Lunch Baskets and Moral Choices
Summary
When Jesus outlined moral values, he put feeding the hungry at the top of his priority list. In fact he said that ultimately we would be judged on how well we did that. “I was hungry and you gave me food ….” Jesus fed a hungry crowd, but only after a young boy showed enough faith to give up his lunch. We too have a lunch basket, and we are called to faith. We are called to believe that with our “Yes” God will work miracles.
“I was hungry and you gave me food.” “I was hungry and you gave me food.” Some things are important enough to repeat at least twice and maybe more. This is one of those statements. Jesus told us that when we are finally judged, we will hear him speak these words to those who have made feeding the hungry a priority. “I was hungry and you gave me to eat.”
Despite food-basket programs, something of which we hear little about except at holidays, and despite the efforts of some in government to change policies that perpetuate hunger, and despite this commandment of Jesus to feed the hungry, it is still a very hungry world.
According to most every study on the issue, over 842 million people worldwide do not have enough to eat. That is more than the entire population of the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. More people die of hunger than of AIDS, malaria and TB put together. Over 25,000 people die each day due to hunger and malnutrition. That translates to one person every five seconds. To put it in perspective, this means that four to five people have died of malnutrition since you just heard that 842 million number a few seconds ago.
These are not simply social statistics. They are descriptions of the lives of the people of God. They are the plight of those whom Jesus tells us to feed. And these are facts on which he has told us we will be judged. They are challenges to the choices that we make both individually, as
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