In the story of the loaves and the fishes, as throughout his active life, Jesus wanted to help people penetrate the illusion of scarcity and act out the reality of abundance.
Jesus… acts on the assumption of abundance. First, [in Mark's Gospel,] he divides the crowd into companies of hundreds and fifties and commands them all to sit down… upon the green grass. His miracle begins with the simple act of gathering the faceless crowd of five thousand into smaller, face-to-face communities. This is the stock-in trade of every good community organizer, this clustering of people into more intimate settings where everyday miracles have a chance to happen.
In the faceless crowd we experience scarcity – a scarcity of contact, of concern, of affirmation, of love. But as the crowd is replaced by community, an invisible sense of abundance arises long before the community produces any visible goods or services. True abundance resides in the simple experience of people being present to one another and for one another.
--Parker Palmer,
The Abundant Life:
A Spirituality of Work,
Creativity, and Caring
Image source: John August Swanson, Loaves and Fishes, hand-printed serigraph, available for purchase at: https://www.eyekons.com/john_swanson_serigraphs/john_swanson_loaves_and_fishes_s
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