The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, 4 September 2022
Eldroth, Clapham
Jesus was a hungry man in a land of hungry, anxious, angry people.
Hunger isn’t much talked about, in scripture, but when it stalks a people the signs are there. Hunger was the Israelites’ companion on the long weary road to the Promised Land. The prophets and the psalmists decry the gluttony of the wealthy few and the resultant hunger of the masses. ‘There is hunger in the Gospels, in Paul’s epistles, in the Acts of the Apostles, and in Revelation - sometimes a creeping hunger, sometimes chronic malnutrition, sometimes famine.’ [1]
The signs of hunger are there in the crowds who meet John the Baptist at the River Jordan - they come from all over the country, leaving the cities empty. Why? Not primarily to hear the preacher-man - I’ll return to that in a moment - but because they were looking for food. Whether or not it was a time of famine, in Roman-occupied Palestine the wealthy 10 per cent secured their comfort by openly exploiting the 90 per cent. The system was set against the masses. Thus, hunger was widespread amongst the rural poor.
Maybe by the banks of the Jordan there would be pickings of food for those prepared to search for it. That’s why they came. And by the banks of the Jordan they found this preacher-man promising redemption for those who returned to God. Would ‘redemption’ mean bread appearing on the family table? Many were baptised in the hope that it would. [2]
Of course it may have been a time of famine: for following his own baptism by John, Jesus went out into an arid wilderness where we are told he was ‘famished’. There’s justification for saying that the devil who troubled him through that ordeal was a ‘hunger devil’ - one who teased and taunted him through the emptiness in his belly, trying to entice him into wretched acts of weakness for the sake of being fed and sustained. [3]
Hunger, though hidden, shows itself at times in anger. Jesus rebuking the hunger devil was one of those moments; Jesus fiercely defending his disciples’ right to pick corn to eat on a Sabbath was another. Jesus cursing the fig tree which bore no fruit - on a day when perhaps his belly ached for it - and a ravenous Jesus raging at those he found trading fancy meats for the Temple sacrifices whilst outside the Temple the masses starved.
Just before the feeding of the five thousand Mark’s gospel tells us that ‘many people were out and about, coming and going, for the times were not good for eating’. People were driven out of their homes in search for scraps, for these were ‘bad times in which to eat’. [4]
And just before the feeding of the five thousand Mark’s gospel tells us that Herod had arrested and then beheaded John the Baptist, his most outspoken critic. Many people who had come to the Jordan seeking food, had found hope in John’s baptism. They heard that John was murdered at a lavish banquet in the king’s courtly palace… whilst their stomachs rumbled. Mark ‘creates a vast discrepancy: the wealthy eat at fully laden tables, while times are hard for the people, and thousands are hungry. The rich have the head of the popular movement served up, so that the people stray about heedlessly’. [5]
Jesus was a hungry man in a land of hungry, anxious, angry people. And with John gone, they then turned to him in hope of feeding and redemption. He did not turn them away, but he did warn them there would be a price to pay for following him.
Hunger isn’t much talked about, in our society, but when it stalks a people the signs are there. The signs are there when ‘the managing director of Iceland, Richard Walker, says on Good Morning Britain that his supermarket was losing customers ‘to food banks and to hunger’’. The signs are there when Universal Credit is slashed by £20 a week - ‘the biggest ever overnight cut to our social security, already among the lowest in Europe’. The signs are there in the more than 5,000 percent increase in the number of emergency food parcels distributed between 2008 and 2018 by the Trussell Trust, and the news that by the end of 2019, before the pandemic, the UK had more food banks than branches of McDonalds. [6]
And hunger, though hidden, shows itself at times in anger. So the signs are there in the protests of workers whose incomes in real terms have been steadily eroded at the same time as their companies shareholders and executives have enjoyed increasingly extravagant bonuses, as profits have soared.
How does a person follow Jesus in a time of hunger? Out of the pain and the joy of his own experience Jesus tells the crowds travelling with him that it involves some giving-up. It involves giving-up serving only the needs of one’s immediate family so as to create space in one’s life to give oneself to joining in the struggles of the masses. It involves giving-up one’s own possessions - starting with giving up the desire to possess things for oneself - for the sake of sharing what we have with others, for the common good.
In a land of hungry, anxious, angry people, at a time when people ‘stray about heedlessly’, how do we follow Jesus? To borrow St Paul’s beautiful question to Philemon, how can we perceive all the good that we may do for Christ?
Let us remember Jesus as the one who fed five thousand hungry, anxious, angry people in a time of hunger. Let us remember Jesus as one who taught his followers to pray saying, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, in faith that the Father who cares for each of his children will put food on our table.
But let us also remember that the five thousand were fed because Jesus asked the crowd to share what little they had with each other - that the miracle was in that sharing. And we must be clear that Jesus needs us to understand that The Father can only give us all our daily bread if we share the bread we have with others.
Notes
[1] Luzia Sutter Rehmann, Rage in the Belly: Hunger in the New Testament. p.5.
[2] Luzia Sutter Rehmann, Rage in the Belly: Hunger in the New Testament. p.12-14.
[3] Luzia Sutter Rehmann, Rage in the Belly: Hunger in the New Testament. p.69-71.
[4] Mark 6.31 translated by Luzia Sutter Rehmann in Rage in the Belly: Hunger in the New Testament. p.12.
[5] Luzia Sutter Rehmann, Rage in the Belly: Hunger in the New Testament. p.12.
[6] Francesca Newton, Another summer of hunger. Tribune, 18 August 2022.
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