August 9, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

The Language of Food

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 130
Proverbs 9:1–6
John 6:41–51a

Jesus repeatedly emphasizes the difficulty of explaining his gospel in words, and indeed, most of the time his disciples do not understand what he is saying until he finally speaks to them in food.

Gillian Feeley-Harnick
The Lord’s Table

In a devotional book he wrote for his own family, Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama began one of his devotions by recounting a story about chickens. As a visiting lecturer at Tarus Theological School in Timor, an eastern island of Indonesia, Professor Koyama came across many chickens when he entered the school. “You see many chickens,” he writes, “because the school runs a poultry farm, and students breed chickens for their personal income. When I met the students I began my lecture by asking them: ‘What do you see when you see chickens?’” He tells us that Student A responded, “When I see chickens, I see eggs. I can sell them and make money.” Student B responded, “When I see chickens, I see God. God created chickens. He created them for us to eat.” Student C gave this response: “When I see chickens, I see a good family life. A hen impresses me always as a good mother who takes care of her chicks.” Student D answered, “When I see chickens, I see the difference between man and animal. A chicken doesn’t have understanding as I do. We are very superior to chickens.” “Splendid!” responded Dr. Koyama. “We have found out so many interesting things from which we can begin our theological discussion. We all see something more when we see a chicken. A chicken is not just a chicken.” He goes on to say, “Rice is not just rice. The sun is not just the sun. Rain is not just rain. A house is not just a house. A water buffalo is not just a water buffalo. Everything has something more” (50 Meditations, pp. 15–16).

In our lesson from the Gospel of John, we find that bread is not just bread. Just as for their Jewish ancestors manna was received as having come from God, for the early Christians bread took on a significance beyond simply bread. They understood Jesus as having said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.”

“Theology,” as Professor Koyama wanted his students to understand, “requires the mind to see something more in the ordinary things.” If we want to live theologically—that is, in the light of what we think about God—we have to approach life metaphorically. In a recent article published in the Christian Century, scholar of liturgical language Gail Ramshaw writes, “Living deeply into the metaphors of the Christian faith is not for the faint of heart. You need an inspired heart, a flexible mind, and even a steady stomach.” (Christian Century, 28 July 2009, p. 21).

I know that I need a steady stomach whenever I say the words of institution at the Lord’s Table—whenever I say the Lord’s words, “Take, eat; this is my body, given for you” or “Drink of this cup, the cup of the new covenant sealed in my blood.” Why do we say this? What does it mean when, according to John, Jesus says, “I am the living bread” and “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”?

In order to understand the meaning of these words, we need first to back up historically to understand some of the metaphorical meanings of food in the Hebrew Bible, for ancient Judaism made up the fertile ground out of which Christian symbols arose. Food was, according to biblical anthropologists, one of the most important languages in which the ancient Israelites expressed the relationship human beings have to God and one another.

Simply stated, for the ancient Israelites the food God provided was his word; food embodied God’s wisdom. God’s word was found not only in the Ten Commandments of Deuteronomy, but also in the dietary laws of Leviticus. At least two of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible ate the scroll given by God so that they could speak God’s word to the house of Israel. In Genesis, the deep connection between eating and seeking knowledge underlies the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in which they ate fruit of a tree not only because they thought it would taste good, but also because they thought it would make them wise.

Recall the verses from Proverbs that we read this morning. Lady Wisdom invites simple, unlearned folk to a banquet feast. To take part in her banquet, to eat the food and drink the wine at her feast, is to eat the wisdom that she imparts. It is wisdom necessary for good judgment and for life. According to this tradition, wisdom leads to life, while folly leads to death.

Running deep throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is the connection between eating, becoming wise, and living. We know the connection between eating and living; it is obvious: we eat fundamentally to live. So much of human life is organized around the need to eat, that at times it may seem that the need to eat is what makes the world go around. As Leon Kass points out, “enormous time and energies are poured into growing, harvesting, rearing, butchering, preserving, packaging, storing, transporting, stocking, selling, buying, preparing, cooking, and consuming food” (Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 2).

In the life of Fourth Church, the same is true. Our Sunday Community Meals, Friday Night Suppers, and Monday Night Suppers cost about $41,000 per year. Monday Night Supper alone involves 1,750 volunteer hours. In addition to the many hands that serve these suppers each week, crews of volunteers busily prepare 750 sandwiches every month to be distributed for weekday lunches.

It is part of our church’s mission to ensure that those who are hungry in our city are fed. But if food were simply food, we might take a different approach to the meals we serve. Having inherited the deep connection between eating, gaining wisdom, and life, we seek to experience that “something more” that can happen when we feed each other. Our Deacons experience this when they receive prayer requests from those to whom they serve dinner. We experience this when together we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. On those Sundays when the Lord’s Supper is celebrated at all four worship services, the 77 volunteers who prepare, serve, and clear Communion elements know that the bread they serve is not just bread and the cup not just grape juice.

We are about to partake in the Lord’s Supper. You may need a strong stomach. You are not alone. Those who, according to John, heard Jesus say “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” took offense at the thought. Even some of Jesus’ own disciples were offended and responded, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” So hard was Jesus’ saying that some of the disciples drew back and decided no longer to go around with him.

The offense taken was not just visceral. To many, Jesus’ words offended their understanding of the law, the law they had received from God. Jesus drew on the metaphors and language about food that he had inherited from his Jewish upbringing, and he interpreted them in novel ways. It is important to note that he wasn’t alone in this. He lived at a time when laws, including laws about what to eat and with whom to eat, were being interpreted differently by different groups within Judaism. Sadducees, Essenes, Pharisees, the Maccabees, and the early Christians all developed different interpretations of Jewish law.

As diverse as their opinions were, all of these groups shared in two common assumptions about food. The first assumption was that the food God provides is his word, God’s wisdom. The second is that eating God’s wisdom should establish a binding agreement, a covenant, that those who eat God’s food will abide by his word. The manna that fell from the heavens was a sign making known “that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”

For Christians, Jesus Christ is the embodiment of God’s wisdom. This is expressed by John when he begins his Gospel with the statement that “the Word became flesh.” In Jesus, God’s Word is embodied in flesh and blood.

This is not, as we know, the whole story. In the Last Supper we remember not just that Jesus was the embodied Word of God, but also that he suffered for our sake and sacrificed himself for our lives. The blood of his sacrifice is his own, not the blood of goats and calves. Jesus’ self-sacrifice embodies God’s law to love one another. It is this Word made flesh that we are invited to consume when we eat the bread of the Lord’s Supper. And when we consume it, we are to live by it. The cup from which we are invited to drink is the same cup from which Jesus is reluctant to drink when, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he prays to God to take it away. It is the cup about which Jesus asks his disciples, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?”