Isaiah 55:1-3a (NRSV Updated Edition)
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread
and your earnings for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
Matthew 14:13-21 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
Romans 8:35,37-39 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? ... No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
~
"[W]hat does it mean to be looked at through eyes that only know abundance, for whom scarcity is simply not a reality, for whom there is always more? Think of the rupture this produces in my patterns of desire! “If you want more, there won’t be enough to go round,” or “There’s no free meal at the end of the universe,” or “Grab what you can before it all runs out,” or just the gloomy depressed “euugh” of disappointment with things, life, and so on not matching up to expectation, the way of being in the world and perceiving everything which the ancient Hebrews referred to as vanity, or futility.
"What does it look like to spend time in the regard of One for whom it is not, as the whole of our capitalist system presupposes, scarcity that leads to abundance by promoting rivalry, which we then bless and call competition? Rather it is a hugely leisured creative abundance that is the underlying reality, and an endless magis, “more,” is always on the way.
"What does it look like to spend time in the regard of one for whom daring and adventure, not fear and caution, underlie the whole project of creation, for whom everything that is is open-ended and pointing to more than itself, and for whom we are invited to share in the Other’s excitement and thrill, to want and to achieve crazy and unimaginable things?
"What is it like to sit in a regard which is bellowing at us “something out of nothing, something out of nothing”? Our pattern of desire says “Unnhh, nothing comes from nothing” and feels sorry for itself. Yet the heart of the difference between atheism and belief in God-who-is-not-one-of-the-gods is not an ideology, but a pattern of desire which thrills to “something out of nothing.”
...
"Well, these terms - deathlessness, abundance, daring and something out of nothing - are just a few of the sorts of phrase by which the Scriptures attempt to nudge our imagination into spending time undergoing a regard that is not the regard of the social other, one which has a wish, a longing, a heart that is for us, much more for us than we are for ourselves, one which we can trust to have our long-term interests at heart."
- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, p. 422-24
~
"Again here is the difference with the Mosaic story [of the quails in the wilderness] - in the Moses story the quails come, people can't get enough of them ... and a huge number of people die of excess quail eating - but here there is no excess eating, everyone is satisfied and there's a huge amount of fragments left over. And the fragments are collected up in twelve baskets, giving a sign obviously of the twelve tribes of Israel that have been fed by the real Moses, the one who has come to put right what Moses was never quite able to to get right. We'll see that compared a little bit later, Jesus walks across the sea either like Moses or across the Jordan like Joshua, and then we'll get another feeding but this time with the numbers indicating Gentiles.
"So what's going on here? Well the first thing of course is that faced with people in a place of hunger, people who are hungry for a sign, people who hadn't really understood Jesus's teaching in parables, he enacts a sign. He's not only generous in healing the sick but he enacts the sign of Moses, saying. 'Yes, I am the one who is going to bring to fulfilment what Moses was unable to do'. Because of that, he does show the abundance, the utter abundance, of God - nothing is held back. And the prophetic passage that's being fulfilled is exactly the one which we have in our first reading [Isaiah 55:1-3]. ...
"This is, if you like, the definition of something for nothing, something out of nothing, pure abundance, something that can be relied upon. But there's something that goes along with this. In the Isaiah passage it's not only, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread or labour for that which doesn't satisfy?” [but also] “Listen carefully to me and eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear and come to me; listen so that you may live.” This is a continuous element of Jesus's teaching: not by bread alone but by the word that comes from the mouth of God.
"So every activity becomes a sign of a much richer lesson. Are we going to be able to find ourselves not satisfied with physical feeling alone but beginning to allow ourselves to be satisfied by the sheer abundance and generosity of God - by, if you like, a changing of our mind that comes through listening such that we're able to rest peacefully with each other and with God. This of course will later become a prophecy of the Eucharist and that's how it will be understood over time but for the moment it's this extraordinary sense of there being a richness in the teaching that is even greater than the abundance of the food...
"[A]t the bottom of all this there is an abyssal love, a longing for us in our precariousness, in our weakness, a longing for us to receive a fullness - a fullness that is both physical and of understanding of heart, such that we can learn to rejoice and discover ourselves the loved children of God, who as Paul says, nothing can separate us from."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 18 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxnN89m16Uk)
[Source of quote from James Alison's Jesus the Forgiving Victim, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper13a/]
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