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Reflection for July 31, 2005

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Edgar Lee Masters wrote a fun poem about the episode in today's Gospel reading. It's about two small merchants from Damascus in Syria who dealt in figs and wine - doing a nice business. The one named Hipparch also ran a bakery. And then someone told them about the growing Jesus movement down in Galilee and how lots of money could be made off the crowds flocking to his preaching.

"Buy fish, and set up a booth, / Get a tent and make your bread. / There are thousands come to listen, / They are hungry, and must be fed."// And so we went. Believe me, / There were crowds, and hungry too. / Five thousand stood in the desert / And listened the whole day through.

The two merchants invested in a large supply of bread and fish and set up something like a mobile fish and chips enterprise among Jesus' followers. And indeed Jesus' disciples played right into the merchants' hands, telling Jesus to give the hungry crowd a recess to go buy food, since the disciples could only come up with two fishes and five loaves.

We heard it, me and Hipparch / And rubbed our hands. You see / We were there to make some money / In the land of Galilee. // We had stock in plenty. We waited. / I wiped the scales, and my chum / Restacked the loaves. We bellowed, / But no one seemed to come. // "Fresh fish!" I bawled my lungs out: / "Nice bread!" poor Hipparch cried. / But what did they do? Sat down there / In fifties, side by side.

Well you know the rest. The two fishes and five loaves miraculously proved more than enough to satisfy those five thousand potential customers, leaving our entrepreneurs bankrupt. Which I guess is a way of saying that it takes more than commerce to satisfy the hunger of the human race. There's another kind of sustenance we need, something far more profoundly nourishing than we'll ever find in the shopping malls and supermarkets and stock markets of this world.

It's to the satisfaction of this deeper hunger and thirst that Isaiah invites us in today's first reading where he says, "All you who are thirsty / Come to the water! / You who have no money, / Come, receive grain and eat." - which we interpret to mean, "Come, assimilate Christ's Gospel of forgiveness, love, generosity. If you're starved for love, maybe it's because you yourself are afraid to love. Indeed, maybe that's the very miracle Christ worked in today's Gospel, his words reviving within a love starved people a capacity for love, a generosity that solved their problem - and could solve the world's problems as well.

When we come to church each Sunday we come to be fed in ways the world of big business by itself cannot match. We come to recover that mutually sustaining sense of a local and global family, which we tend to forget when we're obsessed with cornering the energy market or competing for a free lane on Highway 101. Of course our Damascus friend and his partner, finding no profit in following Jesus, gave up on him as a bad investment and left the Holy Land. But not before holding a clearance sale.

Everything! Counter and scales - / I'll take whatever you give. / I'm through and off to Athens, / Where a man like me can live. // . . . To Athens, beautiful, free. / No more adventures for us two / In the land of Galilee.

-- Geoff Wood