Scarcity and Abundance

By Jonathan Safran Foer Luke 9:11b-17 is a story about hunger, but not just the crowd’s. It exposes the deeper, quieter hunger of the disciples, and by extension, our own — the hunger for control, certainty, and the reassurance that we’ll always have enough. A large gathering has followed Jesus into the wilderness. There is no food. The disciples do the math and panic. Their instinct is practical: send them away. But Jesus responds with a command that must have sounded absurd: “You give them something to eat.” It is not a strategy. It is a confrontation with how we think about sufficiency. Today, we live in a world bursting with production. Humanity makes more food than ever in history — nearly 3,000 calories per person per day, enough to feed everyone on earth. And yet over 780 million people go hungry, while one-third of all food is ...