Food in the form of bread, wine and water, everyday things, lies at the heart of our sacramental practice. As St. Theresa of Avila told her sisters: “God is found among the pots and pans.†If you visit her convent in Avila today, among other pious memorabilia in the little repository shop, you can buy aprons with her words embroidered on them. They are designed to remind us that it is so often among the ordinary things of the kitchen and the diner table – the bread and wine, the water and the oil – that we encounter God.
It is delight of Jewish scholars, even today, to involve themselves in the cut and thrust of arguments about the meaning of particular texts of the Bible. Sometimes to an outsider the style of argument seems quite strange, as there is fascination with the play on the meaning of words as well as an amazing knowledge of what earlier rabbis might have said on the issues. When His listeners try to involve Jesus is such wordplay, He tends to outfox them by introducing an angle of thought that has not occurred to them. When questioned about the greatest commandment; He does not go into the evidence base for each commandment, He merely states the call to love God with all our being. To that He then adds the call to love our neighbor as ourselves. His answer is utterly comprehensive, as any other commandment anyone might put forward can be subsumed into these two great ones.
Our practice of the two great commandments begins among “the pots and pans†of our lives. St. Theresa of Avila was a great mysterial writer and lived a good deal of her in what her confessor and friend, St. John of the Cross, would call the “dark night of the soulâ€. Yet when she speaks of God’s presence among us, she directs us to the ordinary concerns of our daily lives. We need to eat to live, and those who provide us with food are offering the most essential service. Special meals, feasts, parties, evenings out perhaps still take us back to a deeper understanding of what we are doing when we eat, for our ordinary meals have been made forever extraordinary by the last meal Jesus shared with His disciples. We can see God in those who work to provide us with food, in those who cook it for us, in those who share it together, and in the food itself, which reminds us how God feeds and sustains us. How we eat becomes a vivid example of how we fulfill these two great commandments.