It is Lammas Day, the 1st of August. In the old ritual year of Britain, this represented the midpoint of the downward swing of the year from the high point of midsummer to the autumnal equinox on September 22 and Michaelmas on the 29th. This was the traditional first fruits of the harvest, also, in which the still largely agrarian society of the British Isles, as late as the early 17th century, would bring loaves to church for use in and in excess of the Mass. Hence “Lammas,” or hloaf-mass: the Mass of loaves, a late summer equivalent to St. Basil’s Day in the East, and something of an anticipation, perhaps even a vague memory, of the harvest season and its liturgics on the biblical calendar for Jews (Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot), which (with some intention on the part of the Church) engage in similar themes to those of the Christian autumn.
This is, then, yet another feast about bread. If we tire of hearing about bread in church, as I sometimes do, I wonder if we are not thinking from the cushion of privilege. In a 1931 Young India piece about his visit to Lancashire, published on October 15 (Vol. 13, No. 42), Mahatma Gandhi reportedly asked, “[H]ow am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day? To them,” he continued, “God can only appear as bread and butter.” The sentiment apparently stuck around in his regular conversation and teaching: in his 1953 memoir, My Days with Gandhi, Nirmal Kumar Bose recalls a 1946 conversation in which Gandhi said that “for those who were in need, God appeared in the form of bread and of clothes.”
The quote was subsequently truncated and misremembered in a variety of Western publications until, today, it has become a rather famous one in the Anglophone world. By it, Gandhi has joined a long history of those connecting bread to God and provision. Bread is an especially ubiquitous motif of divine provision in biblical literature. True: the aboriginal curse upon our humanity includes that we shall eat bread by toil’s sweat (Gen 3:19). But then, Melchizedek brought out “bread and wine” to Abram (Gen 14:18); later, now Abraham, the patriarch offered bread to YHWH and his angels to refresh themselves (18:5). Lot offered fresh-baked bread to the angels (19:3). Abraham offered bread to Hagar to sustain her and Ishmael in the wilderness (21:14). Esau traded his birthright to Jacob not merely for porridge, but for bread to dip in it as well (25:34); Jacob, ever the trickster, swindled Isaac for his blessing with Rebecca’s bread too (27:17). “If God will be with me,” says Jacob on the road, “and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God” (28:20-21). By bread Jacob celebrates the pax with Laban (31:54). By the providence surrounding Joseph, during seven years of famine, Egypt has bread (41:54-55; 43:25). A refusal to break bread together presages the rupture between Egypt and the Israelites (43:32); but when Joseph calls for Jacob to join him in Egypt, he sends bread along for the journey (45:23). Jethro’s hospitality to Moses, before it includes marriage to Zipporah, first consists in bread (Exod 2:20). The unleavened bread signifies, yes, the haste of the Israelite flight from Egypt at Pesach but, also, the divine provision of miraculous escape (Exod 12:8, 15, 17-18, 20; 13:3, 6-7). God rains bread in the wilderness for Israel to eat on the way to Mt. Sinai (16:1, 3-4, 8, 12, 15, 22, 29, 32). Jethro, Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel eat bread with God on the holy mountain (18:12). A feast of unleavened bread is to be observed in commemoration of the Exodus (23:15, 18). In exchange for service, God promises to bless the people’s bread and take sickness away (23:25). As though a permanent bread-breaking between God and the people, the Tabernacle will include a table of the lechem hapanim, the “bread of the face” or “bread of the presence” of God in their midst, and bread is used in a multitude of consecrations and sacrifices (25:30; 39:36; 40:23; Lev 7:13 et passim; Num 4:7 et passim); it is arguably God’s favorite food. Man does not live by bread alone, but by God’s word, Moses reminds in Deuteronomy (Deut 8:3); knowing so and acting like it, though, will offer up the promised land where bread without scarcity may be enjoyed (8:9).
That’s just the Torah; we’ve not enough time to break bread with the Prophets and the Scribes beyond the familiar stories, like David eating the bread of God (1 Sam 21) and feeding the crowds with sacrificial cakes (2 Sam 6) or Elijah’s blessing on the widow of Zarephath for her morsel (1 Kgs 17) or Elisha miraculously feeding a hundred men with bread (2 Kgs 4:42-44), or the Psalmist’s famous declaration that bread strengthens a person’s heart (Ps 104:15). But we may take time to observe also that the significance of bread to Jesus was animated by Scripture’s imaginal bakery. As God’s Son Jesus enjoys the power to turn stones to loaves of bread should he desire, but Jesus recalls and obeys Moses’ command, good Jew that he is (Matt 4:3-4; Lk 4:3-4). “Give us this day our daily bread,” he instructs the disciples to ask of God at prayer (Matt 6:11; Lk 11:3). What good father, after all, gives a stone instead of begged bread (7:9)? David ate the bread of the Presence, so Jesus, the Son of Man, is free to pick corn on the Sabbath as its true Lord (12:4; Mk 2:26; Lk 6:4). His healing power is like bread meant for the children of Israel; but as the Syrophoenician woman retorts, even dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall beneath table, changing Jesus’ mind (15:25-27; Mk 7:24-30). Jesus repeats Elisha’s miracle of the divine provision of bread—fifty times over (Matt 15:32-39; Mk 6:30-44; Jn 6:1-15). The teaching of the Pharisees, says the Matthean and Markan Jesus, is like leaven, implying that his own is like the unleavened bread of the Passover (Matt 16:5-12; Mk 8:14-17). “Blessed are those who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!” exclaims someone dining with and listening to his teaching (Lk 14:15). The Johannine Jesus is all the more explicit: “I am the bread of life,” he says, claiming to be the superior reality of which the wilderness manna was merely a type (Jn 6:22-59). And all this before ever we make it to the Last Supper, though the Johannine discourse in Capernaum takes up some rather eucharistic themes with its talk of eating the flesh of the Son of Man, the bread from heaven (Jn 6:52-59).
Yet I want to stop short for a moment of the institution of the Eucharist, because the temptation to make any and every sermon on something to do with bread eucharistic, while it perhaps makes a good deal of liturgical sense, can blind us to the deeper themes of the texts surveyed here: bread’s communication of divine blessing, hospitality, peace, and plenty. For most of antiquity, bread was the ordinary food of the poor, hearty, substantial stuff to help one make it through the day and to restore one’s spirit at the conclusion of another round of brutal labor; together with wine, it was that to which everyone attributed their most basic health and well-being, their viability and livelihood. Juvenal’s famous critique of the two anxieties of the mob as panem et circenses, “bread and circuses,” witnesses this precisely (Satura X.81). As early as the Epic of Gilgamesh, eating bread is the most basically, paradigmatically human thing: the gods don’t do it, and neither does Enkidu, at least until his rendezvous with the prostitute. So to pray for our daily bread, and to be a people that breaks bread together, is not quite to feast sumptuously in the Kingdom just yet; but it is to order our common life around the provision of the most basic necessity of food for all—bread for the poor—as the distinguishing mark of our discipleship to Jesus. After all, the early eucharistic banquets were exactly these sorts of meals: whatever else they included, their most basic provision was bread, and the good order of the assembly demanded that patience was shown for the poor to gather and get their share, not seated to suit their worldly station, but together with the rich, in view of the day when those claiming the best seats at the table may well find themselves asked to get up and move (Lk 14:8). Without this visceral understanding of bread, as the food of poverty and labor, the miracle that God in Christ becomes bread in the liturgy, such that he may also become “Christ in us, the hope of glory” by our partaking of it (1 Cor 10; Col 1:27), will be lost on us. But moreover, we cannot meaningfully share God with anyone to whom we will not also give bread.
A final, concluding observation: that there be bread enough and God for all requires also, logically, that the toilsome labor of growing grains and transforming them by our own efforts into bread remain possible. The natural, agricultural rhythms that stand behind Lammastide, at the meridian of Midsummer and the autumnal equinox, intersect with the human and the divine here: it is the poor who suffer most when the earth is infertile. Our hospitality for God, for one another, for the earth, and the earth’s for us are all one receptivity, and bread provides its common symbol. To share in God, and to share God, we require to be able to give bread to the poor; to give bread to the poor, there must be bread.
Happy Lammas.
There Must Be Bread
Yay for Lancashire. As a boy in my Northern England hyper-Calvinist denomination we would have harvest festival. That, at least, was a good thing from those days.
You find it even in It's a Wonderful Life when Donna Reid hands to the new couple a loaf of bread, and some wine too, before entering their new house ....thanks for this really good piece.