Where do you go to get your food?  We are being forced in our present circumstances, with stay-at-home orders and the closing of restaurants, to find new ways to obtain the food we need to eat.  Some restaurants are providing curbside service as well as delivery options to homes.  Many people, who are financially capable, are ordering their groceries to be delivered to their homes and then preparing their own meals.  Others make infrequent visits to local grocers to stock up on food to cook as meals.  The increase in home-cooking has also provided for the opportunity for some families to have real family-style shared meals.

Food providers, such as farmers, are losing their livelihood because of the inability to sell and/or deliver their food.    Food banks are having to find new ways to find food due to the increase in consumer grocery shopping as well as new ways to provide meals to those community members that rely on them.  Church and neighborhood communities are delivering groceries and prepared meals to those unable to leave their homes at all.  Many people are finding creative and sustaining ways to both support the restaurants and provide food/meals to health care workers and first responders.

In all of this, we are being challenged in obtaining food, providing food, serving food, and even sharing food and meals.  Some of us are complaining about the inconvenience of the situation and claiming that it is unnecessary, while others are simply making do and being as creative and generous as they can be.  For many, the direness of the food situation is nothing new, only now it is under a new form – the pandemic.  Today’s Gospel (JN 6: 1-5) has some resonance with this situation…

When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him,
he said to Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?”
He said this to test him,
because he himself knew what he was going to do.
Philip answered him,
“Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough
for each of them to have a little.”
One of his disciples,
Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to him,
“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish;
but what good are these for so many?”
Jesus said, “Have the people recline.”
Now there was a great deal of grass in that place.
So the men reclined, about five thousand in number.
Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks,
and distributed them to those who were reclining,
and also as much of the fish as they wanted.

I find it interesting that John has Jesus testing Philip by asking him “where can we buy enough food for them to eat?”  It appears that Jesus is seeing if the disciples are ‘getting’ the message about hunger, nourishment, and sharing.  Well, Philip somewhat fails the test it appears, when he responds in fashion by making the rather practical conclusion that, given the amount of people who needed to be fed, there would not be enough money (wages) to purchase enough for everyone to just have a taste.  Then, Andrew speaks up.  He is aware that a young boy in the crowd has a little food, but he also comments that this small amount could not possibly be enough.  Perhaps not the answer Jesus was hoping to hear either.

Enough, enough, enough!  There just does not seem to be enough!  Everything is scarce and we are worried about that.  Insecurity and fear about the uncertainty of the unfolding situation in our world is putting us into starvation mode.  Along with this perceived starvation, we are aggressively defensive and cannot perhaps see opportunities to address the current situation in an altogether new way and indeed in a way where we end up with more than we ever thought possible.

“Have the people recline” is the instruction Jesus gives the disciples to pass onto the crowd.  And that curiously wonderful line, ‘Now there was a great deal of grass in that place.”  Jesus is reassuring them, inviting them to relax, breathe, lean into the situation with a certain amount of flexibility, lower yourselves to the ground and let the life of the grass refresh you and perhaps allow you to release some of this anxiety and tension.  Take advantage of the present.

The food is distributed after Jesus gives thanks and everyone is reclining and quite full.  Everyone!  It is enough, and then we find out it is more than enough.

When they had had their fill, he said to his disciples,
“Gather the fragments left over,
so that nothing will be wasted.”
So they collected them,
and filled twelve wicker baskets with fragments
from the five barley loaves that had been more than they could eat.

What is this encounter or event?  It does not turn out how many in the crowd, perhaps even the disciples, had anticipated.  I wonder if everyone could really see what had happened?  The Gospel goes on to say that the crowd recognized Jesus as a prophet and were going to come and carry him off to make him king. Jesus withdrew again to the mountain alone.

There is nothing harder to change than one’s mind – one’s structure of perceiving things.  The lenses we look through are affected by everything around us – our culture, our history, our genetics, the list goes on and on.  It’s not all bad, but when it is held onto as a strict source of identification and value in our lives, then it can become a type of food that we rely upon, not realizing that we can be poisoned by it and indeed pass this poison on to others.  The lenses through which we see everything is a type of food that we rely and depend upon, believing that it is the only thing that is real.

It takes practice to recognize this type of food that narrows everything, everyone, the world and even God down into something to be consumed.   And then it takes courage, diligence and complete honesty to begin to fast from this food, and allow our habituated reactions to give way to new food – a new way of perceiving that comes from a place of abundance and generosity.  Quite frankly, it’s similar to the struggle with any addiction.  It’s no wonder the twelve step program has always been authentically spiritual in its nature.

The Easter story, cast as a story of seeing the abundance of the divine in situations, which by all accounts, seems meager, scarce, and frightening, is more a process or way of life than merely an historical event.  Real nourishment is not about more of the same to satisfy hunger, but rather enough newness to see and respond to hunger as an engagement of abundance through death.  This is the ongoing call to move into new life through death in all of its shapes and forms.  It is only through this process that perceived scarcity can be transformed into abundant newness.  Here enough is always new and more, because it is God’s way of life.  As the astute Pharisee teacher, Gamaliel, warns the Sanhedrin in their attempts to thwart Peter and the Apostles in preaching this new way of living in and through Christ (ACTS 5: 34-42):

…if this endeavor or this activity …comes from God, you will not be able to destroy them; you may even find yourselves fighting against God.

God’s way is irrefutably deathless and Life-giving.  It is more than enough and nothing is wasted in Christ.   Our call is to recognize, eat and share the fragments of our lives in our lives with each other.  For the source of abundance is in the gathered fragments left over.