There are a couple of characters, advertising a 118
directory enquiries service, who pop up during programmes on ITV and have spoof
conversations with actors in old films.
One of these involves a man talking on a pay phone about bread and it is
clear that what he means is money. Bread
is the staple of life, a basic foodstuff and its slang link with money is that
money buys the basics to keep us alive.
We can’t survive without it. I
think people who have large reserves in the bank have difficulty knowing what
it’s like to live hand-to-mouth. In fact
if you find that you have more salary than month you don’t really know what
it’s like to have more month than salary where you have used up your cash long
before the next payday. Living
hand-to-mouth, or even worse not having enough, is very difficult to understand
for those of us who have a cushion to fall back on, however small.
The more I look into money and the more I understand about
how it works the more I realize that it doesn’t really exist. Our financial system has long since ceased to
be linked to anything tangible like gold or trading chickens. It is based on promissory notes, the
perception of a market that a trading system is stable and will continue to
produce a very complex network of transactions that keep the illusion going. There are some goods in the background but
there is an awful lot that is illusory. If
the trust in those promises is shaken then the system becomes unstable and can
unravel. We have seen what that can look
like in Greece and our own banking crisis.
Money is a very fickle and unstable place to rest our ultimate hopes. To borrow a phrase from the gospel reading, it
is a bread that perishes. In our
financial system money exists because we say it does. As soon as we think it might not, like the
cartoon character Wiley E Coyote, we plummet into a dust ball at the base of
the cliff.
In that gospel reading Jesus was a little irritated with the
people’s cupboard love (John 6:24-35). They also seem to be a bit dim. He has just fed 5,000 of them with very
little more than a small boy’s lunch and they have the cheek to ask him what
signs he will do to prove himself. Rustling
up a meal for 5,000 with a few slices of bread and some fish fingers seems
pretty impressive to me. Leaving that
aside, he sees through their Teletubby ‘again, again’ call. His response is for them to look more deeply
into what is going on. His call is not
for a free lunch to fill their stomachs for one day, conjured up out of very
little, but for aspirations and striving for a higher purpose. Who are we, who are you, what is the point
and is there an ultimate goal which gives life its purpose and point beyond the
day-to-day? Clearly Jesus’ answer is
that there is and we find it in all that we see in him and the life and hope he
brings. We need to read the story to the
end to find out exactly where that leads in the cross and resurrection. Hope here means having confidence in what
that means. But there is in this story,
in this conversation following the feeding, a hint that the sustenance of life
can itself reveal the gift that is life and the grace that gives rise to it.
The irony here is that once we start to look into the
purpose and point, the bread that endures, we find that how we share the daily
bread, the cash, the fruit of our financial scheming, comes under the spotlight
too. Justice is how we live out the
truth that we believe and the Christian truth will never be content with an
‘I’m alright, you don’t count’ approach.
If we want to know what that means this week’s news gave a few examples
to be going on with.
We have seen yet more images of desperate migrants climbing
over fences in the pursuit of a new life
and border controls stretched to cope. I
hope that leads us to ask where these people are coming from and how we can
respond with humanity and compassion. It
is complex, not least because mixed in with desperation there is trafficking
and corruption. We have to make sure
that services can cope and asylum and residency applications need proper
assessment, indeed need to be processed in the first place. This is not an easy problem to solve and will
involve cooperation across Europe and probably further afield.
By one of those strange coincidences those who are being
trafficked were also in our minds this week because on Thursday we remembered
William Wilberforce in our church calendar.
He strove with others to end the slave trade 200 years ago. Sadly there are new forms and on Friday new
sanctions came into force. People find
ways in each generation to display their inhumanity.
More directly linked with bread, with money, the living wage
debates continue. Our government in
their budget has taken the living wage branding, which is currently £7.85 per
hour (£9.15 in London), and applied the term to an increased minimum wage,
which in April will be just £7.20. It
doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that is a cut. And what is more it won’t apply to those
under 25. Wages need to be set at a fair
minimum otherwise the tax payer ends up subsidizing the true cost through
benefits. Responsible employers know
their workers need to be properly paid.
It is also not the job of the tax system to increase off-shore tax haven
profits by picking up the bill through benefits. These benefits have themselves just been cut,
so I foresee some big problems ahead for the poorest. The living wage brand is now a confused term
because it has been applied to different things, they are not the same, so I
think we now need to talk about a living income. A living income is the just sharing of bread
which springs from being committed to pursuing the bread which does not perish.
Behind all of this is an amazing generosity. It is the generosity that brings life into
being and sustains it. But it sustains
it with a purpose and that purpose lies in the eternal giver, the source and
goal of everything that there is, God. When
we long for the bread of life that does not perish, we long for the hope that
is our life and which is truth. When
truth is lived it is justice and that brings hope for everyone, especially the
poor. If our bread, our financial system
is to have any semblance of hope for the poor, which is written on the
foundation stones of the Kingdom of God, then it must bring justice, fairness.
Jesus’ redirecting the crowd’s attention away from a free
lunch to the bread of life, of hope that does not perish, should not be
mistaken for a shallow don’t worry about food.
It is a warning not to devote our energies to storing up riches which
are of no lasting value. Money, rich
bounty are tools for a purpose. The
bread which does not perish is fundamentally linked with the purposes of God
and those require the hungry to be fed, the homeless sheltered, the sick
visited and healed, the oppressed set free and good news to be lived in all its
forms. That should sound familiar
because it is the passage of Isaiah that Jesus read in the Synagogue at the
beginning of his ministry. It was his
manifesto announcement (Luke 4:16-21). The spiritual hope has some very physical consequences. The physical likewise has spiritual roots
too.
Come to Christ the living bread and you will be amazed how
this banquet feeds you and everyone else.
Longing for the bread of life has consequences for justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment