Readings: 2 Kgs. 4:42-44; Ps. 145: 10-11, 15-18; Eph. 4:1-6; Jn. 6: 1-15
Thirty thousand children die every day of absolutely preventable causes associated with hunger. Mostly they die from diarrhea connected with unsafe drinking water.
Thirty-six million people in all die every year from those same easily remediable causes. That's like the death toll from 300 jumbo jets crashing each day for a year, with no survivors, and with most of the victims children and women.
Can you imagine 300 jumbo jets crashing every day? Of course, you can't. Just three jumbo jets crashing on a single day would throw the airline industry into complete panic. It would recognize that something was deeply wrong with the system. More regulation would be demanded by everyone.
And yet, with hunger, the equivalent of one hundred times those crashes with the horrendous figures I just mentioned happen each day, throughout each year, and no one in authority will say that the system is defective. In fact, we celebrate it as the very best possible. Politicians commonly champion less regulation rather than more. They believe the free market is the solution to all of the world's problems.
But is unregulated market the answer to world hunger? According to the U.N., the problem of world hunger is not lack of food production, but its faulty distribution. Through no fault of their own, but through the fault of the reigning market system, people in hungry countries just don't have the money to buy food. According to the same U.N., a mere 4% tax on the world's richest 250 people would solve that problem.
Each year those 250 people receive as much income as the world's nearly 3 billion people who live on $2 a day or less. Taxing the 250 by a mere 4% would provide enough to make the hunger I'm referencing disappear -- and not just hunger, but unsafe drinking water itself, along with illiteracy, poor housing, and lack of medical care.
That sounds so easy. But such a tax is not even discussed -- not even by Christians like us who profess to be "pro-life" and concerned about defenseless human life forms -- at least before they're born. In defense of the unborn, such Christians want to force women to bring all pregnancies to term. However, they see forcing the super-rich to part with an infinitesimal portion of their great wealth an unfair limitation on the wealthy's freedom -- even if it is to save thousands of already born children each day.
In the face of such intransigence (not to say hypocrisy) on the part of those who see the free market as the solution to everything, many in hungry countries have turned to the violence of revolution or terrorism in efforts to change the system.
So, our question becomes: free market or violence against that system? Which way did Jesus approve?
Today's gospel reading indicates that Jesus approved of neither. Instead, he offers a third alternative -- a non-violent system of sharing led by his followers with women in the forefront.
Let me explain what I mean.
Today's Gospel reading comes from John the Evangelist. Bread holds an extraordinarily prominent and symbolic place for him. But note that in John's version of Jesus feeding bread to 5000 men, there is no mention of the women and children inevitably in the crowd. (As we'll see, Mark's version of this story importantly centralizes their presence.)
It is also important to note that there is no mention of a "miracle" in either John's or Mark's account.
Instead, the story goes like this: People have followed Jesus "to the other side" of the Lake of Galilee. They are hungry. Testing him, Jesus asks Phillip where to buy bread for so many. Phillip has to confess that the market system cannot even begin to feed them all. There's nowhere to buy, and even then, a year's wages would be insufficient to give each person even a morsel. To reiterate: in the story, the market system proves incapable of meeting the challenge. Jesus and the women in the crowd are about to offer an alternative.
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