Joint Benefice Service, Sourton, Trinity 8, 29/7/2012
Ephesians 3.14-21 , John 6.1-21
Inside a secured running track at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, Usian Bolt trains, while through the fence a crowd of fans look on. ‘He has the hope of a nation in his hands,’ says one of them. ‘I was hoping I'd get a chance to talk to him. He represents us very well. We all just want him to be very careful.’
If word filters out that Bolt is training there, many students and others soon gather to watch the World's Fastest Man go through his paces. Reportedly, in exchange for a cigarette or two, security guards will direct fans to places on the fence line where there's a particularly good view. [1] After Bolt had a car accident, one of these fans sent him a letter. ‘Just want him to know that he's a voice around the world,’ he says. ‘He's not just doing this for himself.’
Last month I stayed at the Premier Inn in Stratford, overlooking the Olympic Stadium. Our elevated position gave us a great outlook on what was then still a work-in-progress. We watched fitters and technicians assembling a BBC studio on top of a car park which had been appropriated for the duration of the Olympics, and we watched crowds massing through the gleaming new Westfield Shopping Centre, the largest in Europe, built for £1.45bn as the gateway to the Olympic Park. Within the shining designer mall there was a buzz of anticipation: it was like watching a rehearsal for the serious shopping which will be going on there during the Olympics. Westfield Stratford City is designed so that over 70% of spectators will pass directly through it en route to the Olympic Park.
Imagine the crowds passing through there today, hungry for a celebrity sighting, yearning to touch the glory of the Olympics, determined on their way to visit Prada. I think of them as just like the crowds who pursued Jesus as he made his way through Galilee.
In the gospels Jesus is constantly pursued by crowds, all wanting his attention, all wanting to touch his flesh, holding their hands out, expecting him to feed them. Like fans mobbing Usain Bolt outside a London hotel, the Galilean crowds hemmed Jesus in, wanting more and more, giving him no time to himself, even to eat. Jesus tried to escape them to recuperate. They kept looking for him until they found him again.
Olympic celebrities speak of being worn down by the attention of crowds. India’s Olympic boxing hopeful Vikas Krishan recently said ‘It is good to be unknown.’ The 20-year-old Asian Games gold-medallist told zeenews.com, ‘Too much publicity impinges in the private life of a person. I can’t do normal things which people of my age do. I can’t even talk loudly or criticise somebody because people and media will blow it out of proportion.’ ‘I don’t have many ambitions,’ he added, ‘I want to live a simple and content life’. [2] But Krishan knows that if he succeeds in gaining an Olympic medal then the crowds won’t leave him alone. The crowds crave those who show signs of greatness, the crowds will convey greatness on them, and will follow them everywhere to receive a share in what these great ones have. The crowd craves to make kings of ordinary men.
We know that Jesus 'was moved with pity for [these crowds] because they were as sheep without a shepherd' (Mark 6:34), but they still wore him down. After a long day by the lakeside he felt harrassed to provide food for them; and in one of the most memorable actions of his entire ministry he produced enough bread and fish to feed five thousand.
The crowd had seen Jesus heal people, even without touching them, and they wanted more of that. But it wasn't just about healing, the crowd wanting more. They couldn't get enough of Jesus; their appetite for him was relentless; they were addicted; even after eating their fill they wanted more from Jesus - they started to call him a prophet, they wanted to make him a king. They were suffering what Gil Bailie calls a ‘famished craving’.
The famished craving is our craving for the famous, our focus on those who fascinate us, our craving for the attention of others, a process in which the crowd wavers between being impressed and being bored, always craving something new.
The Galilean crowds desired to make Jesus a king, this figure who fascinated them for a while. Like celebrities, kings are really sacrificial victims with a suspended sentence, ones who fascinate us for a time, until our famished craving devours them. The crowds turn on those they once made king; like Olympic athletes who age and are soon eclipsed by another, abandoned to drift in sea of criticism. By the end of the chapter, the Galilean crowd has dispersed; by the end of the gospel it has reassembled to devour Jesus. [3]
At this present moment our country is in the grip of an Olympic obsession - is that a famished craving? Or our culture’s driven desire to shop for that one item which will satisfy us - and having purchased that, to need to shop for something else - is that a famished craving? Our need to gain the attention of others; our hunger to be fed, physically and emotionally, is insatiable.
To be able to post on Facebook photos of oneself inside the Olympic Staduim; posing with the Gucci Union Jack handbag purchased at Westfield. In Stratford, in the world, satisfaction is unachievable. And when we realise this we turn on those we hoped would satisfy us.
But compassionate Jesus gives us more than we ever imagined. Jesus makes a gesture which shows that he longs to remove us from our world of craving. Jesus doesn’t give the crowds what they crave. Jesus gives far more than anyone could imagine or expect. Jesus gives them twelve baskets full to overflowing. Working from another set of values altogether, Jesus gives an uncountable, infinite gift.
Our famished craving comes in a world of scarcity - where there are finite limits on how much humans can do for each other.
Jesus invites us to step into a world of abundance - where there is no limit at all on how much our compassionate God can do for us.
Our world of scarcity produces systems in which most people suffer: whether the peasant farmers of Jesus’ time, or dairy farmers on the receiving end of harsh economics today. Our world of scarcity is a world of inequality. And studies have shown how those nations with the greatest inequality are also those with the worst health. In the words of David Cameron, ‘Among the richest countries, it's the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality-of-life indicator.’ And Ed Miliband has said: ‘I do believe this country is too unequal and the gap between rich and poor doesn't just harm the poor, it harms us all.’ [4]
At Stratford those who shop in Westfield’s branch of Liberty are separated by an invisible but massive security system from the homeless begging poor outside; they are channelled onto trains so never rub shoulders with local residents in a district (Newham) which has the highest unemployment rate in London. [5]
So how can we turn from the famished craving to trust in God’s abundance? In his letter to the Ephesians Paul models a way. ‘I bow my knees before the Father’, he says. Interesting that those celebrities and kings who we crave, we resist bowing our knees to them - we resist offering our complete submission to them. We pursue them helplessly but we hold something back for that time when we will lose interest in them and move on to another. But Paul invites us to bow our knees before the Father - to give our all to God. To devote ourselves to God in prayer.
And what does Paul pray? He prays - a prayer for all believers - that the Spirit of God would strengthen our inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, as we are rooted and grounded in love. And he prays a prayer which speaks explicitly to the crowds in their famished craving, addresses directly our world of scarcity - as it announces the good news of Jesus’ world of abundance:
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
May this be our prayer for our world - that we may have compassion for these crowds who are as sheep without a shepherd.
May this be our prayer for ourselves, in our famished focus on those who fascinate us, in our craving for the attention of others - that we might learn to leave that world behind and focus on God; whose provision for us is abundant, infinite and eternal. To conclude as Paul concluded Ephesians Chapter Three:
Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
Notes
[1] Bolt can't forget roots on the fast track to fame; The Associated Press/ESPN
[2] It’s better to be unknown: Vikas; zeenews.india.com
[3] These sections adapted from Paul Nuechterlein's Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, PROPER 13 (July 31-Aug. 6) -- YEAR B which rely especially on Gil Bailie's audio tape series, ‘The Famished Craving: The Attention of Others, the Fascination for the Famous, and the Need for Faith’. This in turn reflects on T.S. Eliot's poem ‘Gerontion’, in which which the poet writes, ‘And what [History] gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving....’
[4] Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Yes, we are all in this together; New Statesman 11 November 2010. They are co-authors of the book The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone.
[5] London unemployment highest in Newham; Stratford Today, 20 October 2011
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