"One of the great things about Jewish Holy Days is there’s always food!" The last course I pursued at the university where I spent my working life was Introduction to Judaism, taught by a local Rabbi. And now, during the week following the Feast of Corpus Christi, I recall this great statement he made about food and celebration. And there in the Gospel on Corpus Christi was Jesus feeding the multitude: lotsa fish, lotsa bread. Eat, eat!
The “Miracle of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes” is a great food story. Here is a crowd of Jewish people, listening to their Rabbi. It’s meal time, and you can tell that Jesus’ gang is primarily male, because women would have thought of this, would have prepared lotsa food. So one of the guys comes to Jesus and says, “How the heck are we gonna feed all these people?” The “miracle” is that Jesus collects what is on hand, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it . . . and it turns out to be enough, and more. Later, at his last meal with his homies, he will follow the same rubric, used in the Sabbath service with the loaves there: he takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it with everyone there.
Taken, Blessed, Broken, Shared: somehow, all what we have is turned into all that we need. Here in the cool shade of Corpus Christi, I want to spend some time considering this holy rubric, this way that we are fed, and the holiness that is the oven in which the bread is baked. For the next several days, I’d like to encourage us to recall stories of how we have been called to table to eat, and of how we’ve been called to be bread, taken, blessed, broken, and shared.
Tomorrow we will begin with a story that Mother Theresa told us in Detroit.
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your comments are helpful, and will be used to improve this blog.