It
is often said of the English in particular that they eat to live: compared to
their European neighbours and indeed many other cultures of the world who live
to eat.
The
politics of food are all around us,
Whether
it is the fact that we eat so much when so many in the world do not have enough
to sustain life.
Whether
it is the fact that food has for many become a way in which we deal with the
grief or loneliness created by our increasingly technological and demanding
urban lifestyles leading to ever increasing ill health.
The
results are all too plain to see, although the power of denial means that many
of us refuse to recognise the tail tail signs of our dis-ease and expanding
waste lines which are often the result of terrible emptiness in our lives, an emptiness
that we fill with calories resulting in ever increasing instances of obesity in
children and adults alike.
Something
has changed about the way in which we view food, no longer are we prepared to
put in the time and effort to source and prepare food for ourselves or those
around us, in stead we seem content in snatching a solitary meal in our
increasingly hectic and unfulfilled lives or sending for a take away that is as
indigestible and it is inhospitable.
When
we look at the gospels it is no surprise that eating together is a common
feature of Jesus life and language about the kingdom. A wedding, a demand to
eat at the home of outcast, the kingdom of God described in terms of a food and
feasting, the accusation that Jesus is a glutton and a drunkard, the breaking
of taboos and laws around food all are part of a recipe for disaster that
brings us to the upper room on the night that Jesus was betrayed
You
may not know the wonderful story of Babettes feast, but when Babette, who for
the last decade has been serving a basic gruel, of boiled fish and rice, to the
members of small 19th century Danish protestant religious community,
finds herself in possession of £10,000 francs she offers one last and final
gift to the community – a meal.
Babettes
feast is a wonderfully and lovingly crafted and presented meal which the
community at first resolve to endure in silence, this travesty, this
disgraceful waste of money they decide is counter to their spirituality and
morality and the only way they can endure the experience is by remaining silent
as they eat.
However as the meal progresses they cannot
remain silent and in the course of the meal ancient feuds and petty squabbles
are healed and at the end of this gastronomic triumph the community, which was
facing its own annihilation recovers its first love and purpose and
relationship with one another and with God that will ensure its survival for
the future, a future of course radically altered by the experience of meal. One
might be tempted to think that £10,000 francs is a high price but I am not so
sure!
If
eating is a spiritual as well as a necessary and material activity then the
Christian experience is rather different to that of other faith communities. I
have not exhaustively researched this but I expect that Christianity is unique
in the way in which its spiritual understanding of sharing food makes it so
different.
The
Eucharist of course began as a meal. The Jewish roots of the Eucharist are
clear, Jesus himself was Jewish, he and his male disciples were doing what all
Jews have and continue to do for millennia – meet at the beginning of festival
of Pesach / Passover and share a meal that takes them back to the depths
of their history as a people when they
were slaves in Egypt.
But
what we do tonight and have for two millennia as Christians is more than the
gathering every Friday night by Jewish families at the beginning of Shabbat/the
Sabbath; different to the Islamic community breaking the fast every night of
Ramadan; not to be confused with the sharing of blessed food that every Hindu
does when at Temple:
For
the Christian understanding of the Eucharist takes us a step nearer, and for
religious traditions other than Christian a step too far, towards God. It is this understanding that helps us
understand the significance of this evening, when on the night in which Our
lord was betrayed, he took bread and blessed it, broke it and gave it to his
disciples.
It
was within the first decades of the early church that the understanding of what
we share at the Eucharist changed the practice of that early church where
Christians gathered week by week and maybe even day by day and shared food
together.
If
the Eucharist was at first always celebrated as part of a meal, an agape we
might call it, it was precisely because those first Christians came to realise
that something very different was happening when bread was taken, blessed and
broken and when wine was taken, blessed and shared that it was taken out of the
context of a family meal. Because of the realisation that this was somehow
different, it was taken out of the daily eating habits of Christians and
enshrined in a very different context; one we are very familiar and is known as
the Mass, the Holy Communion, the Lords Supper
For
what we claim as Christians is that we are no longer eating bread and drinking
wine, but we are in fact eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood - whether we understand those terms literally
or symbolically.
And
so here is the unique experience that Christianity offers the world as a way
into the mystery of God – that by partaking of the Eucharist we become one with
God.
To
understand this mystery some draw upon the famous phrase coined by one Ludwig
Feuerbach in 1863 “You are what you eat”.
So when it comes to the sacrament, the bread and wine of communion, we share in
this and in turn become the body of Christ in the world and our nourishment is
supplied directly by God – When Jesus started to speak in this way it became to
much for his Jewish listener and we are told that this was the only time in his
ministry in Galilee that some could not bear his words and so no longer went
about with him – John 6.
Others
have called upon our common use of English. When I drink a glass of wine I
drink the wine. At first it may appear not to have an effect upon me but in
truth it is already beginning to affect my body and perception of reality. By
the time I drink my second glass of wine I may find that my mood is altered, I
become more animated, better company and expressive in my words and
actions. By the time I have drunk my 3rd or 4th glass of wine I may be as one under the influence of that
wine, and there comes a point sometime after the 4th or 5th glass of
wine when I become drunk. I drink the wine but now I am drunk by the wine in
turn.
We
have gathered tonight to join in a meal as friends, as a family under God, we
gather remembering that night when Jesus shared his last meal with this
friends, his family. But as this evening progresses we will come to realise
that we gather to share in something far greater than just a meal, we gather to
partake of God in a way that is unique and if we allow it life changing.
So
to return to the question I began with:
Do
you eat to live or live to eat - the
answer for us as Christians is that when we gather for the Eucharist we do so
in order that we might find in the food of the Eucharist LIFE.
The altar of repose at St Matthias
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