Sunday, October 27, 2013

A Womanist Reading of the Feeding Miracle

A womanist is "a black feminist only more commonly". A womanist, as a woman of color and/or a black woman values and privileges her own experiences as an individual black female and as a sharer and participator in the historical and cultural legacy and present reality of black women and black people's lives. The following is an excerpt from my article:

"There is no shame in begging especially when we have done all we can to survive. What difference would it make in people’s lives if we all lived in a sharing mode grounded in a compassionate consciousness of the existence and impact of unjust systems and situations, of human error, of hardships that can befall any of us, and an understanding of our human connectedness? In her 1983 book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker describes a womanist as committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female …. Traditionally universalist, …Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “it wouldn’t be the first time.”...."The first time” signifies Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and her work to free other slaves. A womanist ethic asserts that we cannot free ourselves without freeing other people too. We cannot liberate ourselves and our children and leave other people and their children to themselves without the proverbial boots or bootstraps, if we can help it. Human beings need other human beings to survive....

"Both the miracle of the feeding of the great crowd in our text and manna in the Wilderness of Sin connect the earthly miracle with heaven. In the desert, Jesus looked to heaven before (or as) he blessed and broke the bread. 24 In the Wilderness of Sin, Yahweh promised to rain down bread from heaven for the congregation of Israel. In Matthew, both John the Baptist and Jesus announce (and commission his disciples to proclaim) that the “kingdom of the heavens (ouranoi)25 has come near” (3:2; see also 10:7). The Kingdom of heaven has drawn near in the person and ministry of Jesus; he embodies the Kingdom and encourages his disciples to do the same. Matthew’s Jesus is God with us (1:23). The food that fed the multitude was multiplied in the human hands of the earthly Jesus in whom the kingdom of heaven is brought near. “The source of the feeding is God, but the resources are human.” (Boring, 324). As Cheryl Sanders states, “God feeds the poor in our kitchens”; we must make “God’s kingdom come alive on earth.”....

"When human beings fail to respond to hunger, to dismantle injustice, and use what we have for the sake of others, then even the righteous will be forsaken and its seed begging for bread....

read the entire article at www.bibleandtransformatiom.com Vol 3

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