Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, January 19, 2025
I like baskets. When I see a display of them, my eyes light up and I have to mutter my Cautious Consumer Mantra a few times, “Feel free to admire without needing to acquire.”
There’s something about a well-made basket that makes me smile in appreciation, and sometimes, if I’ve ignored my mantra, in acquisition.
When I think back to baskets of my childhood, I only remember one. Maybe that’s because it outshines any and all other baskets I knew then. It was our picnic basket.
Our family liked to load up that large wooden basket with plates and silverware and cups and ketchup and mustard and all manner of good food and a big thermos. Then we’d load up the car, and head out to one of our southeastern Alaska rocky beaches to build a campfire and prepare to picnic heartily. Whenever I see a basket similar to our beloved picnic transport, I am awash in nostalgia, and immediately hungry for food eaten outdoors, at ocean’s edge.
If you ask me what Biblical baskets come to mind, it might be because of my fondness for those childhood picnics that I first recall the story I heard as a small child, when Jesus fed 5,000 people. I was impressed that he could make a boy’s humble lunch of two loaves of bread and five fish stretch to feed all those people. (I was much older when I realized there were not only 5,000 men, but also women and children, who didn’t make the count.)
I loved the end of this amazing picnic story – there were leftovers! Twelve baskets of leftovers! I enjoy leftovers almost as much as picnics! Those baskets tell me there was enough, and more than enough – very satisfying and reassuring to the anxious child I often was.
I learned another Biblical basket story before I was old enough to read it myself; maybe it was the first story that came to your mind – that of baby Moses floating on the river in a basket his mother had carefully made for him.
It could be such a fearsome story if the teller focused on the death decree that forced his mother to do what she did, and on what might become of a little baby floating alone on a river, abandoned by his parents.
Fortunately, I didn’t hear the story that way. Instead, I heard how a mother’s love constructed that waterproof basket, and sent the baby’s big sister to keep careful watch over him from the riverbank. And then a princess shows up and rescues the baby. All is well if a princess arrives on the scene!
When I scanned my memory for another New Testament basket, I thought of what must have been a very large and sturdy one:
After many days had gone by, there was a conspiracy among the Jews to kill him, but Saul learned of their plan. Day and night they kept close watch on the city gates in order to kill him. But his followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall. (Acts 9:23-25 NIV)
In the first verse of Acts 9, Saul is “still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples,” and before the end of the chapter he is trying to become one of them, at great risk to his life. I wonder how fast his heart was racing as the men lowered his basket through that wall! I’m sure his angel steadied that basket and made his escape possible.
Saul lived to become Paul, intrepid missionary for the Lord, church planter, author of up to half the books of the New Testament.
Moses lived to lead God’s chosen people out of slavery to the brink of the Promised Land, with 40 years of adventures and misadventures on the way. He authored the first five books of the Old Testament, and perhaps Job and a few of the Psalms.
Their baskets are strong reminders of God’s protection. He is Emmanuel, God With Us.
The baskets of Jesus-blessed bread and fish leftovers speak of God’s provision. He is the God of Enough, and More Than Enough.
Not only for there and then, Saul and Moses and 5,000 plus people, but also for here and now, you and me.
That’s great good news as we step out into this brand-new week: we do not walk alone. It’s always a journey with Jesus.