Food Sunday: Becoming Food Providers
Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35
This Sunday is “Food Sunday”. In our first reading, God feeds starving Israelites with Manna in the desert. After their meal of Manna, calm returns to a people on a verge of rioting! In the gospel, Jesus feeds the hungry crowd, and they look for him to get extra free food. Essentially, we need to remember that the availability of food and the action of eating are opportunities to encounter God because he never abandons his children in their needy moments!
The experience of Israel, in our first reading, confirms that a “hungry person is an angry person” because Israelites protest their hunger and get ready for a riot. Israelites’s strategic quest for food is to blame Moses for their hunger. They could not see God among them, so Moses is the scapegoat! The Israelites’s argument suggests that a good leader should feed those under his leadership. The menu of Egypt becomes the example they cite for Moses – “Would that we had died at the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread!” – hunger as the worst type of slavery!
Hunger clouds the mind and leads to temporary amnesia. On account of hunger, the Israelites forget the slavery of Egypt and why they find themselves in the desert in the first place. The journey out of freedom into liberty stands on the brinks because of hunger! God’s initiative to free Israel from slavery in Egypt is about to be hijacked! The conspiracy to lynch Moses mounts! The worst in human beings – violence – is about to boil over!
God provides the Manna from Heaven to calm down Israelites’s boiling blood! Yes, food and eating do calm nerves and lead to reconciliation and peace. After a good meal, Israel regains its memory, and the Manna banishes amnesia. More importantly, the Israelites recognize once more the presence of a Provident God in the miracle of the Manna. God reveals that he steps into turbulent situations to calm them. He not only steps up to liberate enslaved Israelites, but God feeds the Israelites in moments of starvation.
Slavery is not the experience of everyone, but hunger is. Everyone gets hungry every day, whether there is food to eat or not. Hunger reminds us of the importance of food. Most people work and find paying jobs to be able to feed themselves. Eating and the ability to eat keep us alive. It is precisely the near indispensibility of food that God uses today to teach us about our need for him (God). Just as everyone becomes hungry and can riot or become violent in the absence of food, God teaches us to see his presence in our lives as more indispensable than food. In fact, God becomes our FOOD to teach us to crave for him at every instance of our lives!
Jesus’s teaching in today’s gospel is simple: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” From this statement, Jesus teaches two lessons: firstly, the Manna is not just food; it is the presence of God. Secondly, Jesus is not just a man; he is God! Consequently, any time we eat food and have the availability of food and forget the remembrance of the presence of God, that is the pinnacle of atheism and crass ingratitude!
“I am the bread of life” is Jesus’s declaration of God’s indispensibility in human lives and projects. The real hunger and the violence that ensues from our cravings for physical food stem from our forgetfulness of the presence of God.
True disciples of Jesus do not forget him. Our gospel reading shows that the followers of Jesus know where to find food without having recourse to violence – they go to Jesus, who multiplies bread for thousands of them to eat. Jesus only gives them one condition for them to receive free food – to recognize that God/Jesus Christ is our food and Provider of food!
Our atheistic world of today goes to war to dispossess nations of their resources because they imagine that material food without God will assuage their hunger. Our so-called democracies pass laws to dispossess individuals of their fair share to our common resources to enrich a few greedy entrepreneurs! However, God alone and the recognition of his presence and power can scale back human thirst for violence because of the greed for surplus food!
It isn’t rocket science, but common knowledge: a community that recognizes God as food and Provider of food never starves! “Community” means everything belongs to everyone, with no one having more rights and access than anyone else. The food that you couldn’t finish, which goes into your refrigerator, incriminates you as a thief because it is your poor neighbor’s food that you have stolen! Refrigerators and freezers are not conservation technologies but are symptomatic of technological greed when their purpose is to dispense with the knowledge of God and our collective responsibility to feed our hungry/starving neighbors.
The theology of “I am the bread of life” teaches the interconnectivity and intersubjectivity of every human person. When each person takes enough food for the day, everyone else gets enough. The collection of the daily Manna, from where we learn the meaning of “give us this day our DAILY BREAD,” is to collect enough for each family and neighbor just for one day. Avarice and atheism are the collection of food for storage because others will starve in the process!
Here is our ultimate lesson and the meaning of Christianity, according to our second reading: “You should put away the old self of your former way of life,
corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”
Our “deceitful desires” include hiding our greed and gratification of stealing from and robbery of our neighbors’ food under senseless economic theories that justify theft. A Christian must be like God: “put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”
When you eat, remember Jesus, who is the bread of life. Each time you see your refrigerator(s) and freezer(s), ask whether your neighbors have eaten. Each time you receive Holy Communion, remember that your password in response to the priest’s or Communion Minister’s Code/username means that you MUST become like Jesus – a provider of food for your neighbors and not a thief and a hoarder of food!
Assignment for the Week :
Could you feed somebody this week in gratitude for God feeding you?