What do you hunger for? What are you thirsty for? We all know the expression "I want it so bad I can taste it," so the question to night is what can you want so bad that you can taste it?
For some people, though probably few of us here, the answer this question is literal food and drink. For our sisters and brothers who are so impoverished that they do not have anything to eat that their bellies bloat their eyes sag, hunger and thirst for just basic foodstuffs and clean water that won't make them ill is a dominating part of their lives in a way that many of us have never known.
Now for we who have, at least temporarily, lest we idolise ourselves, mastered the soil and made of it a chemically induced year round cornucopia, we tend to make hunger and thirst abstract, though the move from physical want to spiritual and emotional want makes our hunger pangs no less painful than those who long for tangible nourishment.
We hunger for wholeness, we thirst for personal peace. We can taste having no more anxiety for love and care for. We hunger for the end to sadness and sorrow, we thirst so deeply for a release from death that we have created entire new scriptures telling us we'll never get old, just look at the magazine racks in the supermarket aisle.
We hunger for personal fulfillment, we thirst to be loved.
Now, sisters and brothers, to hunger, to thirst, is neither good nor bad. Often our deep desires are for the sake of our loved ones and neighbours, to want the best for a child, to cry when a parent has to move out of their home into assisted living, to mourn when a brother or sister can't pay their bills, these are compassionate hunger pangs.
The problem with our human hunger is that while we are good at experiencing lack, we are too often not good a satisfying our need. We run to an odd buffet when we are hungriest, whose dishes are not what they seem and whose salads have no leafy greens but only green, red and orange jello. We seek out foods that will fill us up but won't really nourish us.
It's easy to wonder as we sit here today if all the ills of our world and of our personal selves don't come from our misguided attempts to slake our thirst. War to fight off the hunger for security; misguided sexual desires to water the thirst for deep love; overspending to feed a sense of insignificance; selfishness to water our fear that there isn't enough stuff to go around.
Even king David, who could sing in psalm 42 "As a deer longs for waterbrooks so longs my soul for you, O God," had other thirsts, just ask Bathsheeba, and battle-stricken Uriah.
We do indeed come up with strange feasts, sisters and brothers, so great is the grip of our hunger and thirst.
Now, lest we get stuck in the mire of self tonight, as I suspect our Father Peter and our brother Judas did at the first great meal, we ought to turn our attention to what God hungers for.
God thirsts for much the same things we do, we are made in the divine likeness after all. Peace, mercy, compassion, love, fairness, everyone have what they need and no more.
Isaiah sings this song of God's hunger:
Let me sing for my beloved
my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watch-tower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.
The vineyard, which had been cared for and loved and blessed with the sweat of the vinedresser yielded wild grapes, unfit for eating, no good for making wine. The divine vinedresser, the prophet goes on to tell us:
expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness,
but heard a cry of anguish!
How hungry and thirst God is for our goodness. And how we have refused to offer him anything to eat or drink, sour grapes the best we can come up with.
And yet, to quench the divine thirst God has not, as we have, cast about to find substitutes for real drink, real food. No, looking upon the plight of humankind, looking upon the hunger that led us to eat of the first apple in the garden, looking upon the thirst that makes us delirious with sin, God established a new banquet. Unlike any other.
This banquet, spoken into existence by his son as a last will and testament given to the disciples and the Church, feeds us, quenches our thirst in a way unlike any other. For at this banquet we eat only food grown up from creation but rather we eat food that is the creator. When our Lord Jesus first took the loaf of bread and spoke, "this is my body," and when he took the cup of wine and said, "this is my blood, shed for you," he brought down the celestial feast and offered it to us here, to eat, to fill our gut. The true Body and Blood of Christ, in, with, and under simple bread and wine, feeds us by forgiving our sins, by cleansing us from all unrighteousness. The true Body and Blood of Christ, even in a simple setting like this, gives us a foretaste of the land without hunger, without thirst, when all the wants we have will be filled to overflowing with the presence of God in the new Jerusalem. When we will no longer have to turn to alien nourishment, but rather our stomachs will be full of good, sweet tasting food that never disappoints and our souls will be drunk with the wine of Christ's embrace.
Tonight, sisters and brothers, as we celebrate the foundation of this holy meal, let us give thanks that the host of this feast gives himself to us, God nourishing we weak humans with food that cannot fail to make us full and quench our thirst. Amen.
