Easter 3: I could feed people
8:00 AM |
| "by summer." by land_camera_land_camera, on Flickr |
And then in the New Testament appeared the central, astonishing fact of Jesus, proclaiming that he himself was the bread of heaven. "Eat my flesh and drink my blood," he said. I thought how outrageous Jesus was to the church of his time: He didn't wash before meals; he said the prayers incorrectly; he hung out with women, foreigners, the despised and unclean. Over and over, he told people not to be afraid. I liked all that, but mostly I liked that he said he was bread and told his friends to eat him.
As I interpreted it, Jesus invited notorious wrongdoers to his table, airily discarded all the religious rules of the day, and fed whoever showed up, by the thousands. In the end, he was murdered for eating with the wrong people.
And then - here's where the story got irrational. I didn't exactly "believe" it, the way I believed in the boiling point of water or photosynthesis, but it seemed true to me - wholly true, in ways that mere facts could never be. I believed this God rose from the dead to have breakfast with his friends.
I read about the crazy days after Jesus' arrest, death, and burial, when the terrified disciples were scattering, just as I'd seen peasants and revolutionaries run from the violence of soldiers in Latin America. A stranger hailed them on the road to Emmaus. They told him what had happened, and he explained it all by citing Scripture, recounting old prophecies in impressive detail. Then, according to the book, they came to a village and invited the stranger to eat with them, as the night was drawing near. He sat down at the table, took bread, and broke it. Suddenly "their eyes were opened," reported the book. "He made himself known in the breaking of bread, and they felt their hearts on fire." Then he vanished. In another story, he reappeared cooking food on the beach. in another, he showed up to tell his followers that he was hungry and wanted something to eat. They gave him a piece of fish.
All of it pointed to a force stronger than the anxious formulas of religion: a radically inclusive love that accompanied people in the most ordinary of actions - eating, drinking, walking - and stayed with them, through fear, even past death. That love meant giving yourself away, embracing outsiders as family, emptying yourself to feed and live for others. The stories illuminated the holiness located in mortal human bodies, and the promise that people could see God by cherishing all those different bodies the way that God did. They spoke of a communion so much vaster than any church could contain: one I had sensed all my life could be expressed in the sharing of food, particularly with strangers.
I couldn't stop thinking about another story: Jesus instructing his beloved, fallible disciples Peter exactly how to love him: "Feed my sheep."
Jesus asked, "Do you love me?"
Peter fussed: "Of course I love you."
"Feed my sheep."
Peter fussed some more.
"Do you love me?" asked Jesus again. "Then feed my sheep."
It seemed pretty clear. If I wanted to see God, I could feed people.
--Sara Miles, Take This Bread, p. 91-93
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