We talked about food in class today . . .

and I'm not sure what my students thought of it.  We read biblical narratives of hunger and feasting (including stories of the Israelites in the wilderness, Elijah and the widow, water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, and the road to Emmaus.

But one of the things we talked about was our tendency to abstract these passages into spiritual metaphor without stopping to think about the ordinariness and reality of Actual Food.

The class meets at 12:00, and a number of my students have both 11:00 and 1:00 classes surrounding it; most days this means that as many as a third of my students go without lunch (though some of them bring food along with them--and I'm glad they do).  And I confessed that most days I eat my lunch hurriedly at my desk while I prepare for the afternoon's classes.

But when faced with the biblical stories that suggest food is, in fact, important to our lives, how do we respond?  How do these stories change our response (and responsibility) to food?  And how does food change our understanding of the story of salvation?

If you're interested, these are the passages we read.  Perhaps I'll come back to these questions again.  In the meantime, there's a potluck at church this weekend, and I'm looking forward to it.

Hunger and Feasting in the Bible

• Exodus 12-13, 16
• Numbers 11
• 1 Kings 17-18
• Matthew 14-15
• Mark 6, 8.1-21, 14.1-25
• Luke 9.7-20, 22.1-23, 24.13-49
• John 2. 1-12, 6