Jesus said to the Jewish crowds: “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.” The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” (John 6.51-58)
As we know, potluck dinners are a mainstay of life in our country and probably elsewhere for that matter. The simplest definition of a potluck dinner is a communal meal to which people bring food to share. They are popular for any number of reasons, the first being that everyone shares the responsibility of bringing the food, in this way making it less laborious if one person had to provide the entire meal.
The original understanding of potluck goes back to England in the 16th century when a pot with leftovers was kept on the stove after everyone had eaten in the event that someone showed up later or unexpectedly. The late arriver had to trust his or her luck as to the contents in the pot. However, the meaning changed during the Great Depression when the potluck meal allowed a group to combine meager resources, in this way providing a meal that otherwise could not be served and shared.
Also, the meals provide an opportunity for everyone in a group or community to gather around a table to share a meal, that act alone being a quintessential human experience, eating together extended in the moment beyond the family dinner table to the community table, something that the human person wants and needs, to be with others in a group.
If that were not enough to commend it, potluck dinners are popular because of the variety of foods that show up on the table, people often bringing their favorite or specialty dishes to the meal, in this way giving others a chance to taste a new or different dish. The meals are notorious for establishing bragging rights, everyone curious about who brought a particularly good or unusual dish to the meal.
The de rigueur exchange of recipes often follows a potluck meal, people begging for a recipe that they want to try at home for themselves. Here is where the name potluck comes into play again, a person considered lucky if a recipe is honestly shared and if it is as tasty when tried at home. For some reason, some people hoard their recipes like the miser in Aesop’s fable who kept his gold buried in a hole in the ground, fearful that someone would get it.
Of course, there are a few downsides to the potluck dinner, a person or two gaining notoriety for bringing nothing or a dish so small it won’t feed a single person. In our age of obsession with cleanliness and proper food handling, others don’t like to participate because of being persnickety about where and how the food was prepared. That being said, potlucks remain popular, the good obviously outweighing the bad. As I said, there is nothing more human than sharing a meal, the food bringing people together, bonding them in a way almost unlike any other, attesting to something fundamental about our human nature.
So, it comes as no surprise, I would suggest, that at the core of both the Jewish and the Christian religions is a shared meal. For the Jews, it is the Passover meal, the annual event recalling their ancestor’s escape from Egypt, the Lord God allowing them to safely pass over the Red Sea in their flight from their captors. It is so sacred to the Jewish people that the rules for the ritual are spelled out in great detail in both the Book of Exodus and in the Book of Deuteronomy.
For the Christian believer, the shared meal is the Eucharist, celebrated each Sunday as the community gathers around a table to receive food and drink from the Lord Jesus, the solemn ritual reenacting Jesus’ last supper with his disciples in the Upper Room the night before his death on the cross. At that meal, he instructed his disciples to “do this in remembrance of me,” and so a meal with a loaf of bread and with a cup of wine became the most important ritual of the early Christian community, and has continued to be to the present age.
If that were not enough to show the centrality of and the connection with food for these two religions at their origins, there is even more. Another key chapter in the early story of the Hebrew slaves was their long journey through the desert after their escape from Egypt. Obviously, a desert does not provide a food supply and so the Hebrews cried out to the Lord God in their hunger, begging for something to eat.
Hearing their cries, the Most High God sent down manna from the heavens, a moist, sticky bread-like food that provided nourishment for the slaves and allowed them to stay alive rather than perishing from starvation. While the story is honest enough to include the Hebrews’ complaining about the food, lamenting the lack of variety that they enjoyed in Egypt, it makes clear that their survival was ensured by the gift of manna from the hands of the Lord God.
Likewise, the story behind the story for Christian believers is Jesus’ providing food for the hungry crowds who gathered with him on the hilltop, listening to his words as he instructed them on the right way to live in this world. As the story goes, evening drew near and the disciples approached Jesus, telling him to send the hungry people away so that they could find food on their own before nightfall.
Jesus, unhappy with the disciples, instructs them to feed the crowd. After hearing them insist that they don’t have enough for so many mouths, he tells them to bring him what little food they can find, resulting in them bringing him two loaves and five fish. He prays over the food and tells the disciples to distribute it to the crowd. Miraculously, the food multiplies and there is enough for everyone. More than enough, in fact, with twelve baskets of leftovers remaining after everyone had their fill.
The point, once again, is that the Most High God provides food for the hungry. Like a mother who feeds her hungry child with milk from her breast, so the Lord God feeds his children, providing them with food that will sustain and strengthen them so that they will survive in this world. As a mother loves her child, he loves his children and does not want to see them starve.
Take away the notion of food from these two religions and they are not the same. Like a woven cloth made of strands weaved together, food and religious sentiment are tightly interwoven in both the Jewish and the Christian faiths, and any attempt to unravel the threads destroys the fabric of both religions. Not only would it alter the nature of the religious practices of each, it also would greatly change the understanding of the God whom both groups call their Lord.
That, in short, explains why we have before us today the celebration on the Catholic calendar that goes by the name of the Solemnity of the Most Precious Body and Blood of Christ. It is a mouthful–no pun intended–the former name of Corpus Christi for the feast being simpler, even if running the risk of not being understood.
Traditionally, the feast was celebrated on the Thursday after Holy Trinity Sunday, but like other important feast days during the week, such as Ascension Thursday, the feast has been moved in the United States to the following Sunday, in this way allowing the people in the pew to participate in the important celebration that is at the heart of their Christian beliefs.
For all the complexities and controversies about transsubstantiation–that is, how bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ–the heart of the matter is simple. The backstories of Judaism and Christianity make it clear that the central point is God’s want for us to have food. Not only food for the body, but also food for the spirit, both of these foods being gifts from God and bringing us closer to Him who provides for our needs. We are all sucklings at the breast of God.
As I like to see it, then, the primordial stories of Judaism and Christianity are paradigms that overlay the human experience in every age. We are all sojourners in the desert, living in a world that does not always feed our bodies and too often fails to feed our spirits. For the Jews, it was called the Sinai Desert. For the crowds listening to Jesus, it was called a mountaintop. But for both, it was a place of hunger, not only hunger for food, but hunger for a close connection with the Most High God.
Neither can be overlooked without harm coming to the human person. It is for this same reason, I believe, that the gospels present the Lord Jesus as hearing the cries of the beggars on the side of the road, men and women who were destitute, without food, without a means of support, without human contact. Alone and forsaken, they reverted to the more primary and primitive mode of human communication, that is crying, the sound every newborn infant makes when it is hungry.
And as the gospels are quick to tell us, Jesus answered their cries, as would a mother with her child, bringing them close, touching them with his hands, and giving them more than just food, but also connection. Saint Augustine thought the same, one time putting the thought in these words, “Before God, we are all beggars.”
In that simple but profound phrase, he has again pointed to the essence of our belief. Wherever we stand, whether in the sands of the desert or on the sides of the road, we are all beggars, desperately in need of a God who loves us and who will provide food for our empty stomachs and for our emptied-out spirits.
And, all things considered, that is the more honest posture that we should present as we gather around the table of his word or gather around the table of his food and drink. There is no need to pretend otherwise. We are all beggars before the Most High, dead if not for him, Lazarus outside the door waiting for just the scraps off his table.
Unlike the rich man in that biblical story, the Most High God shares his riches, giving us much more than scraps, but giving us food and drink in steady supply, and even twelve baskets more, inviting us to sit at his banquet table in the eternal kingdom where there is no death, no sorrow, no crying, no pain, for the former things have passed away. There, at long last, we are no longer beggars, but brothers and sisters seated at the table, feasting on the food prepared by our loving Mother’s hand.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 