At a Barrio Fiesta
(The Kingdom of God As Rice)
our host: Barrio Fiesta Folks
Barrio Fiesta. We hear the peal of church bells. People are in the streets in their Sunday best. The town band, with the inevitable majorettes, is parading around the streets. It is the feast of Señor San Isidro. It’s the town fiesta! We come just in time for the handa, the fiesta meal: Lechon, kare-kare, panga, potsero, kinilaw, imbutido, leche flan, matamis na makapuno, ube, suman sa latik, beer, tuba – all elbow for space atop the banana leaves on the fiesta table. The folks will be in debt for the rest of the year. But tomorrow will take care of tomorrow. Who will hinder music today?
No need for invitations. We walk in …
One of Jesus’ table companions would have enjoyed our fiesta. For his idea of the Kingdom of God – and that of many other Jews – is a banquet. "One of the dinner guests, on hearing this, said to him [Jesus], ‘Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!’" (Lk 14:15)
Striking Way of Speaking. In our last stop, we rejoiced with the hungry people of this world. Food, according to one of the beatitudes, was what God wants to see on their tables. The New Testament gives us an impetus to follow this through. In the New Testament, one of the most significant images of the Kingdom and its blessings is ‘sitting at table, eating and drinking.’ It is significant, of course, because it overturns some of Second Look’s cherished axioms. The Second Look tends to rule out of court anything ‘material.’
But what truly makes it significant and striking is the frequency with which food-and-Kingdom is mentioned in the New Testament documents. The New Testament writers generally take for granted the meaning of the Kingdom of God. After all, they were addressing first generation readers. They therefore scarcely provide an explanation or description. And yet in that scarcity, the most frequent blessing associated with the Kingdom of God is food. So it is not amiss that our roadmap directs us to a barrio fiesta and to take part in it.
Here is one of the happy surprises of my biblical search: the Kingdom means sitting at table, food, drinking, absence of hunger, meal, feast, banquet!
Check your eyeglasses….
The Kingdom of God As Food
The Kingdom of God Is Rice! Look at our signposts carefully. Originally these texts were not intended to give a theological exposition of the Kingdom of God. Yet they happen to contain refreshing information:
(a) It can refer to the usual food we ordinarily eat from day to day. One meaning of epiousion is ‘daily,’ ‘from day to day.’ Thus it refers to the fish, rice, and pan de sal we usually and regularly need from day to day. This is the meaning we have in mind when we pray the Lord’s prayer in our day.
(b) There is, however, another and different meaning. Pay close attention to it because it is the original meaning on Jesus’ lips. Epiousion refers to the food of the coming Kingdom of God at the end of time. For epiousion can also mean ‘for the future.’ This refers to the banquet which peoples will enjoy in the new earth at the final and definitive Kingdom at the end of our present history. This, according to contemporary scholarship, was the original meaning as Jesus first taught the prayer. In the original Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’ disciples prayed not for the day-to-day meal but for the barrio fiesta of the final Kingdom of God! ‘Give us today our epiousion bread’ is the exact parallel and equivalent of: ‘May your Kingdom come.’
We Filipinos and Asians would say: ‘The Kingdom of God is rice!’ In doing so, we are in the good company of Jesus and the First Look. Our hosts chime in: ‘The Kingdom of God is a barrio fiesta!’
Frequent. The frequency with which the New Testament writings associate bread/food with the Kingdom of God is striking. Give yourself a treat.
And I confer on you, just as my Father has conferred on me, a kingdom, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. (Lk 22:29-30)
Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is ready now.’ But they all alike began to make excuses…. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ And the slave said, ‘Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’ Then the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.’ (Lk 14:16-24; Mt 22:2-10)
… The bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut…. (Mt 25:10)
Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. (Lk 12:37)
Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. (Mk 14:25; Lk 22:15-16)
Real. We assure our hosts, Jesus was not using merely figurative or symbolic language. Real food is the more obvious reference of our texts—unless from the start, without reflection and under the influence of a theology later than Jesus, one has opted for a symbolic interpretation. As isolated statements, our signposts, many of which are parables, may not carry a realistic meaning. But all the references taken together forbid us from imposing a purely symbolic meaning.
Best Evidence: The Lord’s Prayer. Our best piece of evidence, however, is found in the Lord’s prayer, ‘Give us today our epiousion bread.’ Again, listen carefully. Listen to the tone of the prayer. Are you praying for symbolic bread or real food? No one, I think, will say that in the Lord’s Prayer we are asking for symbolic bread. We are asking for real food. Such is the tone and obvious significance of the prayer. Well, then if you recall that epiousion bread originally referred to the bread of the Kingdom, there is little doubt that the bread of the Kingdom of God appears to be real!
Concretist Thought-Mode. Of course, what we have here is not a newspaper report, and we do not exactly know what the reality will be; but we will do violence to the concretist thought-modes of Jesus and his culture by attempting to rob the bread-language of all realism.
The Risen Body and Food. Our hosts who, presently are in the twilight zone between the Third and Second Looks, ask for clarification. We respond: help could come from the realization that, at the Kingdom of God in the end-time, we will be resurrected people. The resurrected person is a real, physical self (Cf. 1Cor 15:35, 42b-45; Lk 24:6-43; Mk 9:2-3; Dan 12:2-3). Although of course we will no longer be a this-worldly body, we will not cease to be a real body. We will be a transformed body, but a body nonetheless. Therefore why, pray, may it not eat real food? It could be ‘transformed food’ for a transformed body, if you will, but real nonetheless. Our hosts feel their bodies, as if to assure themselves that they are indeed bodies.
The Risen Christ and Broiled Fish. We continue: Watch Jesus. The fact that a risen body is not averse to food is illustrated by that delicious little incident of the risen Jesus asking for, getting and eating broiled fish with his dumbfounded disciples.
Salvation and Food in Biblical Tradition
Roots in the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus and the First Look had strong bonds with Semitic 33 culture and the Hebrew Scriptures which tend to be concrete and earthy. We have been cut off from much of that. Instead we have bonded well with a non-Semitic tradition which inclines towards abstractions. This is one possible block for us today.
Total Well-Being and Food. The Hebrew Scriptures, particularly the prophets, envisioned future salvation in terms of a renewed earth. In that renewed earth one finds total well being, justice … and food. These prophetic statements are not just background, they are the roots of First Look ways of seeing. Isaiah pictures final salvation as real, not symbolic, feasting. Statements such as these are the historical and cultural antecedents of the tradition about final salvation as food and fiesta. Notice Ezechiel’s total and integral salvation, involving both the religio-moral renewal of heart-and-spirit and grain-and-fruit. Some signposts:
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. (Isa 25:6)
They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden,
and they shall never languish again. (Jer 31:12)
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. I will save you from all your uncleannesses, and I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. I will make the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field abundant, so that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations. (Ez 36:26-30)
Then the Lord became jealous for his land, and had pity on his people. In response to his people the Lord said: I am sending you grain, wine, and oil, and you will be satisfied; and I will no more make you a mockery among the nations.
Similar texts: Isa 1:19; 7:21-22; 30:23-24; 33:16; 51:14; 62:8-9; 65:13; 65:21; Jer 31:10-14; Hos 2:21-22; Jl 2:18-27; 3:18; Am 9:13; Zech 9:17.
A Casual, Spontaneous Remark. ‘Who is the luckiest person in the world?’ As a young boy in catechism class, I would shoot back with this answer: ‘Blessed is the soul that will see God face to face in heaven.’ A prize-winning answer.
Ah, the price of growing up! The cost of re-education. I later learned that the First Look would replace each word in that sentence.
Blessed … the person who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God.
That’s how things stand in the biblical tradition. We Asians would conjure up varieties of rice! The translation of the New English Bible can all but suppress its enthusiasm: ‘Happy the man who shall sit at the feast in the Kingdom of God!’ Food for thought! Our hosts reach higher levels of appreciation.
Cautious Conclusion and Problems.
But Wait … Our cautious conclusion at this point is: We cannot exclude the possibility of real food in the Kingdom of God. But there are problems … and answers.
Problem: The risen person in the final Kingdom of God is pictured as not marrying; some would infer from this that the risen person does not take in food either.
Problem: Our hosts, honest and truthful people, somehow remember the following ‘problematic’ words of St. Paul who says that Kingdom of God has nothing to do with food and drink!
For the Kingdom of God does not mean food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. (Rom 14:17)
Another possible response: more generally, some rabbinic teachers in Jesus’ time said the Kingdom-banquet was real; others, symbolic. In Jesus’ case, as we have seen, the Kingdom-bread cannot be reduced to something purely symbolic.
Still another possible response: in Paul’s Christian communities, there was intense debate about whether or not to eat meat offered to idols in the pagan temples. It is possible that in a pique, Paul exclaims: ‘Look, the Kingdom of God is not (a debate about) food and drink …’
Problem:
Response:
(1) What is the issue here? About whether Jesus’ salvation is concerned with bread or not? That Jesus rejected bread and opted for spiritual things? That is highly doubtful. Such a view goes against the very core of the Lord’s prayer, in which one of the principal petitions is for real bread! It also jars with one of Jesus’ great messianic acts, the feeding of the crowd of hungry thousands (Mt 14:13-21; Mk 6:30-44; Lk 8:10-17).
Rather, the situation is that Jesus is hungry (Mt 4:2; Lk 4:2) after 40 days of fasting, and the most natural thing is to put Jesus to the test, hitting him where he was weakest at that moment, his hunger. ‘You are hungry? Show your power! Work a miracle! Change stones into bread!’ 34
Actually a simple parallel is being made here. Just as Israel, Yahweh’s son in the Old Testament, was tested about manna and failed, so Jesus is being tested about bread and emerges victor. But, I repeat, the issue is not about the nature of the Kingdom of God.
(2) But, so the objection persists, does not Jesus say that to live we need not just bread, but the will of God? Response: to a tempter who is using bread to test a hungry Jesus, Jesus simply reminds Satan that life is not all about food; it is also about God’s word, quoting Dt 8:3. But in saying that, Jesus does not thereby mean to exclude bread from human life nor from the Kingdom of God.
For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you. (vv 7-10)
Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. (v 11)
Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty….’
Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.’ (Jn 6:26-54)
Some of us would ban food from the Kingdom because it is ‘material.’ We saw this as an attempt or temptation to be more Catholic than the Scriptures, a temptation worth ‘resisting,’ if one wishes to think and talk Jesus.
Problem:
Response: This appears to be a difficult passage, until you note the following:
(1) Jesus counsels against over-anxiety (this is the meaning of the original Greek word) about food, drink and clothing. He is not criticizing a legitimate concern for food and clothing. The Greek word means ‘to be unduly concerned,’ ‘be over-anxious’ (Mt 10:19; Lk 10:41; Phil 4:6). Exaggerated – we could almost say, consumerist—concern for food, not food itself, is the issue here.
(2) A contrast seems to be made between God’s Kingdom and food/clothing. Yet in the context of the whole passage, the contrast is rather between God’s Kingdom and an exaggerated concern about food/clothing, typical of the spirit of the wealthy.
(3) Lastly and importantly, a closer look will reveal that, in this passage, Jesus is not juxtaposing ‘spiritual things’ with ‘material’ things. A Second Looker might expect Jesus to say:
Are not SPIRITUAL things more than MATERIAL things
(e.g., sanctifying grace) (body, life, food and clothing)
Rather, Jesus’ statement is:
Is not something MATERIAL more than something MATERIAL?
(body) (clothing)
Is not something MATERIAL more than something MATERIAL
(life) (food)
Rather, Jesus’ statement is:
‘Body’ is a value for Jesus. ‘Life’ is a value for Jesus. Jesus did not say: ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God, meaning, things of the soul, and all these things, clothing and food, will be added unto you!’
He loved ‘body.’ He loved ‘life.’ Addressing the over-anxiety of the wealth-ethos for fine(r) clothes and fine(r) food, he said: ‘Body and life’ are of more worth! Sometime in my growing up, I had to say goodbye to sermons which put other words in Jesus’ mouth. Barrio fiestas or not, my homilies have had to change. We notice that our hosts are suprisingly somewhat pensive. We enquire. They have come upon a certain realization. Their problem is not over-anxiety. Their problem is over-spending!—as they cast a mortified glance on the fiesta table.
A Note. One might think that these words about over-anxiety are addressed to the poor, advising them not to be concerned for food and other ‘material’ things. No. These words, rather, are against what we would call today the ‘consumerist’ spirit, typical of the wealth-ethos. This saying of Jesus is in a cluster together with other sayings against the (typical wealth-ethos of the) rich. In Matthew it follows the saying to the rich: ‘No one can serve two masters … You cannot serve God and wealth’ (Mt 6:24). In Luke it follows the parable on the rich fool, who said to himself, ‘Relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool!’ (Lk 12:15ff)
For Whom and When
An Aspect of Kingdom of God As Food: For the Hungry. Very well, the Kingdom of God is rice or bread. Take note, however, that Jesus is not talking about food in general. He is in particular talking about food and feasting for the hungry of the earth. Recall that the beatitude about food was addressed to the hungry. (Lk 6:21)
A whole parable, reported in slightly different ways in Mt 22:1-10 and Lk 14:16-24, describes the Kingdom in terms of a banquet or a marriage feast. Moreover, for Luke, it is a banquet for the poor. Many were invited, but they gave excuses. ‘I have bought a field,’ said one. ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen,’ ‘I have just married, and therefore I cannot come,’ said the other two. So, from out of the streets and alleys were invited the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. The Kingdom is a banquet; some are too busy with their businesses and affairs. For whom is the banquet, then? It is for the malnourished poor of the land, therefore, the lame, blind, crippled.
Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is ready now.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.’ So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ And the slave said, ‘Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’ Then the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.’ (Lk 14:16-24)
Corporal and Spiritual: A Non-Biblical Classification
Corporal Work of Mercy? As a Second Looker, I used to look down on food-for-the hungry as merely a ‘corporal work of mercy.’ It is of secondary importance only. It was not a ‘spiritual work of mercy.’ Corporal works benefit the material body. Spiritual works benefit the spiritual soul. I have since disabused myself of this non-biblical and Western distinctions.
In the biblical tradition, the human person is not made up of two components, material and non-material, linked into one. There are no two components that God, so to speak, put together and death puts asunder. No, for the Bible, as we will see in Stopover 6, the human being is one, indivisible person, made alive and made sacred by the puff of God’s breath. Accordingly, in the Bible, there is no talk of corporal blessings for the body and spiritual works for the soul.
Life-Giving or Death-Dealing. And so, the Bible does not categorize works as ‘corporal’ or ‘spiritual.’ Works are only either ‘life-giving’ or ‘death-dealing.’ So it is at least for Jesus:
Notes for Today
Food for the Hungry Today. While we celebrate with the barrio folk, we are acutely aware that poverty and hunger will mar their tomorrows. Our minds expand then to the millions of others who can do no more than just hallucinate about barrio fiestas. Many coax their sustenance out of garbage heaps and restaurant left-overs.
How do we deal with ‘food for the hungry’ today? Love that puts a ganta of rice onto the cupped hands of a beggar remains a way of feeding the hungry. But we know that this is a band-aid solution and will not do in the long run. Precise diagnosis and surgery are needed.
What causes massive hunger? No, not sloth. No, not the will of God. It is the social system. With the barrio-folk we will have to band together to dismantle social structures and rebuild.
Catechesis Today. The biblical statements about food for the poor of the earth are summons to our conventional catechesis, theology, and pastoral practice. In the concern for the ‘higher things,’ less importance is given to the so-called ‘corporal works of mercy’— which, as we have seen, is a very unbiblical way of thinking and speaking. Salvation in terms of food and drink is not part of traditional religious vocabulary. In fact, in the understanding of the blessing of salvation (soul seeing God face to face or ‘beatific vision’), anything ‘material’ is scrupulously excluded.
The First Look, by contrast, in depicting the new world, speaks of bread and satisfaction, not of intellectual contemplation, for the once-hungry of the earth (cf. also Lk 1:53). For the Bible, definitive salvation itself has to do with food and drink!
It might perhaps be doubted that Matthew, Paul, and John spoke about the satiation of hunger for the poor. It cannot be doubted that Jesus did. In a saying best preserved in the gospel of Luke, Jesus proclaims, in ringing tones, that the hungry will be satisfied with real food (Lk 6:21).
A Practical Daily Reminder. It is time to take leave of our hosts, celebrating their barrio fiesta. We say grace after meals and pray the Lord’s Prayer once more. The ‘Our Father’ can be a practical daily reminder of this food-aspect of the Kingdom. In the ‘Our Father,’ we pray: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (Mt 6:11). The petition asks for either (1) ‘our day to day food’ or (2) ‘food for the morrow’ [=bread of the Kingdom]. This latter meaning would refer to the feast or banquet of the future and definitive Kingdom.
The combination of both meanings would make for the best pastoral practice today. We would be asking for the arrival of the final feast of the Kingdom, while we pray for the food that we need for our sustenance today.
Living as we do at a time when massive hunger is caused by the unjust organization of the global society, our prayer for rice acquires real meaning only when it is accompanied by action to create a just society where rice will be equitably shared by all.
It is the end of another day once more. We find ourselves in … a dance-hall! Well, it is not really a dance hall. But it is good enough for the barrio folk … and for us. It is a spacious enough patch of earth, a clearing between trees and houses. The young people are ‘dancing’ and having fun. But what is usually remarkable about events such as this is the noise … I mean, the music. Instantly, we have a problem in our hands. God, how can we be still and silent here? And it slowly dawns on us that we can, that silence is of the depths. Then we notice something else. There were some dancers rocking away, apparently beyond themselves, so to speak. They seem to be meditating. But no, you usually meditate on something. They seem to be thinking of nothing. They just seem to be in meditation.
Well, we got more than a few free meals at this fiesta….