Articles

Bread for the hungry

Genesis tells us that sin upsets the world in which people live, our relations with God, our relations with one another. Familiarity with God makes place for fear and distrust. Then the author(s) try to give a popular answer to the causes of evil, suffering, difficult work.
Jesus, on the other hand, brings people together and gives them something to eat when they are hungry, as a sign of his mercy, his efforts toward unity and of the food of the Eucharist. Let us seek this unity and this food.

Reading: Genesis 3:9-24

God called to the Man: “Where are you?”
He said, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid.”
God said, “Who told you you were naked? Did you eat from that tree I told you not to eat from?”
The Man said, “The Woman you gave me as a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree, and, yes, I ate it.”
God said to the Woman, “What is this that you’ve done?”
“The serpent seduced me,” she said, “and I ate.”
God told the serpent:
“Because you’ve done this, you’re cursed,
    cursed beyond all cattle and wild animals,
Cursed to slink on your belly
    and eat dirt all your life.
I’m declaring war between you and the Woman,
    between your offspring and hers.
He’ll wound your head,
    you’ll wound his heel.”
He told the Woman:
“I’ll multiply your pains in childbirth;
    you’ll give birth to your babies in pain.
You’ll want to please your husband,
    but he’ll lord it over you.”
He told the Man:
“Because you listened to your wife
    and ate from the tree
That I commanded you not to eat from,
    ‘Don’t eat from this tree,’
The very ground is cursed because of you;
    getting food from the ground
Will be as painful as having babies is for your wife;
    you’ll be working in pain all your life long.
The ground will sprout thorns and weeds,
    you’ll get your food the hard way,
Planting and tilling and harvesting,
    sweating in the fields from dawn to dusk,
Until you return to that ground yourself, dead and buried;
    you started out as dirt, you’ll end up dirt.”
The Man, known as Adam, named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living.
God made leather clothing for Adam and his wife and dressed them.
God said, “The Man has become like one of us, capable of knowing everything, ranging from good to evil. What if he now should reach out and take fruit from the Tree-of-Life and eat, and live forever? Never—this cannot happen!”
So God expelled them from the Garden of Eden and sent them to work the ground, the same dirt out of which they’d been made. He threw them out of the garden and stationed angel-cherubim and a revolving sword of fire east of it, guarding the path to the Tree-of-Life.

Gospel: Mark 8:1-10

At about this same time he again found himself with a hungry crowd on his hands. He called his disciples together and said, “This crowd is breaking my heart. They have stuck with me for three days, and now they have nothing to eat. If I send them home hungry, they’ll faint along the way—some of them have come a long distance.”
His disciples responded, “What do you expect us to do about it? Buy food out here in the desert?”
He asked, “How much bread do you have?”
“Seven loaves,” they said.
So Jesus told the crowd to sit down on the ground. After giving thanks, he took the seven bread loaves, broke them into pieces, and gave them to his disciples so they could hand them out to the crowd. They also had a few fish. He pronounced a blessing over the fish and told his disciples to hand them out as well. The crowd ate its fill. Seven sacks of leftovers were collected. There were well over four thousand at the meal. Then he sent them home. He himself went straight to the boat with his disciples and set out for Dalmanoutha.

Prayer

To those who are not filled with themselves,
you reveal yourself Lord, our God,
as the giver of all good things.
Make us yearn for justice and peace
and for all things that endure.
Give us a copious meal
of your word and your life
through him who is our bread of life,
Jesus Christ, your Son and our Lord. Amen.