On Christmas, I was with some children who had received toy guns from Santa. The guns featured flashing lights and loud (to my ears) sounds but they did not fire projectiles. Instead, squeezing the trigger caused the toy to send out a radio wave. All the guns were equipped with sensors to detect these radio waves as incoming fire. Guns that were “hit” five times deactivated themselves. The user of the gun was out of the game until the gun was turned on again.
One child wanted to shoot it out with me. Gently, I told the child that I do not like and I do not play shooting games. From across the room, he shot at me anyway. I pretended that his gun was in fact firing projectiles and after each shot I gobbled up the shot and said “Yum!” This response did not please the little boy: “THEY ARE NOT EDIBLE!!!”
His rejoinder put me in mind of a different slogan: “Bread Not Bombs.” I thought about our war-torn world: Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan, Congo, and so on. Humans spend money on bombs that could be used to fund equitable distribution of food and the bombs that humans do acquire all too often target food resources.
God, on the other hand, comes to humans in the form of bread in liturgical rituals celebrated with relentless regularity (though the frequency varies by denomination).
On New Year’s Eve, I was at a Mass which featured the baptism of a toddler. Just before the big moment, the toddler was standing with his family at the font. Suddenly he bolted down the aisle away from the font. As a patient parent chased him down, the presider remarked, “We have a runner!” The parent brought the child back to the font and the baptism proceeded without further incident.
With the Christmas encounter on my mind, I thought about the runaway toddler and about how we humans all too often run away from God (all the way back to Adam and Eve trying to hide in the Garden of Eden). I had a mental image of Jesus chasing after runaway humans calling out, “Hey! I’ve got bread for you all!”
Believers go to Mass and line up for Communion, but it is first of all God who runs to us and it is God who pursues us when we run away. Angels rejoice over repentant sinners. When we flee from God, perhaps the angels call out “We’ve got a runner!”