This is the bread of life – part 2

Middle Eastern flat breads

This routine was so familiar to me that I had ceased to think about what I was doing and why, but then there was the winter evening when Joseph, Mary, Jesus, Nathan, Jonathan, Hannah and I were sitting cross legged in our house with bowls of food set before us ready to be eaten. There were bowls of fruit and olives and olive oil and sesame oil to dip bread in. We had boiled onions saved from our harvest and a porridge of peas. Mary had brought some milk from her goat and some cheese. Jesus had picked up the large loaf of bread that I had made that morning, and was turning it over in his hands looking at it carefully. Then he said, almost to himself, ‘I wonder why we call this ‘The bread of life’ when there is so much other food set before us each evening?” I looked at Mary and she turned to Jesus “Look at the food that is set before us. There is fruit, and cheese and olives. We have milk and wine to drink, and olive oil to dip our bread in, but see, there is flat barley bread, and there is bread with herbs, and in your hand is a large wheat loaf. Tomorrow you will break your fast with bread left over from this meal, you will take from your pocket a piece of cheese wrapped around with bread, and you will eat it as you walk with your father to deliver the plough that he and Simeon have just finished. Tomorrow morning I will begin again grinding flour and baking bread as I do every day to feed you and Joseph.”

She continued “You have helped your father in the fields picking up the stones in front of the plough as Joseph steers the animals up and down the fields turning over the soil ready to sow the seeds. I have watched you scatter the seed, marching up and down the furrows throwing right and left to scatter the good seed on the ground. With other children from the village you have pulled branches from trees over the ridges, pulling the soil over the seeds in the furrows, and in our prayers at home and in the synagogue you have prayed with us for a good harvest, so that we will be able to make and eat our daily bread. When the wheat and the barley is ripe in the fields everyone in the village goes out into the fields to help bring in the harvest. The men will cut the wheat and barley with their sickles and the women and children gather the stalks into bundles and stack them into stooks.

When everything is completely dry you have helped us to pile the bundles onto our donkey and carry them to the threshing floor. You know that it takes hours of work to beat the grains of wheat and barley from the stalks You have stood there and watched is being done. And you have watched as the grains are thrown in the air, and the chaff removed by the wind, as the grains are winnowed. When all that is done you have sealed the grain in our stone lined storage area in the ground until it is needed to be ground into flour, baked and eaten. Getting the bread on our table takes an enormous amount of effort by everyone in the village, young and old, and we do it because it is the best and most plentiful thing God has given us to eat. Without bread we are nothing, if the grain runs out, we will starve to death. It is what keeps us alive.”

Jesus held up the bread again. As he did so, the rush light in front of him seemed to glow stronger than it had before, and reflected on the wall behind, I saw the shadow of him, as large as if he were already a man. Each of us there were reflected on the wall sitting beside him. He took the bread and performed the ritual blessing then he broke it. He got up and walked around to each person present and broke off a hunk for them saying ‘This is the bread of life, whoever eats this will never be hungry’. Half way round he stopped and asked another question. ‘Why do we never cut the bread with a knife?’ I answered this time. Bread is so important that we feel that it would be disrespectful to cut it with a knife, so we always break it not cut it. When I had said the blessing over the cup of wine, Jesus, already on his feet beside me, took the wine and poured some into each persons beaker to drink. “This is the drink of life, whoever drinks this will never be thirsty.” It was an odd thing, and a rather perceptive thing that he said to us that night, and I looked at him and wondered.

After his death, many stories circulated about Jesus and his life. Many of them were about Jesus and eating. He was accused by the Pharisees of liking his food and drink too much, and partying with tax collectors and sinners. I was in Jerusalem just after his resurrection when the two disciples who had been travelling back to their homes in the village of Emmaus almost broke down the door in their hurry to get in and tell us about their encounter with the risen Jesus, how he had walked and talked with them; how he had accepted their invitation to eat with them, and in the way that he broken the bread and blessed the wine they had recognised him.

I did not quite understand the significance of this statement, so I turned to one of Jesus closest friends and asked him what those disciples had meant. He then told me about the precious last meal that Jesus had shared with his closest friends. When the meal was nearly over Jesus had taken a loaf of bread, blessed it and broken it. He had given a piece to each of the people there saying ‘ This is my body broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ Then he had taken the cup of wine and blessed it and gave it to each one of them saying ‘This is my blood of the new covenant. Do this in remembrance of me. Each time you break bread and eat it together you will remember me, and when the cup of wine is blessed, and you share it with each other you will remember me.

And I remembered a meal long, long ago where Jesus, still a small boy then had asked the questions, broken the bread and shared it. Then he had taken the blessed wine and shared it among us all. With clarity, then, I understood that the shadows I had remembered seeing on the wall behind us all on that day, when Jesus in shadow looked like the man he would become, was the beginning of a story. It is a story about the simple things of life, the necessary things of life, of bread and wine, of God and his son, of giving and taking, of breaking and sharing so that everyone might live, now and in eternity, and everyone might have plenty from the bounty of God.

This is the bread of life – part 1

Middle Eastern flat breads

There are some things in life that you do every day that you never really think about, until something happens to jolt you out of your rut. Every morning of my life, for as long as I can remember, my main task has been to make the bread which we will eat during the day. I remember as a child sitting at my mother’s knee watching the miracle of changing grains of wheat or barley into bread. In her turn my daughter has sat at my knee, and I have passed my skills on to her. And every morning Nathan gets up at first light, has a quick drink of milk or water, kisses me on the top of my head and jokes that when I am ready for real work, he will be waiting for me in out basket weaving workshop. When we were newly married I would flare up and tell him that my work was more important than his, and if he didn’t think so, he aught to ask his stomach the question. Nowadays I would be disappointed if he didn’t make his usual comment. I would think he didn’t love me any more.

So the first task of the day is to collect some grain to mill. I keep a jar full in the house, but our main store is in an underground pit lined with stone, where I can go to to collect more when I need to. I have to remember to seal the top properly with some mud when I leave, otherwise the air gets in and the seeds start to sprout, then they are no good to us at all. After all these years I can judge pretty well how much grain I will need for the people I will be feeding. Then comes the hard work. I have a small quern stone which Nathan bought for me when we married. It has two stones, one is flat and one has grooves in it. There is a hole in the top one, and a small wooden handle. I drop seeds down the hole, and start turning. Eventually flour comes out from between the two stones and falls onto the linen cloth they are standing on. It will take me about three hours to make enough flour for the family for the day. All women have strong arms from the daily grind.

When I have enough flour, I put it in a bowl, add water then work it into a dough. Then I have to make a decision about what I am going to do next. If I am in a hurry, I will take small amounts of the dough and flatten them out into little flat breads. I will have already put some wood into my small portable oven, and set it alight. My little oven is a large clay jar with thick sides, so that it heats up fast with the fire in it. I throw the flat-breads onto the outside of the jar, and it is best to have it lying safely on its side for this. When they are done on one side I turn them over and cook the other side. If I am feeling adventurous I might add a few herbs such as fennel or cumin to the dough for a change. If I am feeling really adventurous I might make the bread with fruit juice not water, and add a bit of date syrup to make it sweet.

If I am not in a hurry I will take some of the seor, a bit of the previous day’s dough which I keep in a bowl in a warm corner of the house, and add it to my dough mixture. I then have to leave it to rise in a small wooden trough, before I shape it into several round loaves, leave it to rise again, then mark it with my own mark and take it to the communal oven to bake, which is in the communal courtyard behind our house. There is not much about Roman life that I like, but the communal furn ovens mean that several families can cook using just one lot of wood, and we don’t have much spare wood around Nazareth. It also means that because the oven is bigger, it gets hotter, so we can make bigger loaves. The other women and I living around the courtyard take it in turns to make the fire on the large flat stones at the bottom of the oven. When the stones are hot enough, the ashes are raked out from under the clay dome, and all of our breads are placed on the stones. A door is fashioned from wood and sealed with clay and the bread is sealed in to cook. When it is ready the clay seal is broken and the breads are taken out. There is enough heat left in the oven to cook pastries or meat, if someone is cooking for a special occasion.

Marco the Merchant goes to Jerusalem – part 2

Road from Jerusalem to Jericho

Marco of course had heard the story many times in his life. He was the living embodiment of the fulfilment of a vow. Many young men might have found it a burden. To Marco it was an inspiration. Ephraim died while on a trip to Rome trying to sell Galilean linen to members of the senate – he always did aim high. Marco was left with the house and business to run. At the time of his fathers death, his wife was expecting their first child, so Marco wasn’t travelling far from home. He decided to make a trip to Jerusalem going via the Jordan valley to Jericho to pick up some fruit for the markets in Jerusalem.

When he came back he was very quiet. I knew that his wife was well, so it must have been something on the journey which bothered him. One evening he was sat on the roof of Joseph’s house, with Mary, Jesus, Nathan, Jonathan and I, eating and drinking and telling stories. He became quiet for a few minutes, then he began to tell us about his last trip to Jerusalem. He had left Nazareth with his pack animals panniers full of items which had been made in the villages around Nazareth. He regularly went from here to Jerusalem via Jericho as many of the Temple priests, members of the Sanhedrin and other officials had summer houses there, where they could relax in their shady groves of trees listening to the water of the streams flowing down into the Jordan valley. They were the men with money, and it was always profitable to make a trip there with the latest ‘must have’ items. Beyond Jericho the road down to Jerusalem becomes more rocky and difficult, so the going is a lot slower.

The journey down to Jerusalem was uneventful, and so after selling his wares to shopkeepers in the city, he loaded up with items from the city shopkeepers to bring back to sell around Nazareth. He sent his servant to the ports on the coast to see what the boats had been bringing in for sale, so he was travelling the road from Jerusalem to Jericho on his own. As he was travelling, he noticed birds of prey circling overhead in the distance. He thought that perhaps an exhausted animal had been left by the roadside to die. A Priest and a rabbi on their way to Jerusalem, presumably to perform their duties in the Temple had passed him by, and had not made a comment about what was ahead. When he got to the spot where the birds were circling, he idly looked around, as his donkey carried him onwards. What he saw caused him to haul on his poor animal’s reins, so that it nearly sat down on its haunches. There just off the road, rolled down the hillside was the naked, bloody, fly covered body of a man.

Marco told his donkey to stay, and scrambled his way down to the man. He had to shoo off a rather brave vulture, hopping over to the body in hope. When he turned the man over and saw the bruised and bloody face, and that the man was still alive, just, he was filled with such anger that it gave him the strength to lift the man up and carry him back up the slope. He pulled a water flask off the donkey and dropped some water through the swollen and cracked lips. He then took some of the wine he had bought to sell, and used it to clean the wounds. He used some oil to soak the strips of material torn from his own clothes and bound the wounds up. Then he wrapped him in his own cloak and put him on his own donkey and walked beside him, holding him on, until he reached the next village Inn. He spent the night sponging the man’s forehead and keeping him cool, as the fever raged over him. By the morning the fever had left him, and he was in a deep healing sleep, so he left him in the charge of the Innkeeper. He put down a deposit on the rest of his stay, and promised when he came again he would settle the rest of the bill.

When Marco had finished his tale we were all silent. Of course we all knew Ephraim’s story, so this had many parallels, but there was a particular poignancy in this happening so close to the death of Ephraim himself, so far from home, so far from his family. We all hoped that Ephraim had received the same care that Marco had given the stranger. When Marco spoke again, it was with a note of wonder in his voice,
“What I can’t quite get my head around is that the Priest and the Levite must have seen the man, they cannot have missed the circling birds, so why did they ignore him? Did they think he was already dead, and so an honourable burial didn’t matter? Were they so taken up with having to be ritually clean for their work in the Temple that they wouldn’t touch him? What I really can’t get over is the idea that they were so lacking in compassion that they couldn’t even be bothered to find out whether the man was dead or not. It didn’t take much to pick him up and carry him to the nearest Inn. They had more than enough money to pay for his care if it was too much for them, but it makes me almost sick to think of that man lying there another while waiting an hoping that someone would rescue him before he died. There are times I am glad to be a Samaritan. I hope my rabbi’s and teachers are more compassionate than yours.” And we had no answer for him.