The Real Abundant Life

Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann wrote: “The Bible starts out with abundance. In fact, Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God’s generosity.” From the stars in the night sky to wild animals and cattle and even creeping things, creation is an abundance of life, all of which the Creator sees and calls good, very good. From the beginning, God provides.

However, before long, with the help of a talking snake humans start to understand what they need as distinct from what God provides. In a consumer culture, marketing involves making consumers aware of a need, even creates unnecessary needs and then inspires in them a dream of its fulfillment. The story of the fall itself is the story of humans who begin to believe that they need something beyond what God has given them. The snake's lure is a story, not of abundance, but of scarcity. Life in garden, he says --without the fruit of the tree at its center-- is not enough.

When the snake finds customers for what he is selling, even after that, God provides. God provides clothes for the guilty and ashamed Adam & Eve. God provides protection for Cain, a child for Abraham & Sarah, food and forgiveness for Joseph’s brothers during a famine, and manna for the children of Israel in the wilderness. The list goes on. Even God’s own Wisdom is personified as a householder with enough food for a block party. Proverbs 9 states: “Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. To those without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight." Everyone is invited. Everyone.

The themes of God’s abundance and humanity’s difficulty trusting it pop up in the midst of all this provision. Remember the example, that some of the Israelites run to hoard manna (meaning literally: "What is it?"). They are instructed to gather only what they need for the day. When they hoard for the next day, they wake up to a wormy mess. Then, when it works to gather more than they need for one day on the day before the Sabbath, we get the sense that God is almost playing with them. The children of Israel don't need refrigeration in the wilderness. They need trust. To inspire trust, God takes action to provide for the people. God provides through times of need, in spite of fear, for you and your neighbor. That is abundance in the Old Testament.

That is reflected later in the description of the abundant life, the healing and hospitality that Jesus offers in the New Testament. In John (10:10) Jesus calls himself the good shepherd and says about the sheep, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly”. In John, Jesus reveals abundance with wine, water, bread, fish, and lots of conversation. Abundant abundance is a theme throughout John.

A careful look at the Bible suggests there is a deeper meaning to abundance. It's not about things as much as it is about a safe community, safe streets, a place to sleep, and being able to find food to eat and time enough to savor it. The words relationship and community is where abundance comes in. When Jesus speaks of abundant life, he is talking about the life of a flock. The abundance was the people. Abundant life together is also life with Christ, which probably as much as anything, helps us define abundance in new ways as to how abundance is understood in a consumption-based economy.

So abundant life together is lived with daily reminders of humanity’s brokenness and God’s choice in Christ for vulnerable, self-giving love, rather than a bigger hammer to respond to the wounded, wounding realities of human life. It is life that sees abundance in people and communities -- including ourselves, our friends, families, all those with whom we share life. May the Good Shepherd renew and sustain that life in you and in the places you live -- abundantly.