Gathering Everyone to the Table

SOME OF MY fondest memories of my homeland, India, are of food, family meals, and big community banquets. My culinary tastes are versatile, but I explore Indian food as often as possible. What a joy to join a table filled with chutneys, biryani, coconut shrimp curry, aloo gobi, raitas, and dal with the scents of citrus, ginger, cardamom, coriander, and cumin inviting us all. Such meals, for me, are not just an act of consuming delicious food but a means of recalling stories and images of home. Many memories are shaped around the tastes and smells of food. Those memories become part of our experiences and shape our identity. Our relationship with food operates on both primal and profound levels. Food fuels our bodies physically, but meals are also where people express themselves. People are creative in their cooking. They send a message through their food.

Food is also a metaphor for social and economic structures in our contemporary contexts as well as in the Bible. Meals are occasions where people either enact inclusion and deep care for others through table fellowship and radical hospitality, or practice exclusion and tell others they are not invited. In that way, food functions as an extension of our values, of ourselves.

From the earliest parts of the Christian story, food is central. Jesus presents himself as the bread from heaven, our liberator. He offers himself as bread — blessed, broken, and shared for the world. He feeds the hungry and enjoins us to do the same, in his name.

August 4

Hunger for the Past

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; Psalm 78:23-29; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35

HUNGER CAN BE a source of great anxiety. In Exodus, the newly liberated Israelites face uncertainty about their next meal, or perhaps the next several. They understandably complain to Moses. Their food insecurity quickly leads to nostalgia about sitting around pots of meat stew and having all the bread they wanted to eat back in Egypt, under enslavement (Exodus 16:3). Hebrew Bible scholar Terence E. Fretheim observes that the Israelites are experiencing an “idealized and selective memory” of life under Pharaoh. Caught between an uncertain future and a dehumanizing past, the community chooses to idealize the latter. They weren’t simply idealizing past food but everything they left behind — past values, practices, and even enslavement itself. They were willing to trade a liberative, if at times uncertain, future for an oppressive past.

God responds to the peoples’ hunger, but not with the processed fare of their enslavement, to which they’d become addicted. God won’t let people return to a falsely nostalgic past, but instead offers a new recipe for freedom. Rather than the meat of empire, God offers them wild quail. Rather than bread made from grain in storehouses, God offers ephemeral manna. “What is it?” the people ask, not recognizing it as food. Distorted memories of the past may misdirect our future; they may cause us to miss the way God is leading. The church in the United States is at a crossroads — caught between a past often captive to wealth, racism, and heterosexism and a future with God at the margins. God is responding to the church’s anxiety about the future, but what’s offered will be quite different going forward. When God offers us new sustenance, will we say, “What is it?” and spit it out, or will we eat and be satisfied?

August 11

Elijah’s Trauma

1 Kings 19:4-8; Psalm 34:1-8; Ephesians 4:25 - 5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

MARC CHAGALL, A 20th century Jewish artist, has numerous works based on stories from the Bible where angels interact with humans in anthropomorphic ways. Chagall’s 1958 etching “Elijah Touched by an Angel” draws on 1 Kings 19. Chagall’s treatment of the prophet Elijah fleeing the threat of imperial violence stands out for the care with which the angel attends to the prophet. Chagall depicts the angel as a child touching Elijah very gently and somewhat reluctantly, so as to not disturb the man who is exhausted physically and emotionally. In this rendering, Elijah’s vulnerability brings out God’s most gentle and caring aspects.

The Elijah story is full of details depicting the divine in anthropomorphic terms. The angel touches the prophet like a person, exhorts him to eat, and brings him water and a cake baked on hot stone. The angel exhorts Elijah to eat a second time. God, who created the entire universe and can control the weather simply by uttering words, now takes a moment to appear to Elijah in person and to care for him. But this is no ordinary time. Elijah is traumatized by the violence of the regime he’s fled; it has crippled his ability to care for himself. God responds to Elijah’s extraordinarily precarious situation by performing an extraordinary act of solidarity. The text is troubling for its rampant violence, much of it religiously sanctioned. It’s also liberating because God expresses the most radical act of intimate solidarity not in the prophet’s violent rampage but in his moment of vulnerability.

What if the church similarly manifests itself not by the power it holds but by its ability and commitment to side with the vulnerable? It is an act of hypocrisy to claim to worship the God of Elijah while denying, in the name of religion, necessities to refugees or a wedding ceremony to LGBTQ Christians.

August 18

Chew On This!

Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

JOHN’S GOSPEL IS not explicit about the eucharistic event — instead, there are long discourses. But John’s gospel is rich with eucharistic language. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and then gives it to his disciples. The Johannine Jesus, in language reminiscent of God providing manna in the wilderness, presents himself as the “bread from heaven” (Exodus 16:4). But Jesus also equates this bread with his own flesh, “which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:51). Frequently, John uses the Greek word trógó instead of esthió, a more common word, to describe eating. Trógó is a colorful term that connotes continuous or persistent gnawing. The disciples and others who gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood will have eternal life (verses 51, 58). Such an unsettling image confounds many in the crowd (verse 52).

The Greek phrase eis ton aiōna (often translated as “live forever” or “eternal life”) occurs frequently in this text. It connotes “living differently than before” rather than never dying. In their insightful commentary on John’s gospel, Gail R. O’Day and Susan Hylen note that the Eucharist is not a single event instituted on Holy Thursday. Instead “all of Jesus’ life ‘institutes’ the sacrament of the Eucharist, not one particular event at the end of Jesus’ life.” When the disciples gnaw on Jesus’ flesh, they are irreversibly changed in a manner that continuously leads to new worldviews, ethos, and behaviors. The Eucharist is a transformative phenomenon that alters the course of one’s life.

August 25

Jesus’ ‘Hard Teachings’

Joshua 24:1-2, 14-18; Psalm 34:15-22; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

THE EUCHARISTIC PHENOMENON continues to unfold in John’s gospel as both a Christological and political experience. John places his eucharistic language within the literary context of the feeding of bread and fish to the multitudes (John 6:1-15). Those who eat Jesus, the bread personified, will live differently because of him. Jesus equates the bread with his flesh because he put his body on the line to ensure that everyone had access to bread. When others gnaw on his flesh, they too commit themselves to the same cause. They will live because of him, but they will also continue his legacy. Jesus initiates a symbiotic relationship — one that places demands on the disciples and, by extension, on us. For some, this is a difficult invitation. “On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’” (John 6:60). Because of this, many of Jesus’ disciples turn back. They can comprehend his words, but they can not stomach them. A few remain, such as Simon Peter, who asks poignantly, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Rituals, such as the Eucharist, are central to the church’s life and identity. Many churches today have turned Communion into a routine largely devoid of Jesus’ ethos and values. The ritual on Sundays must not become a substitute for living the life of prayer, service, sharing, and prophetic vision that Jesus lived. Living in active solidarity with the most vulnerable and providing an alternative outward sign of the good news in the world are the essential demands of the eucharistic practice — a practice that helps us to “fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel” (Ephesians 6:19). Gnawing on Jesus is a catalyst that capacitates a eucharistic life.