Our Deepest Hungers

Sunday, July 28, 2024 – Gospel, John 6:1-21, also 2 Kings 4:42-44, Psalm 145:10-18, Ephesians 3:14-21

We’ve recently started a Healthy Eating group here at Redeemer. Several of us meet each week to learn about healthy eating and support each other in our health goals. One of the topics that has come up is the question of what really motivates us when we eat.

For example, if we eat when we aren’t hungry, we might ask ourselves,

“What is the deeper need or hunger that I’m trying to meet through food?”

Several years ago, I remember a time when my mom and I were both trying to lose weight. I looked at the perfectly good meal she had made for dinner and said, “I want an emotional meal, like lasagna or baked ziti!”

Now we all know that food isn’t meant to meet our emotional needs, but it’s also true that if I’m lonely or depressed, I’ll reach for food. What I really want is love or companionship and food will never satisfy those deeper hungers or needs.

Thinking about human needs makes me think about Abraham Maslow. Maslow was a psychologist who died in 1970 and became famous for what’s known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. His hierarchy was simplified by other scholars as a large pyramid (though Maslow didn’t use that form himself), with basic human needs like food, air, and water at the bottom, and what he called “self-actualization” at the top. (Maslow actually later came to believe that “transcendence” was the pinnacle of his hierarchy.)

Maslow has commonly been interpreted as saying that humans couldn’t focus on their higher-level needs until their lower-level needs were mostly met. In other words, a person requires food before they seek shelter, and they require shelter before love and family, and they require family and friendship before self-esteem, and self-esteem before they pursue creative self-expression or self-actualization.

What I didn’t know until very recently is that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs may have been inspired by the Siksika or Blackfoot Native American way of life. Maslow visited the Blackfoot reserve in Alberta, Canada in 1938 at the age of 30, but what he observed there was very different from the culture he was used to and from the theories that Maslow’s interpreters published later.

Maslow went to Alberta believing that human societies required the dominance of some people over others. His hierarchy of needs has been understood as very individualistic and has been understood as suggesting that people must meet their own needs as individuals.

A writer named Teju Ravilochan argues this as well (see note at bottom linking to the author’s updates and revisions), writing that in Alberta, Maslow

did not see the quest for dominance in Blackfoot society. Instead, he discovered astounding levels of cooperation, minimal inequality, restorative justice, full bellies, and high levels of life satisfaction. He estimated that ‘80–90% of the Blackfoot tribe had a quality of self-esteem that was only found in 5–10% of his own population’ [in New York]… ‘Maslow saw a place where what he would later call self-actualization was the norm.’”

In the Blackfoot community, Maslow observed the typical way of life in Native American, or what we now call indigenous or aboriginal societies. In such societies, there is a greater emphasis on the relationships within the community and not so much on the individual.

Jesus and the people of his world were indigenous people.

They, like native Americans and aboriginal Australians, were rooted in the land, in their particular place. And they saw the place they lived as being in direct relationship with the greater Reality that we call God.
This way of looking at life is clear in today’s readings.

We see in the psalm the idea that God, or the Wholeness within which we live, satisfies the desire of every living thing and is near to everyone that calls upon it faithfully. We see in Ephesians that every family on earth has its lineage in God. Full stop.

Every person is connected to the divine life, and the Spirit that weaves us all together supports us as individuals by empowering our “inner being.” The writer of the letter talks about how it is through participating in community with each other and the saints that individual believers become one body. And it’s then through the interrelated Body of Christ that we can know the love that surpasses knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God.

Through this one Body, Christ dwells in our hearts and roots and grounds us in love.

These words express what it is to be in relationship with the web of God’s life. We see this same idea in the gospel. First, the gospel text – written about 70 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection – points directly to Elisha who is a prophet and wonderworker who feeds at least one hundred people with a minimal offering. Clearly, by describing this feeding, John is linking Jesus directly to that prophetic tradition. But our gospel also shows us the interdependent web through which people’s basic needs for food and their deeper hungers for spiritual belonging and sustenance are met.

Jesus doesn’t achieve this miraculous feeding of the 5,000 as a solitary individual. No, his actions show him connecting relationally with the whole embodied unity that contains the earth, the people, and God.

First, he makes the people sit down on the grass – he grounds them in the earth, in the place where they live. Then he takes the loaves and the fish – the basic food of the people, the abundance given by the earth – and he gives thanks. By giving thanks, Jesus shows that he assumes that this wholeness reality of God will meet their needs. The food is multiplied, and everyone eats until they’re satisfied.

But there’s still more food, so Jesus has his disciples collect what is left. He asks them to show their respect for the abundance of God, and to see for themselves what has been supplied. Nothing is just tossed into the garbage can.

For Jesus and his community, everything is sacred, and everything is relational, connected to everything else.

He reveals the holiness of this interconnected and abundant reality of people, land, and God.
Because he opens their eyes to this sacred reality of God, the people perceive him to be a great prophet – they see the alternative vision for the world that he has revealed through this sign.

But then they want to latch onto God’s reality and make it something that can serve their desire for power and dominance over daily life. They want to take Jesus and make him king, but what Jesus is doing is not about worldly or political power. It’s about making the relational and life-giving reality of God a reality on earth.

As my friend Thomas Hermans-Webster writes, this sign of Jesus is both an ordinary feeding and,

with eucharistic undertones, a foretaste of glory divine. In the feeding of the 5,000 and the gathering of the leftovers, the gathered crowd glimpsed a different world; an otherwise world that was characterized by sustenance, restorative relationality, creative transformation, and abundant life.”

Yes, Jesus meets the ordinary, physical needs for food of the people who have gathered. But he also shows how God meets our much deeper needs for wholeness, belonging, and for the connection with God’s own life upon which everything depends.

Note: Teju Ravilochan’s original post about the errors he made in his first critique of Maslow appears here and his later revision that incorporates more of Maslow’s own thinking (vs. his interpreters) appears here.