04 - Food
CHAPTER IV
FOOD In many if not most of the forms of worship known to us, food holds a place, through some sort of feast being recognized as a symbol of the relation between the worshiper and the object of his worship. In most cases this is a feast in which they both partake, and in which the deity accepts the relation of host and protector to his guest, with all that belongs to the obligations of hospitality. He is thus pledged to a perpetual good will and helpfulness. Commonly, the matter of the feast is a sacrifice, first given to the god and his official representatives, and divided among all concerned according to recognized rules. An attempt has been made to explain in this way the sacrifices and feasts of the Mosaic system. But this is to misconceive the biblical conception of the relation of Jehovah to his covenant people. That relation is strictly conditioned upon their observance of his law, and has nothing of the absolute character of the obligations existing between either kinsman and kinsman, or between host and guest. In the Mosaic law feasts hold a very outstanding place. Three great feasts every year drew the people of all parts of the land to the center of the nation’s worship, but it was in that of the passover that the people’s feeding upon a sacrifice was the central fact. It was a symbolic statement of the truth that the life of the human spirit is as dependent upon what it gets from God, as are the life, health, and growth of the human body upon natural food. Yet there are few passages in the Old Testament in which this is brought into clear view. In the Thirty-fourth Psalm the exhortation is found: —
Oh taste and see that Jehovah is good, Blessed is the man that taketh refuge in him. And the prophet Amos (viii: ii) says, “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord Jehovah, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of Jehovah.”
It is in the New Testament that not only is food used symbolically, but the truth that food in one of the great parables of God is insisted upon. It is especially in the sixth chapter of the Fourth Gospel that our Lord does this, by presenting the spiritual reality to which it corresponds. But let me observe first of all that our Lord seemed to find an especial pleasure in the feasts of his countrymen, and not only in their solemn religious festivals, but in their social feasts, to which neighbor invited neighbor. He seems to have thought these the most innocent of their social usages, and the best fitted to develop in them the generosity, the courtesy, and the cheerfulness which became the children of the kingdom. While the rest of their life was based upon the Mammonite principle of “nothing for nothing,” their feasts were given and not purchased, and therefore like the grand generosity of their Father in heaven.
While elsewhere they stood upon their rights, and made the most of their claims upon others, those who came to a feast in the spirit of it would be thinking more of others than of themselves. In the fourteenth chapter of the Third Gospel he holds up the ideal of feast-making and feast-taking, and contrasts with this the self-seeking which spoils the feast, the rivalry which would convert it into an exchange of favors, and the joyless, worldly spirit which would put feasting out of life, and would substitute the enjoyment of personal possessions in its place. I am not speaking here of the spiritual significance of the teachings of that chapter, but of their social bearings. The next thing we have to notice is that when he came to establish the two symbols or sacraments of his kingdom, as he took one of them from the purifications of the Old Testament, so he took the other from its feasts. In each case, he takes an immemorial and almost universal usage, in which are employed the simplest elements of our human life, and sets them in such new associations, and surrounds them with such new sanctities, that they become new things to us. He could be original without affecting novelty.
Luther rightly says that the sixth chapter of John does not speak of the Lord’s Supper, but of that of which the Lord’s Supper speaks. It presents to us the mystery of spiritual nutrition, in its parallel to the mystery of natural nutrition. For both are mysterious, and not one alone. We can trace the steps by which food is digested into chyle, and chyle is transformed into blood, and blood in its circulation through vein and artery replaces the waste caused by every exertion of our bodily powers. But to know these steps is not to know how the vital force transforms dead substance into living tissue.
How can the mute unconscious bread Become the living tongue, And nerves, through which our pleasures spread, And which by pain are wrung? Can lifeless water help to form The living, leaping blood. Whose gentle flow, in passion’s storm Becomes a ruffled flood?
Thomas Toke Lynch writes in “The Rivulet.” We can escape all sense of the wonder in this by dullness of mind, or through never giving it thought; but otherwise we must feel that we are in the presence of a mystery in our daily bread. Our Lord in the synagogue of Capernaum insists on the spiritual process, to which our daily bread corresponds. There are three steps in his presentation of it: (i) That he, the Son of man, can give those who hear him bread which will endure unto everlasting life, whereas the natural bread perishes in our use of it. (2) That he himself is the bread, which comes down from heaven for the life of the world. (3) That this bread of life is his flesh, and his blood; that is, his humanity as the Son of man, in which the spirits of men are to find their nourishment as spirits, unto a life everlasting.
It is not his example, or his teaching, or his influence, which is the spiritual food of men, but himself. It is through a union with him, as close and appropriating as that which their bodies sustain to their food, that they are nourished into spiritual life, health, and growth.
1. The first point in the parable of food is that it teaches us the dependence of man. We are not little gods, to stand alone and supply our own strength. We are so constructed that our bodies are undergoing a constant destruction and renewal. Every act, every thought, every emotion, works to the destruction of animal tissues, leaving an effete matter, which is eliminated by various organs, and through appropriate channels. If this elimination were not accompanied by a replacement of what is lost, we should perish of exhaustion. When some organic failure makes the replacement impossible or insufficient, we waste away through innutrition, and our bodies die. To our ordinary consciousness our bodies are permanent solidities.
They are, however, in a state of flux, like a river, whose bed would be left empty if the onflow of its waters were not replaced by a constantly fresh supply. It is from the world without us and beneath us that we are constantly replacing our bodies in the shape of food.
Unlike our bodies, our spirits are not built up of separate particles which can be destroyed and replaced. But in their case also, constant nutrition is required to their true life and growth.
We live only by the reception of life from the Son of man. He is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, and power, and whatever else our spirits call for. We have none of these things of our own, but only a capacity to receive them from the Son of man. From him come our faith to grasp, our strength to resist, our wisdom to guide our lives. We have these only by our incessantly receiving them.
“To keep the lamp alive With oil we fill the bowl; ’Tis water makes the willow thrive, And grace that feeds the soul.
“Man’s wisdom is to seek His strength in God alone; And e’en an angel would be weak Who trusted in his own.
“Retreat beneath his wings, And in his grace confide! This more exalts the King of kings Than all your works beside.
“In Jesus is our store;
Grace issues from his throne; Whoever says,’T want no more,’
Confesses he has none.”
II. The fact that we are hungry when we have not been fed at the usual or right time is a part of the parable. Natural hunger is a beneficent arrangement. The human race would perish but for hunger, which impresses upon us” painfully the necessity of replacing the waste of our bodies. Without it we easily might carry our abstinence to a point from which there would be no recovery.
There is the same beneficence in the hunger of the human spirit for God. We can still and silence it for a time. The prodigal did so, when he was busy with his waste of his substance; but there arose a mighty famine in that land, and it reached him as well as others. He flew for help to man, and found only degradation and disappointment. He envied the very swine their fullness and their satisfaction, but could not share it. He could not, because he was a son, with a father’s house in the distance, and plenty of bread for him there if he would seek it. When he came to himself, after being beside himself, that is insane, he did seek it, and found it. The essential misery and unrest of a godless life is but the hunger of a disinherited spirit for the bread at the Father’s table. Even the paroxysms of men’s sinning are, sometimes at least, proof of their failure to find true satisfaction in life. It is our grandeur, as it is our pain, that our hearts are too large for the whole world to fill them, and that only the bread that comes down from heaven for the life of the world can do so. As Carl Spencer says: —
Whoso the downward paths hath trod, The wrecks of human life to scan, Must write, “This creature, being man, Was ruined having less than God.” But hunger is not always the paroxysm of starvation. It is the daily and pleasant experience of wholesome natures. The saint hungers after God as well as the sinner, but with no despairing anguish. It is the preparation for a fresh enjoyment of what is always within the reach of his faith. And as the absence of natural hunger before we partake of food is a proof of inferior vitality, so is it in the spiritual life. “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” On the other hand, there is a false satiety, a self-satisfaction with what we are, which was the sin of the Pharisees, ’’Woe unto you, ye that are full! for ye shall hunger.”
III. This parable of nutrition is like all the rest in that it does not ’Svalk on all fours.” The correspondence between the two kinds is not complete and absolute. The body is nourished on what is lower than itself, and accomplishes this by assimilating its food to itself. We use for this only impersonal, selfless things, which we may treat as means to our ends. The horror of cannibalism is common to all races which have risen to the point of discerning what human personality means, and grows out of the fact that the victim is a personal self equally with us.
Those races which ascribe selfhood to animals have a horror of eating them. The human spirit, on the contrary, feeds only upon what is above itself; but by the law that the higher assimilates the lower, it is assimilated to its food. “He that eateth my flesh,” says the Saviour, “and drinketh my blood hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day...
He... abideth in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father; so he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me.” This great saying has been fulfilled in millions of lives, in that they have been fed, nourished, and comforted out of this one life. We can see in a wooden fashion what the intercourse between man and man may attain to. We have glimpses of the possibility of two human spirits almost transcending the limits which inclose personality, and living in and for each other. Jesus calmly says, “Abide in me, and I in you!” and although we know not what it means or how it is possible, we discover that it is the most real of human experiences.
IV. With the exception of a few savage races, mankind are agreed in making mealtimes occasions of social reunion, of at least the family. It has been shown that our Saviour gave his approval to this aspect of the social life of Judaea, in his presence at their feasts, his suggesting the finest way of keeping them, and his use of them in his parables as symbols of the kingdom of God. So in the second great sacrament of the church, he bids his people come together for a social feast, and every direction he gives with regard to its proper observance is addressed to them in the plural. *Take, eat... Do this in remembrance of me... Drink ye all of it.”
He speaks to them as a Christian congregation, and the apostle quotes to the congregation in Corinth those very directions, as applying to them also. Not one person present at the supper is treated as having no share or interest in it, and its observance by one or two communicants in the presence of a congregation is a palpable subversion of its meaning and purpose. To eat with any one implies good feeling toward him, according to the usage of the East, in which the Bible was written. The Psalmist (Psalm xli: 9), makes his complaint: —
Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, Who did eat of my bread, Hath lifted up his heel against me.
Especially the eastern host shows a marked good will by singling out a guest, to whom he will give some favorite morsel. So our Lord did with Judas, giving him the sop which he had dipped in the dish; but on his receiving it, “Satan entered into him.”
Both these points are applicable to the Lord’s Supper. It is a social feast, to be observed by all the Christians present, and not by a few. It is a feast of charity, to which we are to come in good will to all men, and especially those who sit at meat with us. It is the Lord’s Supper, and he is present as the host; and we, in accepting his invitation, profess that we believe him our friend, and that we are determined to be his friends. He is not present “in, with, or under” the elements.
Neither does he confer in this feast any grace or benefit which he withholds at other times and on other occasions. The great mystery of eating his flesh, and drinking his blood, is not confined to the sacrament. It was shared by myriads who lived before his Incarnation, as by the Psalmist king, who wrote: —
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, Thou hast anointed my head with oil; My cup runneth over. But the sacrament is an occasion when the Lord “keeps tryst” with his people. He never is absent when the two or three gather in his name. But he aims at making us feel and realize his being with us at this feast, and he has chosen the elements and the acts which will aid us in this.
Sense weighs heavily against faith at other times, even in the worship of God. In this service, it is enlisted on the side of faith. The bread and the cup are there, and we behold them, knowing that in every year since he sat down with the apostles in the upper room in Jerusalem, that bread has been broken, and that wine poured out, and that he has been present with every company of his people who have kept the feast, and has blessed them in their reception of it. And that blessing has been that, while they ate of the earthly food, their spirits were nourished by that which came down from heaven for the life of the world. Whatever they may have added to the feast as he made it at the first, and whatever they may have taken away from it, if they have kept the essentials, and have looked to him in faith, they have found him present, and have fed upon him. His presence is not in the elements nor upon an altar, but in the Christian congregation. “I am in the midst of you.’’ So the right posture for the Christian minister is not that which turns him away from the people, for in so doing he is turning his back upon his divine Master, whatever may be the thing toward which he is turning. The shekinah, the dwelling-place of God, is *’with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.”