Scare-city

For those of you who don't know, my mother is a numismatist.  And as a numismatist, she would frequently have people stop by with their treasured family heirloom coins which were old as dirt, and they'd expect them to be incredibly valuable.  Unfortunately, for most of the people who bring stuff in, they find out that what they're bringing in is as common as dirt, too.  For counterintuitively, the age of a coin doesn't determine its value.  The value of coins is determined by the value of everything else - rarity.  If a coin is rare, it is worth money.  If it is common, it is essentially worthless.  For example, here is a canadian coin that is worth $253,000.  It is a penny from 1936.  And it's only worth so much because there is a tiny dot under the date.  Most of the pennies from that date don't have that dot.  Only three of them are known to exist.  That's why it's expensive.

Now coins, as I said, are like everything else.  They're like everything else in that cost is based on scarcity.  If something is common enough.  If it is rare, it is expensive.  So something like water, or air, is tough to market, since it is all over the place all the time, and therefore is incredibly thrifty.  The only time that changes is when you enter into a marketplace in which that item is limited, and hard to find.  Then scarcity dictates that the cost goes way up.  Think for a moment about the disastrous Woodstock '99, in which the scarcity of things like pizza and water made the cost balloon up to $12 for pizza and $4 for a half litre of water.  In 1999 dollars.  This sort of price gouging is only possible if
there is relative scarcity, which dictates that the thing you wouldn't pay a penny for at a restaurant now

suddenly makes sense at Woodstock.  And of course, we all know the most flagrant offender, which is movie theatre snacks.  The sign up at the movie theatre says that you can't bring any outside food or drink into the theatre, which makes sense, because if you could, then nobody would ever buy movie theatre popcorn or drinks.  Because they're incredibly expensive.  They cost about 12 times what they're worth, and the only way you could possibly get away with charging that much money for them is if you had no other choice, which is exactly the point.   If you want a reasonable snack available from the movie theater, then you're going to have to sneak stuff in, by strapping it to yourself, or by putting it illicitly in your purse, or whatever.  The staff and owners know that if they give you the choice, you're going to buy a two litre bottle of pepsi from the supermarket, instead of the small pepsi from the movie theatre, probably for a comprable price.

This notion of scarcity is what drove the Gospel reading from Sunday.  The reading in which Jesus feeds the five thousand.  And he feeds them in a very specific area.  He feeds them in a desolate place where he had retreated to after hearing about the death of his cousin, John the Baptist.  Upon hearing that his cousin had been slain by Herod, Jesus retreated in sadness into a desolate place, but the crowds followed him.  And what do you know about desolate places?  Well, what do you know about Woodstock '99?  You know that there was scarcity, it was a desolate place, and therefore people could charge insane, absurd amounts for their products, and people had to pay it.  And after the crowd had been with Jesus all day, they were hungry.  And Jesus was faced with a famished crowd, and a desolate environment in which to feed them.  And then, upon asking if there was any food around, he was informed that they had five loaves and two fish.

The food that they had, at that point, was extremely scarce.  Five loaves, two fish, for a crowd of five thousand men, plus women and children.  There were that many people to feed with this amount of food, and given all that, it would be incredibly easy to sell the loaves and the fish to the highest bidder, to sell them for max money, and make a reasonably generous profit.  And for the disciples as well, men
who made their living selling fish, men who wanted the highest value for the fish they brought in, Peter, Andrew, James and John would have spent their entire lives waiting for a situation like this, in which they could sell a relatively meager catch for big bucks.

But what Jesus does is not to feed himself, not to feed his closest companions, what Jesus does is to essentially put an end to scarcity itself.  He takes a limited resource, a finite resource, something that does not have enough to go around, and makes it unlimited.  The loaves and fish which would have commanded a hefty price moments ago, now were without price, without cost, because they had been so successfully multiplied.  It wasn't just as though the people were fed, but they managed to collect basket after basket of leftovers afterwards.  There was no scarcity, there was no want.

This echoes the sentiment found in the Old Testament reading, that we ought to come to the land that God has prepared, that we ought to go to a land that is overflowing with milk and honey, that is brimming with abundance.  The reading tells us to come and buy without price, and without cost, to not spend our work on what does not satisfy.  And most importantly, it tells us to partake of what has been prepared for us from before the foundation of the world.  Not just in terms of food to be eaten, but to suggest to us that for the first time ever, since the creation of everything, that scarcity itself could be beaten.

Scarcity governs everything we do in this modern world.  We live and die by it.  We spend our lives working with dwindling resources, we spend our days thinking about and pondering the fact that our resources are running out.  We are running out of oil, food, water, aerable land, and all sorts of other resources that are vanishing before our eyes.  And the greatest resource of all, time, is similarly running out.  We are running out of time to do things.  Our lives are goverened by the clock, by the calendar, by birthdays which come and go and leave us with a sense of lethargic depression as time ebbs on, and as we run out of it.  There is more sand in the bottom of the hourglass than at the top.  But the presence of Christ at the feeding of the five thousand reminds us that what he came to beat was scarcity itself.  When he says to us that he came so we may have life, and have it abundantly, he isn't joking.  He came that the whole concept of things running out, of there not being enough, that great curse laid upon the world when Adam and Eve sinned, that they would not have enough and would have to work to stay alive, all that was flipped upside down with the presence of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who takes limited resources, and multiplies them abundantly, beyond what anyone could possibly consume.

It's good news for us.  Good news for us who live in a finite world that is running down.  Good news for us who are people who are habitually running out of time, who get to the end of the paycheque before the end of the month, who find themselves worked into a corner and who never have enough of

anything to go around, who are squabbling over oil and water, who have to sneak food into movie theatres, who have to scrounge and fight for what remains, it's good news to ponder that we worship a God whose idea of paradise involves a removal not just of scarcity, but of the concept of scarcity.

For heaven is a place where all tears are wiped away, and there will be no more suffering.  How can there be no sin in heaven and yet we have free will?  If there is no scarcity.  No want.  If there is no division created between us by what we have vs what we want.  If you will, it's a lot like that movie 'the gods must be crazy,' in which things were fine until a coke bottle fell out of the sky, and then all of a sudden, there was something that only one person could have.  It was a very useful thing, but very limited.  And everyone wanted it.  Before that, there was no scarcity.  After that, there was.  And so the plot of the film revolved around the attempt to be rid of the 'evil thing' forever.  To return to a time before scarcity.  A time in which there was nothing to desire, because there was nothing that was not abundant.  The only thing they were lacking was an abundance of time, eternity.  And that is what Christ gives us through his work on the cross.  He redresses scarcity, shows us that there is a promise of abundance, and finally gives us an abundance of life, life everlasting.  Each of these miracles that he performs shows us the same thing - that he is working to undo the curses which brought shortages, of life, of time of food and drink, and gives us his abundant grace, an abundance of resources, an abolishment of want, and eternity with which to enjoy it.


PJ.