There
is just about nothing that human beings obsess over more than our food. We love
food. We love bad-for-you food; and we love good-for-you food. Some of us
obsess over food coated in sugar or packed with grease and fat; others of us
obsess over calories and carbs. Many people just eat without much thought. We
all eat, and our opinions about food are in many ways more engrained than our
opinions about politics or religion, especially if we are people who grow that
food. For the person who eats all the time, the person who struggles to eat
anything, and everybody in-between, food has a tremendous hold on us.
The act of taking in that
food—eating—is also a deeply religious exercise. That’s something that has been
more or less forgotten in a wider, cultural sense, as food has become easy to
come by. Up here we might not have McDonald’s down the street, but getting food
for most of us is pretty easy. It requires opening up a pantry, remembering to
stop at the store, planning a trip to Grand Forks, or, for the more industrious
amongst us, it means putting together a hunting or fishing trip or picking from
a garden. I say eating is a religious exercise because it is a universal human
activity that reminds us of our dependence. None of us make food on our own. We
are dependent on the soil and the weather, and animals and plants whose lives
we take to sustain our own. Even when we carefully monitor these factors we
cannot control them.
Eating is religious because we are part of
the food chain, even if we usually don’t think about it that way. And, most
importantly of all, all eating is
religious because it begs us to show a measure of devotion to a world that we
did not create and will far outlast us. We are not set apart from creation;
we are part of it; and we enter into it most deeply every time we sit down at
the table or grab something from the grocery aisle.
It’s harder for us to remember this
when we eat all sorts of things that don’t actually look like anything you find
in the natural world. I’m not sure where a gummy worm or a Lucky Charm grows in
the wild, for example. So, it’s easy to imagine that those processed things are
somehow different from eating a rabbit or milk from a cow, but that’s our
mistake. We are woven into creation, and, on Maundy Thursday, we are called to remember
that inter-wovenness. We remember Jesus Christ and we do it in the most human
of ways: we eat; we drink; in remembrance.
The Passover tradition has Jesus
standing in the place of the Paschal Lamb. As we imagine Jesus entering the
city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday we would do well to remember that he would
have been accompanied by thousands—tens of thousands—of lambs being shepherded
into town for the Passover. We might imagine Jesus on a road accompanied by
disciples, but more likely he was on an ancient highway surrounded by lambs and
shepherds, making their way to Jerusalem. Every one of those creatures was
destined to be slaughtered. The Last Supper that we remember tonight is
melancholy because it marks for us an end. All eating does if we think about
it. All life that is given for us will not return—at least that’s how the rules
of the game are designed east of Eden. A sacrifice once given can never be
undone.
Which is why it behooves us to reflect on our
eating at every opportunity, and twice as much tonight. What is this bread?
What is this wine? Is it an abstract thing made in a way you don’t understand?
What went into it? Who made it? What additives does it have? And then we should
make the turn that Jesus Christ compels us to make and move from the
agricultural and the gastronomical to the theological: What is this bread,
really? Is it just a remembrance of Christ? Or is it Christ’s body and blood,
actually and viscerally shed for you? Are we more than remembering? Are we
taking in Christ’s physical body and blood? Then, are those two things the
same?
These are critical questions for us
to ponder in a world where eating has become a paltry, degraded thing. Wendell
Berry writes, “Life is not very interesting, we seem to have decided. ‘Let its
satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.’ We hurry through our meals to
go to work and hurry through our work in order to ‘recreate’ ourselves in the
evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest
possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation—for what? To eat
the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the
‘quality’ of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable
obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of
the life of the body in the world.”
This is what today is about. “The
life of the body in the world.” Christ’s body, yes, but ours as well. As the
poet William Carlos Williams writes,
There
is nothing to eat
seek it where you will,
but of the body of the Lord
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.
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