the impact on most of the world, which lives so differently.
The 2008 report of the four-year International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, backed by the World Bank and UN, did not push for big technical fixes, much to the irritation of America and Europe. It came down on the side of “multifunctional” agriculture, which incorporates goals such as poverty reduction, water conservation and climate change adaptation alongside conventional efforts to increase production. It said that the biggest gains will come not from new “miracle crops” but from making existing science and technology available to the small scale farmers responsible for tilling a third of the world’s land surface. Only by helping them to feed themselves—partly by improving distribution and markets—will the challenges be met.
What does this mean for us? There are a growing number of people urging us to rethink the gospel of endless economic growth, and endless technological growth.
People like Bill McKibben counsel that smaller and simpler lives for everyone—rather than insisting that everything keep getting bigger—would point the way out. I know that sounds about as likely as making giant loaves of bread and gigantic plates of fish with the flick of a wand. So many people would have to change in such fundamental ways. We are in a loaves and fishes story right now, an impossible situation. What will it take for us to feed one another?
Back to the gospel story. It gives Jesus the opportunity to ask one of his very favorite questions of the disciples: “Don’t you get it?” What’s the “it” here, what is there to get? “Religion,” writes Sara Miles, “is not so much about swallowing beliefs, as it is about learning how to see.” See with the eyes of mercy, with the eyes of compassion. And what we must learn to see, again and again, is how intimately we are all connected. How one person’s suffering is not so different from mine. The food crisis is asking this of us. It is asking us to see our neighbor, and feel their hunger. It’s not an easy thing to look at.
I remember one time I was asked by some friends to help them with their turn on the sandwich van, going to a designated place in their neighborhood and handing out sandwiches. People were collecting at the corner, I saw, and I suddenly felt tremendous fear and reluctance to open the doors. I felt the enormity of being one of the people inside the van handing out sandwiches, versus being the one on the sidewalk in need. I suppose I felt guilty. Perhaps I even felt their suffering was contagious, or something I did not want to know about. But once we started, I was surprised by how ordinary it felt. Some of them smiled, some didn’t. Some of them looked at me, some kept talking to their friends and took the sandwich without looking. I could feel, for a moment, a very natural connection—I eat sandwiches, you eat sandwiches. I get hungry, you get hungry. We are not so different.
God is food, holiness is food, mercy is food, justice is food. But God does not appear unless we look at one another and connect on this very ordinary, human level. The distribution of this God, found in food, is very much dependent on us. We must look at the crowd with compassion, or we will go hungry, too.
- Hunger and Abundance - May 1, 2019
- You Are the Light of the World - December 1, 2011
