Jesus fed five thousand people, the story says…took up scraps and blessed them. All that ate were filled. This story teaches a profound lesson about the nature of God. God is lively and breaks into situations and transforms them. But there’s another lesson here. Stories like this one invite us to share and be generous and offer that generosity to our neighbor in God’s name. That’s a very good thing. But, there’s “…a more excellent way.” Walter Brueggemann reminds us charity was never supposed to be the overarching goal. “Charity is the patch we use on the way to weaving a new garment.” Charity is a patch until such time that justice ensures enough for everyone. Jesus then is not just meeting a pressing need, he’s modeling “…a new economy that is organized around a love of neighbor and that is committed to the viability of widows, orphans, and immigrants. Widows, orphans and immigrants are people who in the ancient world did not have advocates….So it becomes a test case for the economy, (and the religious community) and it is a redistributive economy of respect and viability for vulnerable persons, and there is no way to cover over or to hide or disguise that we are talking about policies of redistribution. And obviously the 1 percent or the 3 percent or the 10 or whatever the top is, intends to keep extracting from the vulnerable until we have only the 1 percent and a big collection of subsistence peasants who have no economic viability. So what we have to do in the church is to educate the church that we are not really in the charity business, we are in the justice business.”
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
The new podcast expands on Bishop’s For Faith devotional, drawing inspiration from the life of Jesus to answer 21st-century questions.
