Pie math
(for someone who’s struggling with pie math)
Pick a sin. Pick one with screamingly obvious consequences.
So harmful, so bad that even the most jaded cynic would agree that it cries out for justice.
Now go online. And find a group of Christians that supports it.
I’ll give you a full minute. You won’t need all of it. Your response will be something like this,
“How can they do that? If they’re really Christians, they should be at the forefront of stopping it, right?!”
Agreed. It’s a very real problem. And it’s what the end of today’s Gospel is talking about.
Where it shows us the Apostles’ reaction to Jesus walking on the water. And calming the storm.
“They were completely astounded. They had not understood the incident of the loaves. On the contrary, their hearts were hardened.”
Wait. Their response to directly experiencing a miracle is that “their hearts were hardened”?
Sadly, yes. How is that even possible?
It happens because we have an unspoken assumption in our hearts. As human beings, there’s something in us that wants to apply “pie math” to everything.
You know pie math. If we’re dividing a pie between four of us, and then four more people show up? Right. Each of our pieces just got cut in half.
Even if we can’t do the fractions, we’ve got the principle down cold.
There’s only so much pie. I’ve got mine. The only way you can have some is to take it away from me. That’s pie math.
And our three-year old brains (because that’s when we learned pie math) want to apply it to everything.
Pie math is one of the things that eases us (without us really thinking about it) into us-versus-them thinking. And you know how dangerous that is.
The thing is, pie math doesn’t actually apply to everything.
Whether it’s demand (in economics) or love, there are a lot things in life where pie math just doesn’t work.
As a father of two, I can tell you from experience that when my daughter was born, my love for my son was not cut in half. I had just as much love for him as I ever had. And just as much love for her. Any parent of three children, or four children, or more children will tell you the same thing.
Love doesn’t follow pie math. And it’s not the only thing that doesn’t.
Thoughtlessly applying pie math – to anything other than pie – is fraught with danger. Because of where it will lead us, once we let pie math slip its leash.
Even the Apostles – in the face of a miracle where division didn’t reduce the amount that anyone had – still went right back to pie math. That’s how powerful the pull of pie math is. We’ll even use it to ignore a miracle.
But whether it’s the Apostles or you and me, once it’s running at large, pie math is always followed by the turn inward. The move to us-versus-them thinking. Which, in the end, will take us to a place where we are completely capable of saying that we “love” God. While resenting or hating someone else.
Which means that we’re fooling ourselves. That we’re not really loving God.
Because you can’t love God, if you hate His handiwork.
Today’s Readings
