An Invitation to Abundance
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
The poem “God’s Grandeur,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, has always been one of my favorites, not just for the inventive way it engages with alliteration, rhyme, and other creative wordplay, but for the world it describes, a creation that is charged throughout with signs of God’s goodness, glory, and grace. Even after centuries in which we human beings have smeared and smudged the landscapes on which we trod, Hopkins asserts, “for all this, nature is never spent, there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” It is a vision of a creation that is marked with the abundance of its Creator, a fecund and fertile world in which both literal and figurative fruit flourishes under the watchful care of a good maker and a master gardener.
These images of an abundance that runs counter to the threat and the fear of scarcity came to mind as I read the lectionary passages for this week. They, too, describe a world in which God’s abundance reigns supreme, no matter how many times we might forget that truth, or how many times we might retreat back to the perspectives of scarcity that are the hallmark of this world’s economies. These texts remind us of the covetousness, the jealousy, the empty striving that can emerge when we are trained to focus on what we don’t have, when we see the world around us as a context for competition, and our neighbors as our chief rivals. We might even be tempted to view God as nothing more than a divine dispenser of the things we crave, the things we long to consume, and to view our relationship with that God as purely transactional.
The prophet Nathan, displaying remarkable courage even for a prophet of the Lord, recounts a parable in which David, the king of Israel, the man after God’s own heart, is shown to be nothing more than a scoundrel who would run roughshod over his neighbors, even over one of his most loyal soldiers, simply to get what he wanted. He chose not to look at the abundance that marked his life, but rather to focus on what he lacked, which in this case was a woman he had no right to desire, let alone to take her for himself. Despite the riches, the favor, the successes that David had been blessed with, despite the fact that he even had multiple wives, David, operating from a spirit of covetousness, took what he wanted, never mind the lives that he destroyed in the process.
When Paul wrote to the Ephesians, he no doubt had in mind the damage that can be done in a church when a spirit of jealousy and competitiveness is allowed to reign. He had seen the divisive bitterness that can emerge when brothers and sisters in Christ choose to argue about things like spiritual gifts and the status they confer. Thus, he urges them to view every gift as the working of the grace of Christ in the life of the body, and to understand their life together, likewise as a gift, one that reaches its fullest potential when the parts of the body can grow together toward maturity, not tearing one another down with their petty, infantile disputes, but truly bearing with one another in love, tuning out the temptation toward rancor that might tear them apart.
Finally, on the heels of one of Jesus’ most public miracles, the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus addresses the motives of his would-be followers. Have they come looking for him because his vision of God’s kingdom has stirred something in them, or simply because his astonishing multiplication of the loaves and fishes has led them to believe that he might be their meal ticket in a world where there never seems to be enough. Jesus wants to make it clear that, while he, like Moses, was capable of filling their bellies with bread, he had come to open their eyes to a sort of abundance that even Moses could scarcely have imagined. Jesus has come into this world as the bread of life, that those who would come to him, those who would feast on him, would never hunger again. What would it look like to find in this Jesus the kind of fulfillment that ends all desire, the kind of satisfaction that ultimately puts an end to all of our cravings? To set aside our desires long enough to see Jesus for who he is, to know Jesus for who he is, brings us into the presence of an abundance that overcomes all scarcity, a grandeur that never fades, a glory that endures for all eternity.
