Joint Benefice Service (followed by a picnic), West Camel, Trinity 8, 26/7/2015
Ephesians 3.14-21 , John 6.1-21
He has given us so much - that we want him to give us more.
At the Sainsbury’s Anniversary Games on Friday night the crowd witnessed their hero Usain Bolt return to the stage on which they watched his triple Olympic gold medal winning exploits just three years ago. We can’t get enough of him. He has given us so much - that we want him to give us more. The crowds will be watching him again keenly, at the World Championships in Beijing next month. [1]
When Usian Bolt trains inside a secured running track at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, there is always a crowd of fans looking on through the fence. ‘He has the hope of a nation in his hands,’ one of them told a journalist. ‘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. 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.’ [2]
Three years back, the world’s focus was on the Olympic Stadium, Stratford, East London. Every day crowds massed through the then-gleaming new Westfield Shopping Centre, the largest in Europe, built for £1.45bn as the gateway to the Olympic Park. Plenty of serious shopping went on there during the Olympic Games, and has done ever since.
Westfield Stratford City was designed so that over 70% of spectators would pass directly through it en route to the Olympic Park. And so the crowds did pass through there every day of those games, 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.
Whether they are crowds gathered to watch great sportsmen and women, or crowds massing around showbusiness icons, or religious or political figureheads, all crowds crave those who show signs of greatness, all crowds 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. And their craving is insatiable: He has given us so much - that we want him to give us more.
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 only about healing, the crowd wanting more. They just 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 - having once called him a teacher, then a healer, 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, a process in which the crowd wavers between being impressed and being bored, always craving something new. It is closely linked to our craving for the attention of others, which is equally restless, never satisfied.
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 those moments when our country is in the grip of an Olympic obsession, or a Wimbledon obsession, or a James Bond or Royal Family obsession - is that a famished craving? Or our culture’s driven desire to shop for that one item which will satisfy our longing to look good in the eyes of others - and having purchased that, to immediately feel the need to shop for something else - is that a famished craving? Our need to gain the attention of others; our hunger for others to feed us, physically and emotionally, is insatiable. We have received so much - that we want to have more … and more…
To be able to post on Facebook, photos of oneself inside the Olympic Stadium; posing with the Gucci Union Jack handbag purchased at Westfield. The pleasure in such things is intense, but fleeting. In Stratford, in the world, satisfaction is unachievable. And when we realise this, we turn on those we hoped would satisfy us. He has given us so much - that we want him to give us more… Watch out, Jesus, watch out, Usain Bolt, one day the crowd will turn on you.
Our famished craving comes in a world of scarcity - where there are finite limits on how much humans can fulfil their, and each others, desires.
But - knowing all this - compassionate Jesus does gives us more - more than we could ever imagine.
When he feeds the five thousand Jesus makes a gesture showing that he longs to release 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, a sign in bread and fish of his limitless love and provision for us.
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. Even David Cameron acknowledged this - seemingly without irony - when he said, ‘Among the richest countries, it's the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality-of-life indicator.’ [4]
The legacy of the London Olympics is a massive shopping centre, attracting those with money and those drawn to them. 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 to never rub shoulders with local residents in a district (Newham) which has the highest levels of unemployment in London. [5]
How can this ruptured world be healed? How can we turn from our self-destructive 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 heroes 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 to focus all our desires 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] This is a revised version of John 6: The famished craving, the sermon I first preached at the time of the 2012 London Olympics; now referencing the 2015 Sainsbury’s Anniversary Games and Beijing World Championships.
[2] Bolt can't forget roots on the fast track to fame; The Associated Press/ESPN
[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 draws 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's Poverty Profile: Unemployment by Borough; website accessed 23/7/2015.
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