+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It won’t surprise many of you that my idea of a “beach read” is not shared by those whose relaxation is enhanced by light romances or heart-pumping thrillers. There’s nothing wrong with these, naturally; it’s just that I discovered that I have a rather puritanical view of vacations. So if the holiday in question is not planned around cultural experiences–and my time away a couple of weeks ago was not, by necessity–then I tend to choose reading material which is either difficult or in some way intellectually improving. So, among my most recent vacation reads was the collected biographies of the first twelve Caesars by Suetonius. My gesture toward the “beach read” impulse was to read them in translation, though this frequently had me pulling the original Latin up on my phone to determine what the translator had rendered as anachronistic English idioms, lexigraphic “rabbit holes” being one of my chief pastimes.
Anyway, one of the things that kept coming up, and which might strike some as less interesting than the frequent, flagrant depravities of these emperors, was how often manipulation of the grain dole was used to curry favor with the rowdy Roman populace. You may have heard the phrase “panem et circenses” before; it comes from a contemporary of Suetonius, the satirist Juvenal, who wrote “Everything now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” In other words, to keep the crowds in line, give them grain and put on spectacles, particularly gladiatorial contests and chariot races.
Indeed, the grain dole which began as an emergency measure during the Republic but morphed very quickly during the First Century A.D. into a permanent entitlement system, became even more important, I would argue, after the influence of Christianity ended violent spectacles. You can’t let the people enjoy watching other people get brutally murdered in the arena anymore, so you better give them even more grain to keep them from rioting! I’d also argue that this is why the Empire was so determined to integrate North Africa and the Levant into the imperial system and why there were constant attempts to keep Persia as a client state–these regions being far more productive than anywhere in Western Europe at the time, and why the eventual fall of the Western Empire was preceded by Vandals taking control of so many of those regions. Bread is life, and bread was also control until very recently in Western societies.
Some of you know I’ve been on a low-carb diet for a while now. I only mention it to say that this would have been an absurd and impossible project for human beings for nearly the entirety of human history (and, indeed, human prehistory). Even today, this reality obtains in much of the world for the vast majority of people, who would see a diet full of proteins and vegetables and fruit as a benefit of great wealth. Their primary source of calories remains wheat or rice or corn. I saw a horror-comedy movie not too long ago (which I liked a lot, but would only recommend to those of a stout constitution) called The Menu in which an obsessive chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, gives a lavish but deadly meal to a group of obscenely wealthy diners. The funniest moment to me, was when this chef presents his patrons a “non-bread bread course,”–just tiny cups of stuff one might spread on bread if he had any. Bread, he basically says, is what ordinary people eat to stay alive, you are not ordinary people, and so you will get no bread.
Conservatively speaking, bread probably became the primary source of our caloric intake in about 10,000 B.C. More than a thousand years before Christ and the Caesars, Joseph’s brothers arrive in Egypt. We heard the climax of the story today–Joseph is reconciled with the brothers who sold him into slavery–but what brought them to that point? They needed bread. Egypt had full granaries, and they did because Joseph proved himself an able and prophetic manager of that Kingdom’s system of storing and distributing grain. The need for that most simple thing which sustains life was transformed into the means of providing mercy and loving-kindness. Bread in this story is Grace.
What I really want us to consider (here Fr. John finally gets to the point!) is the final verse from this morning’s Gospel: “Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into you lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” The image here is of one in a marketplace or perhaps at the local, imperial granary, the θησαυροζ, (literally, treasure house, and the word from which we get the English thesaurus). Unlike in the city of Rome, this would not have been an impressive structure with a courtyard and people milling about. In the Middle East it would have been a ταβὲρνα, a little shop basically, and there would have been a line stretching out into the city in the heat of the day. Now, Roman officials were famous for efficiency and officiousness. No doubt some state agent would verify that you were an adult, male Roman citizen as soon as you finally got inside to see if you were on the dole or if you’d have to pay for the grain at an extortionate price. Then some other official would quickly measure out your allotment and send you on your way. What they almost certainly wouldn’t have done was take your sack, fill it, shake it and push it down, add more, and repeat the process. They certainly wouldn’t fill your grain sack until it overflowed and let you keep whatever excess fell into your lap. The profligate generosity of this image would have struck those listening to Jesus’ sermon as wildly improbable, yet Jesus assures them that God’s Grace and the Grace we are to extend to others as his disciples works just like this.
Now the form which this call for us to serve as we have been served takes many forms. Charity in terms of alms and other practical means of offering support to the poor is absolutely one of them. I love what St. Augustine said in one of his sermons: “Come now, let’s see if you can cheer the poor up today. You be their granaries.” Elsewhere, in reference to the foolish landowner who kept expanding his farm before dying, he wrote that “the bellies of the poor are safer storehouses than barns.”
It is more than this sort of charity of which Jesus speaks today, though that is certainly part of. Our fallen, human obsession with what’s fair over what’s merciful, will balk at much of what Jesus says here. Love your enemies by doing good things for them, whatever they might have done to you. If somebody steals from you, don’t just let them go, give them some more. Don’t just avoid usury, don’t just avoid charging reasonable interest, but don’t expect a debtor even to pay you back. Most of all, and most difficult of all, don’t judge anybody, and not even in the “who am I to judge” way in which we rightly avoid condemning people whose offenses have nothing to do with us. Don’t judge anybody, even if they’ve harmed you.
Now these must be some of the hardest of Jesus’ teachings, full stop. I’m not smart enough to figure out how this radical selflessness is to be weighed against competing, Christian moral principles like justice, particularly when there are victims of real abuses that we just have to say–that victim needs to see something done on his or her behalf pertaining to make things right. I don’t know, and that’s why I’m glad I’m a priest instead of a judge or a cop.
Even more than not being able to sort it all out from a moral-theological standpoint, I know I’m not good enough, I’m not enough of a saint to succeed in living it out. None of us is, and maybe that’s part of the point.
But what I do know is this: as Christians, as followers of Jesus, as people who have been extended unmerited, unimaginable, infinite Grace through the Blood of the Lamb shed for our salvation, the most important thing we can do is to try our level best to extend grace to others. Grace doesn’t look on deserving. It has nothing to do with the way I, sinner that I am, tend to approach life–namely by the application of the priciple “what’s fair is fair.” It is, rather, the outworking of the kind of love which bears and hopes and believes and endures all things. It is tautologically gratuitous. It’s a hard thing to do sometimes. Or maybe it’s the hardest thing to do at any time! Thank God that God’s Grace can cover even our un-graciousness borne of ingratitude. Thank God that His Holy Spirit, working in us, can sometimes accomplish through us those acts of mercy and compassion that we cannot do on our own.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.