This morning I woke up, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and stumbled to the kitchen to look for breakfast. I poured a glass of milk and threw some leftover pizza on a plate, and called it breakfast. Years of living in a dorm helped me develop a taste for cold pizza, but to be honest, I wasn’t paying much attention to my food. I just know that I need something or I won’t wake up and I will be grumpy and brain dead an hour before lunch. I wondered to myself, how many times have I had cold pizza in my life? I can’t tell you. Do I remember any of those pizza breakfasts? Not really. For that matter, I don’t remember many meals in my life. Do you? As Tish Warren says, “Like most of what I’ll eat in this life, it’s necessary and forgettable.”[1] We all need to eat to energize our efforts, and simply stay alive, but it’s never-ending! In a few short hours, we will need to eat again.
So I think it’s curious and unexpected that when Jesus had a last night with His disciples, he chose eating together for them to remember Him. Tish Warren writes, “He could have asked his followers to do something impressive or mystical—climb a mountain, fast for forty days, or have a…sweat lodge ceremony—but instead he picks the most ordinary of acts, eating, through which to be present to his people. He says that the bread is his body and the wine is his blood. He chooses the unremarkable and plain, average and abundant, bread and wine…Christ is our bread and gives us bread. He is the gift and the giver. God gives us every meal we eat, and every meal we eat is ultimately partial and inadequate, pointing to him who is our true food, our eternal nourishment.”[2]
Before I took a bite of my pizza, I stopped, closed my eyes and thanked God for my pizza and milk. I’m still mostly in a fog, and my stomach is growling, and I don’t really know if the pizza will taste good or not, but I take a moment to be grateful for the gift of the day and the food that I have. Normally, I say grace before I take a bite, because I want gratitude to be more important in my life than consuming, to recognize what God has done to put me right here with what I need right now. You know, I think grace is one of the most profoundly counter-cultural things we can do as individuals or as a group. The world tries to convince us that what matters is what we consume—the movies and shows we watch, the books and memes we read, the food and experiences we take in. It’s one of the failings of our materialistic and consumer-driven society that we value others by what they consume, vilify those who have not the means to consume whatever they want, and determine our value by what we produce for others to consume. When we pause before a meal, we remind ourselves that what we have is a gift from God, and that our value rests with the Giver of our lives and the food.
Like the people listening to Jesus in our passage today, I find the idea of actually eating Jesus’ body and drinking His blood has such a strong “ewwwww” factor, that almost it drives me away. Two things change that reality for me. First, that Jesus’ body actually was broken on the cross for me, that Jesus’ blood really was poured out in an act of tremendous sacrifice. So the metaphor, the symbol, the mystery of sharing a meal with this same Jesus, draws me in. Second, in a way no one has ever been able to explain, when Jesus’ friends gather around a table, Jesus is there. Jesus blessed the bread and broke it. Jesus blessed the cup and poured it long ago, and He is with us as we do those things today.
As I’m eating my cold pizza, I’m not really thinking, not trying to make this moment stick in my head. I’m just giving my body what it needs to keep going, trusting that God is going to use it to energize me. But as my mind comes online, I am reminded that this meal, like Communion, points to the One who made me, and who set these reminders in my life—oh, every three to four hours or so—that I am more than a consumer, and that I depend on people and resources beyond my own in order to have my daily bread. Ultimately, all these meals leave me empty and wanting more, but with Jesus, I find actual fulfilment, purpose for the daily grind of meeting my needs and others, and I find hope that one day, I will sit around a heavenly table with Jesus, and an eternal meal I will never forget.
[1]Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life (Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2016), p. 62.
[2]Ibid., p. 63, 64.