A
Little to a Lot
A little can be a lot. I find what Jesus did here
with this feeding to be quite wonderful.
There’s this great multitude of people out in the middle of nowhere
looking for Jesus because of all the healing he was doing throughout
Galilee. The day is coming to an
end. The people need to eat. So, in a scene reminiscent of the Israelites
wondering in the desert Wilderness after God brought them forth from slavery in
Egypt, Jesus fed them in a way that would leave no doubt that in Jesus the Lord
God of Israel was among them.
The crowd was actually bigger than 5,000. That was just counting the men. Many scholars will say add at least one woman
and one child per man and estimate that the crowd was over 15,000. That’s almost the whole city of Owen
Sound. Jesus feed them with five barley
loaves and two fish.
I think that possibly the real miracle here was that
he got some kid to share his food. I’ve
got two kids and I know how they are with sharing. It’s a hard lesson for them. When we go to McDonald’s they both will want
fries. I’d like to save a little money
and let them share a small fry because they never eat them all. But, they each have to have their own and
getting them to share food is more of a fight than the two dollars are worth. This nameless boy shared his food. And, those loaves and fish were probably his
family’s dinner that he was responsible for.
He probably would have gotten in trouble for having given it to Jesus
and his disciples had Jesus not feed everybody with it.
We adults have a problem with sharing as well
particularly in our culture with its economy that’s driven by the
institutionalized coveting we call private ownership. We each have to have our own – our own land,
houses, cars, stuff. If everybody has
their own, who needs to share.
Moreover, we like building bigger barns and keeping
it all to ourselves. Whether we want to
admit it or not, we are like the rich fool.
Jesus was quick to point out that the rich fool didn’t earn his
wealth. It was the land, the
fruitfulness of the land that produced his wealth. He had little to do with it. Yet, the fool built himself bigger barns to
keep the abundance of the land that he should have shared with everyone who
helped to work the fields. And, then he
has the audacity to speak to his soul as if he is God. In the Bible the soul is the totality of our
embodied being that is supposed to be in relationship to God. This rich fool as if he is a god to himself
builds his big barn to hoard the abundance of the land that he has no right to
and says to his soul, “Relax. Eat,
drink, and be merry.” God got him. That night he died. God called his life, his soul to
account. What good was his earthly hoarding?
God himself called the man a fool. In Greek, the word is aphron, which is the type of fool who is foolish for not living up
to his potential. The potential here is
the Kingdom of God value of sharing one’s abundance with those who for whatever
reason have need. This rich fool spent
his life in pursuit of comfort and achieved it through wrongful hoarding. He could have in fairness distributed the
excess that the land produced to those who actually worked the land for him and
been rich according to Heaven, but he didn’t.
He built a bigger barn and hoarded it and God was not impressed. To be intentionally redundant, God called him
a fool.
In the world today we call this foolishness saving
for retirement. I could rant on about
that, but that’s not a funny rant when you are a senior who is on a fixed
income that really is not enough. You
give to your church and other causes and the giving comes at a cost. It’s a sacrifice. All the while there are those who have
amassed substantial to massive fortunes of the “abundance” of the blood, sweat,
and tears of the hard work of others.
Yet, they give little to nothing and what they do give really costs them
nothing. There is foolishness in our
economic system just look at the bizarre world of the American election. This foolishness keeps us from living up to
our potential of being a truly fair and just society where there is no poverty.
We’ve a whole culture of individuals
fixated on the foolish pursuit of someday being able to like God by being able
to say to our own souls, “Relax. Eat,
drink, and be merry.”
In King Jesus’ kingdom a little boy’s little bit feeds
a lot. In the kingdom of the world everybody’s
pursuit of a lot requires that there be a percentage of people not having even
a little. There is something wrong here.
You may remember the Ethiopian famine back in the
1980’s. There was a drought and people
started to starve. The harsh truth was
that there was enough food being produced in Ethiopia to feed the people, but
the people who were growing the food could get more for it by selling it on the
world market than dealing locally with it and so people starved because of
localized drought. So it is in the world
today. There is enough food at present
to go around. The reason there are
people starving today is greed.
Well, enough of those global economics, what about
us? Fall is here. The harvest is in. Hopefully the crops are sold and the bills
are paid. God has been good to us. We are thankful. What do we do now? Build bigger barns? I doubt that.
I suspect there are probably more than a few farmers in the area
wondering if they should go ahead and sell. Economics for the family farmer are largely
not fair. The big farm operations that
deal at the global rather than the local level with their “lot” of what the
land produces seem to hover like vultures over the “little” of the family
farmer.
Coming back to Jesus and his feeding of the
multitudes, I see the family farmer being a lot like the little boy with five
loaves and two fish. So I’m perplexed
and I ponder. How does the little of the
family farmer become the “lot” that feeds the multitudes when multinational farming
corporations that deal globally are circling?
Well, I could go all hippie on you and talk about how
the family farmer has the potential to keep things local. If we listen to the economics guru’s who have
a mind to the future of the human
species and the planet we live on rather than the bottom line, they tell us
that local based economies are the most healthy, fair, just, and sustainable
way for us to go forward as a species. Considering
Ethiopia in the 1980’s, they are likely right.
But, it requires a local economy being willing to buy local and that is
not an easy and affordable switch for most people to make.
It is amazing how something as simple and basic to
life as food can be so complicated. But,
maybe we Christians shouldn’t give in so easily to the way things are in the
world of “Big Corporate Food.” When we
go to the grocery store we have a choice when it comes to produce and usually
to meat to buy Ontario. We just have to
read the label. If it’s not local, then
it’s “Big Food” who is making the profit and not an Ontario farmer. There’s Kingdom of God value in buying honest,
local food rather than cheap, mass produced food. Let us remember and support and be thankful
for our local farmers. What seems to be “a
little” in the world of “Big Food” when kept local is a lot. Amen.
