Jesus' vision of economic and social redistribution of wealth and power

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Anglicans urged to practice �shared abundance� of food

The keynote speaker of the diocese�s Outreach Networking Conference urged Anglicans to join the food sovereignty (also known as food security) movement, and said an early practitioner of it was Jesus Christ. �He told it, he showed and he embodied it,� said Ched Myers, speaking to about 170 people at Holy Trinity School in Richmond Hill on Oct. 16.

Mr. Myers, a biblical scholar and social justice advocate, said the �engineered scarcity� of the marketplace has led to persistent hunger and poverty and runs counter to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the prophets before him. �The vision of the Kingdom of God is that everyone gets fat and happy � everyone, not just some.� He said people are coming to the belief that food sovereignty is the proper response to this situation. �Foodbanks are good, but food sovereignty is better,� he said.

Food sovereignty is a term coined by members of an international peasant movement in 1996. It claims that people have the right to define their own food, agriculture, livestock and fishery systems, in contrast to having food largely subject to international market forces. One of its principles is that everyone must have access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quality and quantity to sustain a healthy life with full dignity.

He said Anglicans who want to learn more about food sovereignty should look at the scriptures, where it was a central tenet of Christ�s life and was called for by the prophets. He quoted from Isaiah 55: �Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.�

Isaiah was calling for a world in which food was �unhooked� from the economy and available to all those who needed it, said Mr. Myers. �Food is a gift of God for the people of God,� he said. �This was not a vision of scarcity. It was a vision of abundance that was seen as the divinely ordained life for all people, particularly those without money.�

He said Mark�s Gospel gives ample evidence of Christ�s thinking on the consumption, distribution and production of food. One of the most telling scenes is when Jesus and his disciples (poor fishermen who occupied the bottom rung of the emerging imperial economy) sit down to eat with Levi, the tax collector who sold fishing leases on behalf of the governing elites. �What we see is this extraordinary fellowship between the debtor class (the fishermen) and the collectors of debt (Levi),� said Mr Myers. �And the only way that this meal would have been possible is by the embrace, particularly by the debt collecting class, of Jesus� vision of economic and social redistribution of wealth and power. In other words, it was the realization of Jubilee.�

Right after the meal at Levi�s house, the local authorities came and challenged Jesus� practice of shared abundance. According to Mr. Myers, �Jesus said to them, �Look, poor people are already hungry. They don�t need ritual fasting; they need shared abundance.� So Jesus spins that metaphor that the kingdom of God is like a wedding banquet. In Jesus time, the wedding banquet was a time when all the people in the village came together and shared their stuff, no matter how much they had. It was a time of shared abundance. That, says Jesus, is what the kingdom is about. That�s what folks need.�

Further on in Mark�s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples have nothing to eat on the Sabbath, so they pluck heads of grain, much to the disapproval of the local authorities. �The authorities were asserting the narrower vision of Sabbath as a form of prohibiting work, but Jesus was following the expansive view of Sabbath, which is: it isn�t about what you don�t do, it�s about what you do on behalf of justice,�  said Mr. Myers.

He said Jesus was following the ancient �idea of the remainder,� which is one of the Sabbath principles in the Torah. �What that means is that there is no such thing as absolute ownership of a piece of land. You do not own 100 per cent of your farm. The edges of your field belong to the poor. They have a right to glean the edges and the leftover of your field. That is not understood in the Hebrew bible as charity; that�s understood as justice. And that is because the field doesn�t belong to you: It belongs to the creator. You�re just tending it. Because that common wealth belongs to everyone, the disenfranchised in your community have the intrinsic right to your productive capacity.�

When Jesus and his disciples were confronted by the authorities, he reminded them of what David, the father of their nation, and his companions did when they were hungry: they went into the local shrine and took the bread to eat. �Jesus said they were justified to do that because they were hungry,� said Mr. Myers. �Hungry people have rights to anything. Nothing is proprietory when people are hungry.�

Mr. Myers ended his talk by linking the story of the loaves and fishes in Luke�s Gospel to the Last Supper. He said both events use the same verbs and gestures: Jesus takes, he gives thanks, he breaks and he gives. Mr. Myers wondered if it made more sense to read the latter story in light of the former. �Every time we lift up this bread in the central ritual act of what it means to be church, are we supposed to be remembering a celebration of shared abundance in the teeth of an economy of engineered scarcity? How would that impact the life of the church if we understood that ritual like that? How would our church be different if the eucharist was anchored in the practice of Sabbath economics? What is it that we�re remembering when we do this in memory of? Are we just remembering his death and resurrection? That�s important to remember. But it�s also important to remember his life � his life of Sabbath economics.� Read more at www.toronto.anglican.ca

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