Eats with Sinners

Who runs our world? The politicians? Forget it. They profess themselves helpless; they are the victims of ‘forces’ beyond their control. They try to take the credit when things go well, but when things go badly the truth comes out. It’s all a matter of economic forces. Forces? I see no forces. But they must be pretty powerful. They’ve kept us in recession these last three or four years. They create floods of refugees, and the most powerful people in the world can’t sort them out. They have thrown millions of people out of work. They have pushed thousands of business into bankruptcy. Walk through our big cities today, and in one shop doorway after another you’ll see young homeless people, begging. Who put them there? Ask any politician; ask any economist: it was economic forces, they’ll say. It was the politician climate. It was the world economic situation.

Look wider. Why have we not solved the problem of Bosnia, or of Rwanda, or of Northern Ireland? We have spy satellites that tell us everything we could possibly want to know about the world. We have departments of politics and economics in universities all over the place. We have computers that can tell you anything about anything. But we can’t stop people shelling each other to bits in the snow, or driving each other from their homelands with machetes. Why not? Political powers. The post-Cold War climate. Tribal allegiances. And if we ask why it is that this planet is perfectly capable of growing enough food and distributing it to every man, woman, and child who breathes, and yet millions of them are starving, the answer is the same. There are forces which stop us doing it.

(N.T. Wright, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship)