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150 SHARING IN THE BODY OF CHRIST
brings about physical and spiritual nourishment but also incorporates
the partakers into his own Trinitarian community. As God becomes
bread from heaven in order to nourish and constitute his own Body, so
the members of the ecclesial community are called to nourish one another.
From an ecclesial perspective (founded upon the Eucharist) the public
communal and celebratory circulation of the gift shapes the life of the
polis.
In view of this sharing in the same divine Body, the eucharistic practice
presents a great challenge both to the church and to the entire world.
Érico João Hammes puts it succinctly:
Sharing at Jesus table means extending it for more people, making
space for others to eat, finding fulfillment in setting the table for
those who are hungry. The table extended in this way becomes a
feast, a banquet at which humankind and divine mystery mingle in
mutual fellowship.96
In the current increasingly globalized world, superabundance becomes
paradoxical, if not scandalous. Few people live in opulence, yet a great
number live in extreme poverty.97 As Marion Nestle and Samuel Wells
argue, the problem is not so much a lack of resources; the real problem
is the human refusal to share and care for one another, particularly those
who are in most need in our midst.98 Clear examples of this are the realities
of world hunger and malnutrition, which are as pervasive as extreme
poverty: more than 1 billion people subsist on less than one dollar a day,
96
Érico João Hammes, Stones into Bread: Why Not? Eucharist-Koinonia-Diaconate,
trans. Paul Burns, Concilium, 2 (2005), 32.
97
For a study of this paradox, see H. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History
of Eating in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). In the US this
paradox of plenty is creating a greater gap between the rich and the poor. A recent
article in the London Observer Paul Harris, Wake Up: The American Dream is
Over (June 2006) reveals the following US reality: This [economic gap between rich
and poor] has lead to an economy hugely warped in favour of a small slice of very rich
Americans. The wealthiest one percent of households now control a third of the
national wealth. The wealthiest 10 percent control two-thirds of it. This is a society
that is splitting down the middle and it has taken place against a backdrop of economic
growth. Between 1980 and 2004 America s GDP went up by almost two-thirds. But
instead of making everyone better off, it has made only a part of the country wealthier,
as another part slips ever more into the black hole of the working poor. There are
now 37 million Americans living in poverty, and at 12.7 percent of the population, it is
the highest percentage in the developed world.
columnists/story/0,,1792399,00.html>.
98
See Nestle, Food Politics; Wells, God s Companions.
SHARING IN THE BODY OF CHRIST 151
and more than 800 million people have too little to eat to meet their
daily energy needs.99
I agree with Frei Betto, who points out that alleviating hunger is not
just about giving food to people or making donations, but also requires
more holistic action that targets structural change:
The aim is to mobilize world resources, under UN supervision, in
order to finance entrepreneurial schemes, co-operative movements,
and sustainable development in the poorest regions. Hunger cannot
be fought just through donations, or even by transfer of funds.
These need to be complemented by effective policies of structural
change, such as agrarian and fiscal reforms that are capable of less-
ening the concentration of income from land and financial deal-
ings. And all this has to be guaranteed by a daring policy of loans
and credit offered to the beneficiary families, who must become the
target of an intense educational programme, so that they can
become socio-economic units and active agents in political and his-
torical processes.100
Alleviating hunger also requires a theopolitical vision rooted in eucharis-
tic sharing to promote the sort of structural changes that Frei Betto
advocates. For prior and even counter to the hegemony of the policy
of the secular state, which emphasizes proprietary rights and runs the
risk of treating humans as merely individual parties to a contract, the
eucharistic envisioning of co-abiding with a Trinitarian God ensures that
people are embraced as integral members of the same divine Body a
divine gift that cannot be privately possessed by anyone since, as I have
argued, it is already a communally shared reality. This eucharistic envi-
sioning of the edible gift claims that food matters (see chapter 3),
precisely because at the heart of the material that is an entanglement of
social, economic, cultural, and political realities there is a theological
realm, which is the co-abiding of divinity with humanity.
The body politic of the church is, then, centered on a practice of table
fellowship: where sharing is an enactment of participation or co-belonging
with one another, humanity with creation, and the whole of creation
with God. In this body, and at this table, all members are interdependent.
99
This information is taken from the Food and Agriculture Organization,
org/faostat/foodsecurity/MDG/MDG-Goal1_en.pdf>. See also Nestle, Food Politics;
Wells, God s Companions.
100
Frei Betto, Zero Hunger: An Ethical-Political Project, Concilium, 2 (2005),
11 23: 13.
152 SHARING IN THE BODY OF CHRIST
The interdependence, which is the catholicity of Christ s Body, configures
a complex sense of spatiality where the universal and the local, the living
and the dead, transcendence and immanence belong together, yet with-
out annihilating each other, but instead celebrating harmonious differ-
ence. In addition, the catholicity of this body also configures a complex
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