“Hungry Jesus”
Easter 3B
19 April 2015; 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Choral Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
Today’s Gospel
reading is one of the many luminous Gospel stories about Jesus being seen alive
and well, more than he had ever been before, by his friends, after his death on
the cross. This one takes place Easter
evening, just after two of the disciples had dinner with a stranger on the road
to Emmaus, a stranger who opened the scriptures to them, explained what had
happened in the last few days, and whom they suddenly had recognized as Jesus
“in the breaking of the bread.” The two
return to Jerusalem, tell the other disciples, and as they are talking, Jesus
again appears. And again, he asks for a
meal: “Do you have anything here to
eat?”
Hungry Jesus! One would think that with a perfected
resurrection body, you would be the source of your own energy, with no need for
food. But here you are, asking for meal
after meal, like a growing adolescent with a serious case of the munchies. First bread and wine with scriptural
discussion. Now, broiled fish and more
scriptures. Incarnation has God being made fully
human. Resurrection has a fully human
person being made God, but one who remains in real ways fully human. Resurrected Jesus is hungry, yearns, and
still has scars on his body.
Perhaps this is
Luke’s way of telling us that this apparition is no ghost. Jesus is fully alive, with the vim and vigor
of the young man they had known before his death, with his appetites, hungers,
and yearning, intact.
I suspect, though,
that something deeper is at work here than just trying to underscore the
corporeal nature of Christ’s resurrection.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus recognize him by how he breaks the
bread—a clear reference to the Eucharist.
Later in the evening, in today’s story, Jesus appears and the disciples
and their companions are terrified.
Jesus reassures them that he is not a ghost, that it is truly him. Then, as a way of consoling them and
reassuring them, he expresses his hunger.
He eats fish, the very food item he had used with bread at the feeding
of the 5000, an item he had used as an image for his desire, his hunger, for
his disciples to go out and catch people, just like fish!
Hungry Jesus! In your glorified state, you are not
self-sufficient. You need sustenance,
yearn for it, and the companionship that goes with it. You want companions, people you can share
bread with—cum panem. Remember that the group here is the disciples
and their companions.
There is an important
doctrine being taught here.
Sometimes people
suggest that the resurrection “undoes” the passion and crucifixion, and somehow
undoes the scandal of Jesus’ mortality. But
here Jesus shows them the wounds still in his body as a sign that it is truly
him—the resurrection has not erased the harm, the suffering. And Jesus shows them his hunger: he is not a
polar opposite of what he had been: once dead now alive, once mortal now God, once
earthly now heavenly. No. He is in a real sense a continuation of the
Jesus they had always known: Jesus the
party animal, who turned water into wine, dined with whores and crooks, and
welcomed all with a smile and open arms.
Hunger is part of being human. It has a way of making us feel more alive, by
sharpening our sense of need. In
China, I heard the story of how hunger changes our perception. During the 1900 Boxer Uprising and the
subsequent 8 nations’ occupation of Beijing, the Imperial Court fled to Xian. While en route, there was little food for the
normally pampered royal family. The
Empress Dowager, Cixi, was given the only food that could be scavenged: peasant
food from local famers too poor to buy wheat buns or rice, the rough corn cakes
called nest heads, or wotou because they
were cone shaped by being cooked while stuck on sticks, rough fare indeed. She was so ravenous, she loved them. Once safely ensconced back in the Forbidden
City in Beijing, she asked for them again because she had such fond memories of
their luscious flavor. The cook was
terrified—he knew that if he gave rough peasant food to the Empress now sated again
on a daily diet of delicacies, she would find them tasteless and horrid, and
order his head chopped off for poor work performance! So he came up with a small dainty pastry made
of sugar, ground almonds, butter and hazelnuts, shaped to look like a little wotou.
Xiao wowotous are served to
this day in restaurants specializing in Imperial cuisine. Cicero made the same point in his quip,
“Hunger is the best spice.” Things taste
better when you’re hungry.
Hungry Jesus! You’re fully alive, and really enjoying that
bread and wine, that bit of roast fish, after three days without meals in the
tomb!
And it’s not just about physical
hunger. Hunger is a symbol for all our
desire, all our yearning. We are hungry
creatures. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, writes of a need in the
heart of every human being. Addressing
God in prayer, he says, “For you created us for yourself, and our hearts are
restless until we find our rest in you.”
In this view, all our hungers are rooted in a single hunger of the
creature for creator, a hunger only the creator can satisfy. There is a hole in the middle of each human
heart, and that hole has the shape of God.
This most basic and important need
in traditional Christian teaching can be satisfied only by the enjoyment of the
presence of God made known to us, whether in the end time, or in glimpses
through God’s indwelling spirit here and now. In sacramental theology, it is re-presented
by bread and wine.
This beatific vision is the Christian doctrine analogous to Buddhist
enlightenment and nirvana. It is the
Christian doctrine closest to the idea of gratifying desire in secular
hedonism. But in Buddhism, enlightenment
comes through abandonment of all attachments and eradication the feeling of any
need, through the negation of what it means to be human. And in hedonism, the sating of desire means
its end, at least for the moment. But in
Christianity the conscious enjoyment of God’s beauty satisfies all want, fills
every need, even while it stimulates ever-intensifying desire. The presence of God both satisfies our
hunger while it stimulates our appetite.
The idea is expressed
well in a line in one of my favorite hymns, one I hope is sung at my funeral, one in the 1948 hymnal but not the
1982 one:
Joy and triumph everlasting
Hath the heav’nly Church on high;
For that pure immortal gladness
All our feast days mourn and sigh.
Hath the heav’nly Church on high;
For that pure immortal gladness
All our feast days mourn and sigh.
... There the body hath no torment,
There the mind is free from care,
There is every voice rejoicing,
Every heart is loving there.
Angels in that city dwell;
Them their King delighteth well:
Still they joy and weary never,
More and more desiring ever.
There the mind is free from care,
There is every voice rejoicing,
Every heart is loving there.
Angels in that city dwell;
Them their King delighteth well:
Still they joy and weary never,
More and more desiring ever.
“Do you have anything to eat?”
Hungry Jesus asks for food, invites companions.
Jesus is hungry for us to share with him. God yearns for us. Creator seeks creature just as we creatures
have a yearning for God. The great neo-Platonist theologian known to
tradition as Dionysius the Areopagite, the proto-mystic of the church who
inspired the desert fathers and mothers and the Benedictines later on, in his
writing On the Names of God, at one
point gives God the name, “Yearning.”
The idea is expressed in hymn 516,
by Italian mystic Bianco da Siena:
Come down, O love
divine, seek Thou this soul of mine,
And visit it with Thine own ardor glowing.
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
And kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.
And visit it with Thine own ardor glowing.
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
And kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn, ‘til
earthly passions turn
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let Thy glorious light shine ever on my sight,
And clothe me round, the while my path illuming. …
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let Thy glorious light shine ever on my sight,
And clothe me round, the while my path illuming. …
And so the yearning strong, with which the soul
will long,
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace, till he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace, till he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.
Hungry Jesus tells us
it’s OK to be hungry, to yearn. Hungry
Jesus bids us offer him food, and offers to share food with us. Hungry Jesus appears to us in the faces of
all who hunger, whom we must feed. As
St. John Chrysostom taught, “If you are not able to find Christ in the beggar
at the Church door, you will not find him in the chalice.”
Yearning. Satisfaction. Companionship. Ever-growing
yearning. Hunger. Eat
this bread, drink this wine.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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