Food and Toil

First off, the poetry of "and the evening and the morning were the x day" is just incredible.

But to food and toil.  So, We Fall.  And we remember what our Lord says after this:

17.  And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

18.  Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

19. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken:  for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

23.  Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

Okay.  Wendell Berry and others like him have, for years now, decried a food production system that removes us from how that which we eat is created, nurtured, grown.  Disconnecting people from what they eat leads, these folks contend, away from and understanding of the processes of life, death, pain, etc., those things that underpin existence.  I'm not trying to advocate their view here (though I am, to be honest, sympathetic to it).  Rather, I'm struck by what the Scriptures say about eating, and this most basic of practices having some significant metaphysical and existential implications.

In 3:19, God makes clear here that we will die, and when we die, we will return to the dust of which we were made.   Four verses later, in 3:23, we are told that Adam then must till the ground--that very thing to which he shall return--to eat.  Scripturally, eating is a memento mori.

Of course, this prefigures communion; we eat of Christ's body and blood to remember his sacrifice ("Do this in remembrance of me" was carved in large letters on the altar in my church as a boy).  Yet, as Christians, I think we've compartmentalized this; we see the taking of the host and wine as some sort of isolated thing.  But in the beginning--literally immediately afterwards--eating was death.  Eating brought about death (2:17, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die), and very process of creating food is a perpetual reminder of our Fall.    To eat is to live, but also to be reminded of death; not just Christ's sacrificial death when we eat the communion wafer, but of our death, our depravity, our limitation and Fallen state as humans each time we put food to our lips.

As we live in a world where most of us are not involved in the toil to which Adam was cursed, we are able to ignore the death associated with food.  Our death, our damnation.  But reading the opening passages of Genesis, I'm forced back into consideration of this.

I'm about to go and get lunch.  When I was a child, the blessing my family said over every meal was simple--"Thank you Father for this food.  Bless it and bless us, in Jesus' name we pray and for His sake, amen."  Simple, appropriate thankfulness.  There's a humility in thankfulness.  But today, I go to eat with a different sort of humility, a humility knowing that every bite I take connects me back to the beginning, to my Fall, to my sin, to my death, and a humility that recognizes that this is corrected, put right, only by Christ's body and blood, a meal I take at a different table.

Postscript--There's a lot more of this in Chapters 4 and 5.  Cain and Abel.  Blood spilled over, what else, food.  Lamech, Noah's father--"5:29.  And he called his name Noah, saying, this same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed."  Toil, food.  Death, the cursed ground.  And Noah, literally, my references tell me, meaning rest.  The spilling of Christ's blood, the food we eat to commemorate that, the rest we are promised in that--and on and on and on.