Can You See God in the Faces of the Hungry?
What is God doing in the reality of 800 million of our fellow human beings who go to bed hungry every evening? What is God doing in the faces of the children suffering from malnutrition and its complications? What is God doing in the human person who starves to death in a world of plenty? What is God doing in the young high school student who organizes a hunger walk to raise money to buy enough Plumpy’nut to save the lives of fifty children suffering from severe malnutrition in a remote village in Africa? What is God doing in the generous volunteers in our local parishes who give their time and resources to staff our food banks and outreach programs?
The chronic hunger of human beings scandalizes. In the hollow faces of our hungry brothers and sisters, in the bloated bellies and the twisted limbs of malnourished children, God is telling us something. Something is seriously wrong with the way we as a human race have organized our social, political, and economic lives. Our approach to politics, justice, and economics must be wrong, for if it were correct, so many of God’s children would not be suffering with empty stomachs and hopeless hearts. The Pontifical Council Cor Unum addressed this eloquently in “World Hunger, A Challenge for All”:
“The experience of daily life, in every country in the world calls us, if we do not close our eyes, to look the hungry in the eye. In this look is the blood of our brothers and sisters crying out (Cf. Gen 4:10). We know that it is God calling out to us through the hungry. The sentence of the universal Judge condemns without compassion: ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food…’ (Mt 25:41 ff).
“…In the groaning of the hungry, it is God who is hungry and who is calling. Being a disciple of God, who is self revealing, the Christian is urged to heed the cries of the poor. It is a call to love” (1996, © Libreria Editrice Vaticana).
Our ways are not God’s way, and our thoughts are not always the Lord’s, and the innocent suffer the consequences. Hunger in this sense is the judgment of God in tangible form that calls out for repentance and redress.