Augustine similarly argued that such acts of kindness fit into a network of need. Both giver and recipient were in need before God and although God needed none of a person’s goods, God had ‘vouchsafed to be hungry in His poor. “I was hungry,” saith He, “and ye gave Me meat.”‘
-Christine Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, p. 20
It has been said that God symbolically wept through the eyes of the prophet Jeremiah. Surely he literally wept in the flesh in the person of Christ. Likewise God literally experienced hunger and thirst in the incarnation; yet his grace is so abounding that beyond his own temporary need during his short time as a not-yet-glorified man, he has ‘vouchsafed,’ or condescended, to call the hunger of the hungry his own hunger. Even the risen and glorified King of kings is hungry in his poor. It boggles the mind, and demands a response.
He is never hungry: “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine” (Ps. 50:12), but he condescends to call the hunger of the hungry his own.
