Given how essential food and drink are to human survival, their significance in religious imagination and practice is unsurprising. Much of Jesus’ teaching takes place “at table.” The gospels also provide accounts of his feeding thousands of people at a time with a few loaves and fish, yet he also teaches that “one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”* Paul’s letters discuss controversies about how members of the early church should treat one another when they gather to eat and drink. The Eucharist, the community meal of Christians that developed out of the Last Supper, is a sharing of bread and wine in memory of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Because both Judaism as we know it today (i.e., Judaism shaped by the rabbis) and Christianity developed from biblical Israel at roughly the same time, the relatively small and powerless Christian movement struggled to differentiate itself from its larger and well-respected sibling. We see this differentiation process at work in controversies over food practices.

Unlike Judaism and Islam, most contemporary Christian traditions do not proscribe certain foods, although there are exceptions. Seventh Day Adventists, for example, prohibit foods the Bible has deemed “unclean,” as well as alcohol and tobacco. Yet we know from the New Testament that practices around food provoked controversies. The most important of these was the argument about whether those who became members of the Christian movement were obliged to follow Jewish dietary laws, as had the initial disciples, all of whom were Jewish. Here, food issues raise fundamental questions of identity: To what extent was Christian identity linked with Jewish practice? Should Jewish food practices such as keeping kosher and not eating with Gentiles prevail among the next generations of followers of Jesus—or should his followers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, eat together without regard for the dietary laws? On this matter, Peter and Paul took opposing positions, with Paul’s view ultimately prevailing: Christians of all backgrounds could eat together without regard for dietary laws.

In the matter of fasting, we see a process of both differentiation and denigration. Fasting was an important Jewish practice that became significant in Christianity as well. Yet we know that at least for some in the early church, continuing a Jewish practice raised identity issues and involved polemics. Thus, we find in the Didache, chapter 8, (“The Teaching,” a text originating in late first or early second century): “Let not your fasts be with the hypocrites [i.e., Jews] for they fast on Mondays and Thursdays, but do you fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.”*

Dependence and distinctiveness likewise characterize the practice of table blessings. For example, the Didache, chapter 10, contains a prayer that echoes the Birkat ha-Mazon (Jewish grace after a meal), albeit with some alterations in wording and order. Again and again in the first several centuries we see this combination of “proximity to, and antagonism toward, Judaism.”* Fortunately, in our time proximity to Judaism and, increasingly, to Islam and other religious traditions need no longer be a threat to Christian identity, but rather a source of enrichment.

Just as the Passover Seder developed out of the Greek symposium, so also did the Hellenistic world shape how Christians gathered for festive meals. Meals were a central way that early Christians spent time together: making decisions about their communal life and relations with the broader world; teaching and learning from each other; singing, praying and worshipping. The meal was “a central community event.”*

A central meal developed: the “Eucharist” (from the Greek, “Thanksgiving”), or as it is called in some Christian churches, “The Lord’s Supper.” It is an “act of remembering before God the self-sacrifice of Jesus, who, in submission to his Father and for love of us all, did not try to evade death, but let himself be crucified and killed rather than be unfaithful.”* Unlike the Seder, however, the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper is celebrated frequently, in some traditions daily and in others weekly or monthly.*

Over the centuries this central ritual has developed in varied ways, elaborately choreographed in some traditions, and enacted more informally in others. However it is enacted, one essential element must never be lost: the Eucharist is directed to fulfilling human hunger. We think of Eucharist as providing spiritual nourishment, which it certainly does, but it also calls us to assuage other hungers in our world. Christians, it might be said, have a “mission” to the hungry, “to enter into their need and find ways to satisfy their hunger, to challenge the structures of the world that keep some peoples … hungry, to question the sick and inordinate desires that maintain those structures.”* As the American writer Flannery O’Connor wrote, “You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.”*

Bread is vital to Christians. It symbolizes the living presence of Jesus, reminds us of our need for divine and human nourishment, and reminds us of our obligation to alleviate the world’s hungers.

All four gospels contain accounts in which Jesus feeds multitudes with a few loaves of bread and fish. In the Gospel of John, however, the feeding of the crowds serves as a prelude for a more extended reflection by Jesus just as the time for Passover draws near; the discourse and use of Jewish festivals are a typical literary convention John employs throughout his gospel. After feeding them, Jesus instructs the crowd to work not for the “food that perishes,” but rather for the “food that endures for eternal life.” The crowd remembers that God had fed their ancestors in the desert with manna. Jesus reminds them that it was God, not Moses, from whom the manna came. Then he tells them: ”I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” (John 6:35)

We see at least four dimensions of John’s theology in this intricately layered account: 1) the connection of manna, the unleavened bread of Passover and the “bread of life”; 2) the responsiveness of Jesus to physical hunger; 3) his admonition that while people need to eat, they should seek to fulfill other hungers, symbolized by the complex term “eternal life”; and 4) the identification with Jesus, the bread of life, with God, the giver of manna.

Christians down the ages have remembered Jesus not only as their bread of life, but also as a teacher of prayer, most notably, “Give us this day our daily bread.” This petition appears in the so-called “Lord’s Prayer” or “Our Father,” found in slightly variant versions in Matthew (6:9-13) and Luke (11:2-4). Perhaps the “daily” alludes to the manna, which God provided on that basis—it could not be hoarded. So in asking God for daily bread, we who are well fed pray that we do not pile up possessions even as we remember the needs of those who lack sufficient bread.

“In the Mass,” Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “we have Jesus in the appearance of bread, while in the slums we see Christ and touch him in the broken bodies and in the abandoned children.*

Just as Jewish reflections on wine consider the importance of the four cups drunk at the Seder, Christian reflections center on Jesus taking the cup of wine at the Last Supper and saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” Here the wine symbolizes his blood poured out in death, a death his early followers interpreted as “for our sins” (see Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 15:3).

Even before Christianity became separated from Judaism—a lengthy process over several centuries—followers of Jesus gathered to eat a ritual meal in which they blessed and broke bread and shared the common cup. As the excerpt from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth shows, some abused this ritual, either by ignoring the needs of the hungry or by excessive drinking:

For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you! For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:21-26).

Over the centuries, Christians have differed with one another over precisely how to celebrate and understand this ritual—but at its core is the memory of Jesus’ self-giving, of the continued presence of Jesus, and of the call, in the words of Saint Augustine, “to be what you receive.”*

Just as we Christians have often failed to be the presence of Christ in the world, we tend to lose sight of one meaning of communion as a meal shared with others: “Thus, at the Eucharist we come together in communion, sharing the Bread that is the body of Christ and the cup of wine that is the blood of Christ. It is a shared meal—“an antidote to the selfishness and violence that could be signified by eating only for oneself.”*

A note on wine in the Eucharist: Since the 19^th century and the rise of various temperance movements, some Christians use only grape juice in their celebration of the Last Supper. And some churches (e.g., the Southern Baptists) do not allow their members to drink any alcohol. This, however, is not the case in Catholicism, as well as in a number of other Christian churches. Hilaire Belloc wrote a piece of doggerel that expresses a popular Catholic notion of wine:

Wherever a Catholic sun doth shine
There’s always laughter and good red wine
At least, I’ve always heard it’s so
Benedicamus Domino . (“Let us bless the Lord”)

Other sayings from the Christian tradition involve the relationship of the grapevine to its fruit. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” One of the desert fathers, Abba Ephrem, had a dream and a vision that plays on that imagery: “A branch of vine came out of his tongue, grew bigger and filled everything under heaven. It was laden with beautiful fruit. All the birds of heaven came to eat of the fruit of the vine, and the more they ate, the more the fruit increased.*