Abundance

As I’ve pored over the texts I’ll be preaching on for the next few weeks, something jumps out at me. Everywhere you look in the gospel of John’s story about Jesus, you’re confronted with abundance. From the wedding at Cana, where Jesus delivers up the equivalent of 600 bottles of high-quality wine, to the living water gushing up to eternal life that Jesus promises the Samaritan woman, to the leftovers remaining after the feeding of five thousand with five loaves and two fish, to the overwhelming catch Peter brings into his boat at the very end of the story… Jesus meets human needs not only with what is required, but with enough and to spare.

Photo courtesy of flickr user “www.holgersbilderwelt.de.” Used with permission.

Much suffering comes from a false sense of scarcity. When we are scared that we do not have enough—enough money, enough time, enough energy—we guard and protect the little we have, and it ceases to be a blessing. It fails to bless others, and in the end it becomes a burden to us as well. And yet here are stories of Jesus feeding, forgiving, healing, even raising the dead—back-stopping our every anxiety, our every possible fear, with the abundance of divine blessing.

What would happen if, in the face of voices that seek to prime our fear of scarcity—“There’s not enough! You’ve got to protect what you’ve got!”—we learned to wield the promise of abundant life (John 10:10) that Jesus offers? How would it change us? I suspect we might become more forgiving, more generous, if we had the sense that Jesus we have a secure source of support and nourishment, like a branch on a vine (John 15:1ff).