On hearing the readings for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, those gathered for worship this Sunday might easily regard themselves also as “sheep without a shepherd,” for whom Jesus has compassion. Like the social world from which the villagers of Galilee came to Jesus in the wilderness, the world from which contemporary worshipers come to hear his teaching is all too frequently as badly governed and managed as was Galilee under Herod Antipas. As among those guests with Herod when the head of John the Baptist was served up for food, so also amidst the conspicuous consumers of our political and economic elites, death reigns (see our comment on the readings for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost). If told to go “into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat,” as Jesus' disciples thought to instruct the gathering in the wilderness, those gathered today would be fully subject to the anxiety of providing for themselves from a market dominated by the politically powerful and the materially wealthy. Indeed, if anything, we have made a science of creating the economic circumstances that generate such anxieties for most of the people of the world.
In our often thoughtless and aggressive hoarding of the gifts of God we demonstrate again and again the anxiety of membership. We act as though we can thrive while the habitats and organisms that feed us can languish and die. In a fit of ecological amnesia, we have forsaken our natural neighborhood and abdicated our responsibility to care for them. Having forfeited the opportunity to share in God’s delight in a world wonderfully and beautifully made, we now find ourselves eating through a sick and poisoned world (Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 89).
today's global, free-market economy guarantees that we will disregard, diminish, and destroy the larger economy of creation, and so deprive ourselves of the experience of home. It does this by (1) encouraging patterns of life that keep us from seeing and correctly interpreting where we are, and by (2) forming groups of people who, because of their habits and dispositions, find it very difficult to live into any place with sympathy, affection, responsibility, and joy. Paradoxically, the economic disciplines and practices that are supposed to help us live long and well within our homes are now largely responsible for ensuring that we will live perpetually in a state of exile (Wirzba, p. 90).
Indeed, he argues, “the success of today's consumer economy depends on the inattentiveness of its consumers. Very few people appreciate the extent to which their shopping decisions contribute to the degradation of the world's ecosystems. Fewer still understand how this ecological degradation has the potential to catastrophically jeopardize long-term food safety and sustainability.” Meanwhile, as global food production becomes ever more securely tied to the profit-driven interests of multinational corporations, “land, water, minerals, energy, genetic diversity, as well as the many forms of social capital, are consolidated and then managed by a small number of elites. Because poor people cannot afford to enter the global economy, they are easily abandoned and forgotten, or they are made the objects of charity and relief efforts.” (Wirzba, p. 95).
The key point is that this whole development of the way we “provide for ourselves” is a long-term, intentional transformation of human culture. People have been taught “to think differently about human behavior and the aims of a good human life.” What “the great moral and spiritual traditions” once regarded as vices “—pride, greed, prodigality---“ have been “transformed into economic virtues,” so that “Adam Smith's ideas about production, acquisition, and work “ could take hold. In a fundamental “redefinition of self-interest” people have come “to measure personal worth in terms of private wealth”; then it “is a short step from the legitimation of self-interest to the enshrinement of competition and destruction as the normal, even necessary, courses of economic life” (Wirzba, p. 99).
includes also the present assembly of hearers of the story. Once again, even this fragment of the feeding story is a secret epiphany of the Crucified and Risen One—indeed, an epiphany of the shepherd God –present in the midst of the church. . . . . the ‘shepherd's' profound compassion is already the beginning of food for the crowd, a food radically different from anything that Herod served in the immediately preceding narrative[p. 114]. . . . Can given-away, mercy-filled food lead? Yes.” (“Pentecost,” in New Proclamation Year B, 2000, pp. 113-14).
So, “let the sermon announce the judgment of God on false leadership, including the preacher's own,” admonishes Lathrop, while announcing the gathering, wall-destroying, death-destroying leadership of God, present in the grace, leisure, and life—in the food-–that is here given away. And let the assembly be a temple for that God, for the holy Trinity, the God of boundless compassion” (Lathrop, p. 115).
Further development of these theological themes awaits as for the next five Sundays we turn to the narrative of the feeding by the “Bread of Life” from chapter six of the Gospel of John. Lest we leave too quickly the down-to-earth implications of the prophetic critique of leadership, however, our second lesson from Paul's letter to the Ephesians reminds us that the shepherding of God has implications for the gathering's understanding of itself: as Lathrop summarizes the remarkable images for the church contained in the reading, “The church is a union of the far-off and the near, with the wall torn down and the law which divided abolished (2:14-15). It is indeed the ragged crowd of the Gospel. The church is the 'household of God,' the gathered people, a single body, and yet a new-built temple (2:19-20)” (Lathrop, p. 115). That perspective is present in Mark's narrative as well: Jesus feeds both Jew and Gentile in the wilderness, where God is clearly and unquestionably the host. If, as we have been arguing in this series of comments on the lections for year B, Mark's narrative is about the displacement of the presence of God from the temple in Jerusalem to the person of Jesus, this “ragged crowd” is privileged by being newly at home with him in the creation given to sustain their lives.
If “all around us the memberships of creation are coming apart” (Wirzba, p. 80), what creatures “need is the healing and strengthening of memberships, a healing in which the church, understood as the continuation on Earth of Christ's practice or way of being, has a vital role to play (Wirzba, p. 147).