Food holds memory. We know this and need only think of the times when we are ill and know we would be healed if only we could have a taste of our mother’s signature cinnamon toast or chicken noodle soup. We know this because we realize how important it is to have certain foods for certain holidays and if we don’t have them, if someone forgets or has the audacity to try something ‘new’, it will be impossible to have the celebration in its fullness. We know this because there are cravings deep within us that rise up at what seems like the oddest time and then we think of an aunt long dead or a meal that seemed perfection in some strange little restaurant we frequented as children or with our first college sweetheart.

It is amazing to me how many times at memorial and funeral services the person whose life we are celebrating is remembered through food. The food they made. Those they loved. The ones they scorned. The ones they tried desperately to make and never succeeded. These stories of cookies and birthday cakes, of hot dishes and campfire meals, never fail to bring smiles, laughter, and eventually tears. Food holds memory.

In the Christian household, today is Maundy Thursday. Maundy, one of those ‘churchy’ words that can create insiders and outsiders pretty quickly. The Latin ‘mandatum’ which means commandment. Today we read the scripture that is a big, over your head reminder that food holds memory.

Jesus had come into Jerusalem with confidence and courage. He stood fully in his understanding of who he was as God’s child. He continued to preach and teach radical love, acceptance, and welcomed all those on the margins. He spoke against the political power of the time. And he had run out of time.

So what did he do? He called his friends together for a meal. He took ordinary, yet extraordinary, gifts of Earth….bread and wine and shared them with those who had walked with him, prayed and laughed with him, fished with him and created healing community with him. Simple foods, yet when shared with friends around a table, infused with love and fear and hope, became miraculous memory. I love that this is what he did, that this is how the story goes. I love it because I understand it, have lived it. Haven’t you? And that the memory that that food holds has been handed down, over and over, to us.

Food holds memory. Artist and poet Jan L. Richardson has a poem that begins:

And the table will be wide.
And the welcome will be wide.
And the arms will open wide to gather us in.
And our hearts will open wide to receive………..

And ends:
……..And we will become bread for a hungering world.
And we will become drink
for those who thirst.
And the blessed
will become the blessing. And everywhere
will be the feast.

On this day, we might say that to gather round the table with friends is ‘mandatum’, a commandment. May it be so. Food holds memory.