Reflections and Questions 1. Abundance is a key word for the day. Violence Unveiled , pp. It deals with the whole chapter, and not simply the first 21 verses, but this will give you something to chew on in looking ahead to your overall approach to the coming 5-week journey through this chapter of John's Gospel. Her examples of experiences of a God of abundance were the manna episodes in the Hebrew scriptures and the miracle of the fish and loaves in the New Testament.
Girardian anthropology helps to explain the difference.
When two children fight over the same teddy bear in the nursery, that bear seems scarce even if there are a dozen others just like it. Thus, the gods of the Sacred are gods who rule over scarcity, doling out who gets the blessings and who gets cursed. Jesus invites us to know another God, the God who gives life abundantly. In our later forms of capitalism, after generations of mass production have flooded the markets with an incredible abundance of goods, it sounds silly to say that capitalism is based on scarcity. But original capitalist theory has as one of its basic tenets that there is a scarcity of goods and resources which must thus be fairly distributed by the mechanisms of the market.