The Hungry God

The Hungry God--January 10, 2019

"Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished." [Luke 4:1-2]

God knows what it is to go hungry. Huh. How about that?

We usually like to imagine our deities being all-sufficient and incapable of feeling any need or lack like hunger.  In fact, we would probably expect that to be one of the job requirements for any self-respecting god: invulnerability to hunger, as well as cold, age, or heartache.  Certainly, that's how the Greeks and Romans imagined their gods--they lived a charmed life up on Mount Olympus eating ambrosia and never knowing the hunger that so many mere mortals live and die with all the time.

For that matter, Israel had always understood that its God--YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--didn't need animal sacrifices as "food" like some of the other Canaanite gods and goddesses were believed to need.  Any good Judean in the first century knew that God doesn't get hungry, much less need our rams or grain offerings to be "fed" with.

And yet... here is Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, the very One whom the voice from heaven has declared to be "my Son, the Beloved," and after forty days in the wilderness, he is starving.  Christian theology has unapologetically asserted over all these centuries that Jesus is none other and nothing less than fully God--not simply God's Number One Assistant, or God's Vice-President of Human Affairs, or God's Best Delegate, but "of one Being with the Father."  We even get rather poetic with it in the ancient creeds: "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made."  That seems a rather clear position.  What Jesus does, God does.  Where Jesus is, God is.  What Jesus is, God is.

And here, after a grueling few weeks in the middle of nowhere, Jesus is famished.  Which is to say, God--the giver of life and the source of all sustenance, who brings forth grain from the earth--is dying of hunger in the Judean desert.  That settles it.  The Greek and the Roman gods may not know what it is like to go without daily bread, but the real and living God we meet in Christ Jesus surely does.

That's a big deal.

That means, for one, that Jesus doesn't just "appear" to be human.  He doesn't just look the part, without having to suffer the difficulties and messiness of humanity.  Jesus doesn't just play a human being--he is one.  God is not "above" the indignity of a growling belly or the vulnerability of going without.  God is not ashamed to grow weak and frail from lack of nutrition.

And in a sense, it means that God knows something more of being human than I do--because there are lots of people on this planet who are going without food, and who do not know where their next meal will come from... but I have lived a pretty comfortable and privileged life without that kind of knowledge.  I have seen uneaten food go bad or and be thrown out from my refrigerator and kitchen counters, but I do not know what it is like to be chronically hungry.  I don't know what it is like to have the raw ache make it hard to concentrate. I don't know what it is like to have teeth get loose in their gums from malnutrition, and I have never had the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes that come from going without food for a sustained time.  Many--a great many--of my fellow human beings do know those symptoms.  They live with them every day...until they are remedied, or until the hunger takes their lives.

And Jesus knows that hunger, too.  He can relate--and therefore stand in solidarity--to and for those who live and die with empty bellies every day.  And he can also therefore say, "Blessed are you who are hungry now," in a way that speaks real hope without sounding like Marie Antoinette's infamous, "Let them eat cake."

It is easy, from my well-fed position, surrounded by chain restaurants and touch-screen menus, to be indifferent toward those who live week to week without knowing whether they will be able to feed themselves or their kids.  It is easy to become callous and assume that their hunger is a moral failing or a character flaw--that surely, if they would only "work a little harder," or "budget their money better," they would have enough money to put food on the table.  It is easy to say those things when you have never had to tell your kids that there's not enough money to have dinner tonight.  Jesus, however, knows better... because he knows himself what real hunger is. His hunger silences my comfortable finger-wagging with his own gaunt look and loose skin in the Judean desert.  He enters into humanity with and for those who suffer.

As we consider what it means that God entered our humanity in Christ, we will have to consider this, too.  The hungry God of the wilderness--the God whose name is Jesus--calls us beyond our complacency and comfort to stand, as Christ does, with those who are hungry.  Not to scold or to explain or diagram them, but to cast our lots with them, to open our tables to them, and to break our bread alongside one another with them.  It doesn't matter how they came to be hungry, where they came from or how far they have traveled across the desert that they haven't been able to eat, or what circumstances have brought them to our door.  We are called--if we dare to name the name of Jesus on our lips--to take the position that everybody gets to eat in the Kingdom of God. 

Jesus knows more about being human in that sense than I do.  But perhaps I can learn from him, and become more fully human myself as I share my bread with my neighbor.

Lord Jesus, you who have both gone hungry and announced blessing on the hungry, you who broke bread to feed thousands and to signify your own body, give me the courage to learn from those who still hunger, and give me the compassion to share my bread.