Philip answered him, "It would take more than half a year's wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!" – John 6:7

 Today's Scripture Reading (November 19, 2020): John 6

I am a fiscal conservative. That means that we need to watch what we spend and that debt is a bad thing overall. I have never been overly enthused about the idea of debt, regardless of whether the debt is personal or public. I had a great conversation with a local politician, and he explained that governments need to go into debt to get the economy moving, but later they would make up the difference, paying off the debt. I explained that I had heard that before, and the problem seemed to be that later never came. We are always borrowing today while promising that tomorrow we will pay it all back, but tomorrow never comes. Another friend might have been more honest when he just proclaimed that his credit card debt was found money, and he has no intention of ever paying it back. He will keep making the minimum payment until the day he dies, and the problem becomes someone else's. The biblical principle of living within our means seems to be a behavior code that does not measure up to contemporary living. We want everything now, and that means that we are willing to live in debt.  

Jesus perceives a problem; the people are hungry and need to be fed. And so, he poses the question to Philip. How can we feed the people? Philip is mystified. The problem that Jesus has posed has two parts. First, to feed the crowd, made up of five thousand men, plus their wives and children was an expensive proposition. Philip estimates that the cost of providing food for the group would come to more than two hundred denarii, a sum of money that would take the average person more than half a year to earn. And Jesus and his friends did not have that kind of cash on hand.  

The second problem was that even if they had the money to buy the food, there was no place to buy the food. Philip could have easily asked Jesus, "where can I buy the food?" but he chooses to attack the problem by confirming that they didn't have the money available to buy the necessary food. Easy debt was an unheard-of concept, but besides that, the biblical principle was to live within your means and not go into debt. (For instance, Proverbs 22:7 teaches that "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.") And the prospect of feeding around ten thousand people was not living within their means.

Of course, the person who asked the question was greater than Moses, who had fed Israel in the desert with "bread from heaven" for decades. And as Philip ponders how they might pay for the food, he forgets to ask Jesus if he might already have a plan.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Matthew 15