Scarcity & Hope

  When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming towards him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, ‘Six months’ wages* would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.”                                             John 6.5-7

Why is it that the servants just don’t seem to get it? It always seems to be the case in scripture (whether the first testament or the last), that those closest to the workings of God in the world are the ones who repeatedly fail to get the word.

Perhaps like many people of faith today, they are ruled by personal expectations of who God should serve or welcome or love. Perhaps they just struggle to get out of their own way and allow God the freedom to operate as God would choose.

In the passage from John’s gospel that we will hear on Sunday, Jesus is surrounded by a waiting and expectant crowd, drawn to him by the great work he has done among the sick and suffering. As night falls, Jesus asks his disciple Philip, where are we going to find bread for these people? It is a test, of course; and of course, Philip doesn’t exactly ace it.

Half a year’s wages wouldn’t begin to provide enough for all these people, he warns. Another disciples chimes in that there’s a kid here with 5 loaves of bread and a couple of fish. You know the rest of the story: 5000 people are fed; and there were 12 baskets of leftovers. Everyone cries out, ‘there is a prophet among us,’ which really means that they have been in the presence of the word of God.

You need this prophetic voice to articulate a different way of looking at the world and the possibilities it contains. Philip isn’t really a failed disciple; he is merely a human being, and like all of us, he falls victim to the human inclination to see the world and his place in it as limited. The action of Jesus addresses a real, human need: hungry people are fed. But beyond addressing that immediate need, Jesus does something else that carries far beyond that hillside and that gathering: he invests the people of God with the capacity to see the world in a radically different way. Through the eye of God, we are invited to see the world as filled with promise and possibility bestowed by God’s creating and redeeming love, not as limited by our own notions of scarcity. This sense of promise and possibility, the Christian witness calls hope; and it reminds us always that we are children of God whose gaze is always on the promise of a future abundant in blessing.