The Posts From Gift And Task For Today And Tomorrow Are Pretty Good Too

Tuesday After Lent 4

Psalm 97;  Genesis 49:29-50:14; 1 Corinthians 11:17-34; Mark 8:1-10

Giver of enough for all, let us rest our lives in your abundance.  Give us a capacity to wait for our neighbors who also share in your abundance.  In his name.  Amen

Eating is a most elemental activity in which all the great human questions are operative, questions of production, questions of distribution, and questions of consumption.  Food poses questions of scarcity and abundance and creates an environment in which we may act out fearful competitiveness or generous sharing.

In the early church, all questions of food sere evident, setting Christians against each other in greed and selfishness.  The horizon of the Epistle reading, moreover, should not be confined to church behavior, because the same issues are at work in the larger economy.  In an economy of acute individualism, the strong and powerful can, in greedy ways, monopolize food and other resources and take them from the table of the vulnerable; or conversely, policies and practices of the community may generate an equitable distribution of food and other essential life resources so that all may participate together in well-being.  There is no doubt that it is the (most often quite unrealistic) fear of scarcity that propels greed and generates undue surplus at the expense of the other.

Paul Councils:  "Wait for one another."  The ground for such waiting is the assurance that there is enough for all to eat.  That assurance of enough for all is dramatized in the Gospel narrative wherein Jesus feeds four thousand folk and has a surplus of seven baskets of bread.  The narrative attests that where Jesus governs, there is an abundance for all, more than enough.  This gospel claim contradicts the greedy anxiety of economic policies that imagine that we will soon run out and we must get and eat all we can now.  The church may be a practice of alternative eating.

You can contrast this to any number of things, the Republican-fascist Iowa legislature writing drastically restrictive restrictions on what the destitute and poor can use their food assistance to buy (I never thought I'd see that hog killing operation that Iowa is putting restrictions on the buying of fresh meat), the Nazi's years long campaign to get the German public used to thinking of those on the soon to be public death list as "useless eaters" or the most effective modern assertion of that in Malthusian economics in which the entirely artificial scarcity of food in Britain - in no small part to the theft of the commons, the displacement of the agricultural poor, and other agricultural land to feed the far more lucrative  textile industry - which was turned onto its head by Darwinism to impose the British class system on nature.

Or you can go back to the nightmares of Pharaoh and the theft of the cattle and lands, then the very bodies of Egyptians in the managed famine that is reported to have come about.  It wouldn't be hard to imagine it was largely a planned famine such as those created by Stalin to  decimate the Ukrainian population or the inept theoretical famines created by Mao's gangsters or the food inflation that is the cartels rigging the Covid pandemic to their profits.  

A recent sermon given by Pope Francis's warned about the excesses of a purely academic theology that is removed from reality and real life.  I have, before, noted that the late Pope emeritus Benedict XVI was the best credentialed academic theologian in the history of the papacy, and the pastoral disaster his papacy was showed that.   That's that kind of thing Catholic style.  I don't trust a theologian who doesn't regularly come back to the questions of food and clothing, housing and medical care for the destitute, the poor and those who are struggling.  The very issues that are everywhere in the Gospels, in Acts, in the Epistles, for the most part, are so frequently seen as unimportant in the most respectable of so-called Christianity.  That is when the topic that masks that, for the most part, an obsession with sex is the alpha and omega of moral concern.  

Jesus held a last supper, he didn't hold a last lecture or seminar or colloquy or a final edit.  He didn't mention sex once in it in any of the Gospels, he hardly mentioned sex at all in any of the things he said.  And he isn't recorded as saying so much that comes out of the mouths of American bishops, cardinals, media-priests or TV preachers.