“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” (John 6.51)
A professor who teaches the history of food at a leading university likes to say that eating food is the only activity that every single human person must do. Noting that all our other activities are either involuntary (breathing) or voluntary (being married), he tells his students that eating is the single one activity that all humans must do if they are to live.
More than just an interesting way to begin his study of the history of food, the statement argues for the most fundamental common denominator of human beings, the necessity of food, without which we would cease to exist, both as individuals and as a species. In other words, we never want to underestimate the importance of food, essential for our livelihood, a need shared by everyone, uniting us–if nowhere else–around a table.
It is for this same reason that the Hebrew Scriptures speak so often of rain, a theme prevalent on the pages of the holy writ, consistently serving as a sign of divine favor. And why is rain so central to the Hebrew people? Because without rain, there is famine, and when there is famine, there is no food. So, the Hebrews see famine as the opposite of rain, the lack of food a sign of divine disfavor.
We find this same belief as the focus of Moses’ message to the Hebrew slaves, as he speaks to them of just such divine favor. “Do not forget the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery; who guided you through the vast and terrible desert with its serpents and scorpions, its parched and waterless ground; who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock and fed you in the desert with manna, a food unknown to your fathers” (Deut 8.14-16).
That spiritual belief, first spoken by Moses the prophet, is reiterated by the new Moses, the Galilean Teacher, who tells his people, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven, whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (John 6.51).
These twin passages, one from the Hebrew texts, the other from the Christian texts, serve as our touchstone for understanding the special feast that we observe today, a day formerly known as Corpus Christi Sunday, now called the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. The day reminds us, first that we must eat to live, and then invites us to see the source of that food that sustains us as coming from divine beneficence.
Were we unaware of this truth, blinded by our keen ability to take the good things of life for granted, the recent months have shocked us into awareness, removing the blindness from our eyes, as we see grocery stores without basic food supplies, our pantry shelves becoming empty with each day, with long lines of people seeking relief at food banks growing in size not seen before in our times.
Some of us have received a glimpse, others an eyeful, of what many people in our world experience each day, the frightening prospect of no food to eat, experiencing now for ourselves the pang of hunger, an unfamiliar and an unsettling sensation, reminding us that having food is not a certainty, and staying alive is not a given.
This new understanding of our human fragileness puts us into kinship with the Hebrew slaves in the desert and into solidarity with the poor of every age who do not have food to eat. We have come to see in a vivid way that eating is the one activity we all must do if we are to live. It is no longer just a line in a college course on food.
With that awareness of our need for food now put before us in a startling and terrifying manner, we hear in a personal way the words of Moses to the Hebrews, “Do not forget the Lord, your God, who brought forth water for you and fed you in the desert with manna.” It is a message we have forgotten too often, that ultimately the food we eat is because of the divine favor we have received.
With that realization now upon us, it is not enough that we give thanks to the Most High God for the food on our table, but we also are called to invite others to sit at our table, especially the forgotten, the foreigner, and the unforgiven. Once we realize that the food we have received from the hand of God is not only for ourselves, but it is for us to share with the less fortunate, then we have drawn close to the Galilean Teacher who instructed his followers, in the face of the hungry crowd, “Give them something to eat yourselves,” and who welcomed to his table anyone and everyone.
The great writer and theologian, Saint Augustine, reflecting on the Eucharistic table, once delivered a sermon in which he urged his listeners to “become what you have received,” reminding them with these words that it is never enough just to receive the Lord Jesus in the bread and in the cup, but we must become the Lord Jesus, providing food and drink for others, as he has done for us.
If we are to understand this feast in the way that we should, then our eyes are not directed solely to the Lord in the bread and in the cup, but are directed towards the face of the Lord in the hungry and in the poor who have no one to give them bread or drink, except for us, who then become bread for them.
Two decades ago, the foreign affairs editor for USA Today, Jack Kelley, gave an address at a press association convention in which he told this moving story that deserves repeating, especially on this special day. He spoke these words to the assembled group: “We were in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, in East Africa, during a famine.”
“It was so bad we walked into one village and everybody was dead. There is a stench of death that gets into your hair, gets onto your skin, gets onto your clothes, and you can’t wash it off. We saw this little boy. You could tell he had worms and was malnourished, his stomach was protruding.”
Jack Kelley continues,“When a child is extremely malnourished, the hair turns a reddish color, and the skin becomes crinkled as though he’s one hundred years old. Our photographer had a grapefruit, which he gave to the boy. The boy was so weak he didn’t have the strength to hold the grapefruit, so we cut it in half and gave it to him.”
“He picked it up, looked at us as if to say thanks, and began to walk back towards his village. We walked behind him in a way that he couldn’t see us. When he entered the village, there on the ground was a little boy who I thought was dead. His eyes were completely glazed over. It turned out that this was his younger brother.”
“The older brother kneeled down next to his younger brother, bit off a piece of the grapefruit, and chewed it. Then he opened up his younger brother’s mouth, put the grapefruit in, and worked his brother’s jaw up and down. We learned that the older brother had been doing that for the younger brother for two weeks.”
“A couple days later the older brother died of malnutrition, and the younger brother lived. I remember driving home that night thinking, ‘I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when he said, “There is no greater love than to lay down our life for somebody else.””
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 