What Jesus Pointed At

What's happening

For the first time, scientists can show how much of one person's nutrition comes from one named insect. A team at the University of Bristol, publishing in Nature this month, tracked the diets of 776 people in ten farming villages in remote western Nepal, then traced each nutrient back to the insects that helped produce it. One species of honeybee, on its own, accounts for a measurable share of those people's nutrients. Wild bees and hoverflies add more.

The team then modeled what would happen if all the local pollinators were lost. Nutrient intake falls substantially: about a fifth of vitamin A gone, similar drops elsewhere. Adolescent girls, whose diets lean hardest on pollinator-dependent crops, would feel it most. The honeybee at the center of this network is already in decline.

What the Text says

When Jesus told a hillside crowd to consider the birds, his hearers were farmers. They knew what a bird ate, what ate the bird, and what happened to a field when either disappeared.

Matthew 6:26-3026See the birds of the sky, that they don't sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you of much more value than they?27"Which of you, by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan?28Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don't toil, neither do they spin,29yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these.30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won't he much more clothe you, you of little faith?

The passage is usually read as comfort. It is doing harder work than that. The argument depends on the birds doing real work. The Greek in 6:26 is emblepō: to look intently into. God feeds the birds, and the birds (and the bees and the soil and the rains) are how God feeds you. The promise depends on a working chain. The text has always assumed it. The numbers are new. A bee in Jumla pollinates a buckwheat flower, a girl eats the grain, her optic nerve develops. Take the bee out and the chain shows itself by breaking. The argument is only comforting if the chain holds.

The reflection

The girl in the study is fourteen, give or take. She has never heard of Apis cerana. Neither has anyone reading this. The bee weighs eighty milligrams. It moves between flowers in a corner of Karnali Province most maps don't bother drawing. Seven percent of the vitamin A in her blood passes through its body first. The chain Jesus pointed at when he told farmers to look up was always running. It is held up by creatures whose names we do not know, in places we will never visit, on behalf of people we will never meet. The science can now count it. The chain is what it always was. The risk is that the count outlasts what it counts.