Essay
Creed
Eating
7 min read

The meaning of meals

Food is the nexus of relationships. Matthew Croasmun notes that food, and all created things, are most themselves when they are more than merely themselves.

Matthew is the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (with Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz). He is an Associate Research Scholar and the Director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.

Around a table, against a backdrop of fret-cut wood, three people talk and listen to each other with great interest.
Inside Lina Ghotmeh's À table pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery.
Serpentine Gallery.

This summer’s Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, À table, designed by Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, invites us “to the table.” The extraordinary, long tables ringing the pavilion invite us to a meal and to conversation. To connect with one another and with the Earth that sustains our lives.  

Ghotmeh’s invitation is an important one, if we have ears to hear. Through seeing what meals are, what they ought to be, and what they invite us to imagine, we discover what we are and what we ought to hope for.  

Meals help us understand what we are. We can sometimes rush past questions about our materiality. Attending to meals won’t allow us to do that. Food, after all, is fundamental to life. We are what we eat and drink.  

Early in the biblical stories of the life of Jesus, Jesus is confronted with this fact of human life. Hungry after forty days of fasting in the desert, Satan suggests Jesus miraculously produce some food for himself out of the rocks at hand. His response, a quotation from Hebrew scripture, “the human does not live by bread alone,” might at first seem like a hyper-spiritual attempt to deny our bodily dependence on food.  But I take it that Jesus isn’t proposing that the human live without bread. He’s asking us to take a closer look at bread to see that it is more than merely bread. What he invites us to see will yet affirm that we are profoundly interdependent within the natural world of which we are a part. Our hunger and the food that satisfies it is one of the most visceral reminders of just this fact. 

To desire a good meal is to seek to attend to the many relationships at our tables and to pursue nourishing mutuality.

Food, however, is more than merely food. Food is a nexus of relationship. The rest of the verse Jesus cites goes on to insist that food comes by the “word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” Even as we live by bread, we live by Divine words, because the bread we eat—the bread we are—comes to us as a Divine gift. In the biblical imagination, everything comes from God. In the beginning, God spoke and there was. That’s true of the wheat and rye and barley or whatever else we use to make our bread, and it is true also of the human cultures and traditions through which these natural goods come to be bread.  

Bread is more than merely bread; it is a Divine gift. In fact, it turns out, that every good thing is like bread in this way: created things are most themselves when they are more than merely themselves. This is just the sort of thing the creation is. It is an interrelated, connected whole, marked by relationship within and without. Created things are most themselves in right relationship to one another and to the God who created them. As a created good, food is more than just food. 

And, of course, meals are more than just food. Meals are sites of relationship. Particularly in our globalized world, our simple tables often conspire to hide fantastically complex networks of relationship implicated upon them. These networks interweave relationships among people and places—seen and unseen.  

The people implicated at our table include those around the table; those who foraged for, grew, transported, and prepared the food; those whose cultures for generations cultivated the plants, animals, fungi, dairy products and all the rest that find their places on our table; those whose histories and cultures gave rise—through creativity, necessity, or both—to the cuisines that weave together these natural and cultivated elements; and those absent from our tables who yet hunger for food. The places implicated include the fields and wilds and rivers and seas whence the food itself comes; the lands whence the cuisines and cultures hail; and the places we occupy as we share the table.  

So, meals are more than just food. But then, meals most worthy of the name are more than just meals. Meals are not just sites of any old relationship. At their best, they are sites of nourishing mutual encounter between people, places, and the God who created them all. To desire a good meal is to seek to attend to the many relationships at our tables and to pursue nourishing mutuality. To seek the good of the wilds and streams from which our food has come—to seek a way of relating to these places such that those relationships are mutually nourishing. To seek the good of the people seen and unseen but nevertheless “present” inasmuch as they are implicated at our tables.  

In days like ours, our tables are sites of mutual encounter, but the encounter is not nourishing to all involved.

At times, a good meal in this broken world will take the form of fasting in solidarity with or materially for the sake of those who hunger for what we so readily waste. In attending to our interrelatedness with the people and the places God has created, we begin to understand what it is also to attend to our relatedness to God at the table. Each of us—human, plant, animal, field, river, sea—we become most what we are when we become more than just ourselves. We become most ourselves when we attend to our relatedness to one another, when we attend to the God who created us for mutual flourishing.  

It is in these complex webs of interrelationship that what we are begins to suggest to us who we are: we are sharers of God’s home, members of God’s family, citizens, as Jesus put it, of God’s kingdom. The Kingdom of God is just this: all things flourishing in right relationship with one another and with God their creator. One of Jesus’s favorite metaphors for the Kingdom was that of a heavenly banquet. Seated at God’s table, our citizenship, our kinship, our mutual interdependence is plain. 

And yet we are not all flourishing. When I visited last year’s Serpentine Pavilion, Hyde Park was bleached from drought and heat. The would-be lawns felt like deserted wastelands; it was disorienting. Such sights testify to our profound interrelatedness, though against our flourishing. On the Black Sea, wheat that may never become bread, because it is trapped by war offers an analogous testimony. Our lives are deeply intertwined; just so, we are not flourishing. In days like ours, our tables are sites of mutual encounter, but the encounter is not nourishing to all involved. 

If all Jesus offered were a vision of the table as it could be—as it should be—our reflection would have to end here. “Look at what our meals might be,” we might say. “Let us make them so! Let us build the Kingdom of God.” War and climate catastrophe, beware! 

But Jesus never instructed his followers to build the Kingdom. Rather, he invited them to receive it, and in so doing, participate in its coming. 

One of Jesus’ most common ways of inviting people to receive the Kingdom was by inviting them to a meal. These were meals in all our ordinary senses. They were sites of relationship. Particularly as Luke, one of the four gospel writers, tells it, Jesus was constantly offering advice about who to invite to the table. He warned about which absences revealed life-denying alienation. He convened and commended gatherings of rich and poor, religious and irreligious, nevertheless gathered for nourishing mutual encounter.  

These meals are not only revolutionary social projects (though they were and can still be exactly that). In the ministry of Jesus, meals become announcements and enactments of the Kingdom of God. Meals become invitations to and demonstrations of the ultimate Home that God is making for God and God’s creation to flourish together. It is this Home that Jesus invites us to inhabit with him. When we share meals that are more than mere meals, when we allow God to transform our relationships with one another and within the natural world, our meals, too, can become sites of God’s transforming presence—the Home of God coming to be among mortals.  

So, when we come to the table—whether Ghotmeh’s table or the table in our homes—let’s be aware of the opportunity presented to us. At the table, we are invited to know bread that is more than mere bread, even as we are more than merely ourselves. At the table, we are invited into mutually nourishing encounter with one another, within the natural world, and with the God who created it all. At the table, we are invited to be at home with one another in the presence of God in whom all things are finding their Home. 

Article
Belief
Community
Creed
Football
Sport
7 min read

Liverpool's title win shows us that we’re built for community

Answering the question of who do we belong to.
Amid celebrating football fans, one stands on top of a kiosk with outstretched arms.
Liverpool fans celebrate outside their stadium.
Jonathan Rowlands.

“A Liverbird upon my chest 

We are men of Shankly’s best 

A team that plays the Liverpool way 

And wins the Championship in May” 

This is the song that has thundered around Anfield this season. A prophecy willed into existence amidst the departure of Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s Shankly for the twenty-first century. Surely not? 

But then.  

Arsenal drop points and Manchester City drop points and Liverpool don’t drop points. Again and again and again, until Liverpool needs just one more point to make the song a reality. The next game? Spurs at Anfield. At Anfield. As fate would have it, my wife and I had front-row tickets, thanks to my father- and mother-in-law booking a fortunately timed (for us, anyway) holiday and not being able to use their season ticket. (Thanks, Jeff and Janet). 

As we got to the stadium the place thrummed with anticipation. Liverpool is a city that loves to sing, and to dance, and to cuddle; a city built for joy and for love. And here is Liverpool in all its splendour, drenched in glorious, league-winning sunshine, as people sing and dance and cuddle. Most people here won’t have a ticket; Anfield only holds 60,000. People are here just to be here, to be present; around for when it happens. 

The game kicks off and the noise is deafening. Liverpool only needs to avoid defeat in the next ninety minutes and the league is theirs. Spurs, inconsistent all season, surely haven’t got the mettle to get anything from the game. Have they? 

But then.  

Spurs score. An unmarked header from a corner. As simple as it gets. Former Liverpool player Dom Solanke, no less. It was never going to be easy. 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Miracle of Istanbul; if any club knows how to make a game of football difficult for themselves, it’s Liverpool. The ground turns from jubilant to tense. 

But then.  

Salah passes to Szoboszlai who passes to Diaz who scores. Three short passes and Spurs are carved open and all our wildest dreams have come true. 

But then.  

Flag’s up. Offside. No goal. Doesn’t count. Was it Szoboszlai or Diaz offside? Was it close? Doesn’t matter. The ground turns from jubilant to tense. 

But then.  

VAR – which I’ve always said was really good, actually, I promise – overturns the flag. Goal. Liverpool are level. The ground erupts. But there’s still work to do. While a draw would see Liverpool over the line, there’s a lot of football left to go before the ninety minutes is up  

And so Liverpool press and press and press and press. They hound Spurs, hassle them, harass them. Ryan Gravenberch has the ball on the edge of their box and is almost certainly fouled. The ref – who, to his credit, did his utmost to try and ensure a game of football didn’t break out because we wouldn’t possibly want that – decides otherwise. Nothing to see here. Play on.  

But then. 

Alexis Mac Allister picks up the loose ball, takes a touch, and thumps it – properly wallops it – right into the top corner. Anfield shakes and I’m being hugged by someone from somewhere unseen. Now is the time when it happens, when we win the thing we’ve waited so long to win. Being a football fan doesn’t get better than this. 

But then.  

It does. Liverpool have a corner. The ball comes in, Cody Gakpo collects, wriggles, turns, shoots, scores. No coming back for Spurs now. Bedlam. Pandemonium. Carnage. He runs to the corner nearest us, top off, a message on his vest underneath. Daylight.  

“What does his shirt say?” my wife asks. I strain, trying to see, but I can barely remember my own name at this point so I can hardly be expected to read now, can I? 

But then. 

There he is, just meters from us, walking back with his top still off, the message clear: 

I belong to Jesus 

There are two more goals in the second half and the game finishes 5-1 and Liverpool are champions. But honestly, it was all over bar the singing at half-time. And there was a lot of singing still to do. Each player worthy of their own song, the club’s past eulogised over in verse and chorus. And Liverpool’s past means they are no stranger to success. This league title means they are now indisputably, by any metric going, England’s most successful football club. (Hiya, Sir Alex, if you’re reading this). 

But the Premier League has remained oddly elusive: this is only the second time the club has won the competition since it formed in 1992 (although they had won eighteen top-flight titles prior to this; there was, I’m told, still football before the early 90s). And the last league win came at the start of lockdown.  

What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you?

Look: I celebrated that Covid League title; of course I did. But it felt odd, and the oddness has only increased as normality has gradually returned to life since the pandemic. My wife has a picture of me opening a bottle of champagne in our otherwise empty living room. The players life the trophy in an otherwise empty stadium. With hindsight, there’s an unavoidably melancholy tinge to the whole thing. You spend your life imagining what it’ll be like to win the Big Shiny Thing and then it happens when it’s illegal to leave your house (or something; lockdown is just a big blur to me at this point). 

But then.  

2025 rolls around and we get to do it again. Together. Even the ones who don’t have tickets are there. Everyone is there. Together. And all the while I can’t stop thinking about Cody Gakpo with his top off. I Belong to Jesus.  

Gakpo’s a weird footballer, truth be told. He’s unbelievably technically gifted, rapid, and yet somehow enormous, too. He’s scored hugely significant goals for Liverpool. And yet, he’s unlikely to be anyone’s favourite player. He lacks the unflappable brilliance of Rolls-Royce Centre Back Virgil Van Dijk, the sheer inevitability and perfection of Mo Salah, or even the outright gets-you-on-your-feet electricity of Luis Diaz. He's unlikely to be named Player of the Year or to have a statue outside Anfield when he retires. But there he is: 60,000 feral scousers wrapped around his finger, the eyes of the footballing world on him. And what’s his message to them? I belong to Jesus

I don’t know much about economics, but I’m told often that things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. This is certainly true of footballers, anyway: one player might be worth significantly more to one club over another. But, in Christ, His infinitely valuable perfect Son, God declares that you and I are of infinite value. The One who’s judgement is perfect and faultless has decided you are worth the incalculable cost of His perfect and faultless Son. And so you are. It’s just a matter of simple economics.  

I forget this so often, that I am Jesus’ gift to Himself. I find it so hard to imagine myself as a gift. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. I didn’t know what to expect when we turned up to Anfield, but it certainly wasn’t a reminder of the worth Christ has placed on my very existence. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. And so does Cody Gakpo.  

The reason the Covid title feels so melancholy is that we couldn’t celebrate together. What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you? Liverpool’s League win, the euphoria that came with being able to share that win together with other people, gives us some slight sliver of a glimpse into the value Jesus Himself places in sharing His life with us. I reckon Cody Gakpo knows this, too. Because he knows he belongs to Jesus. He knows that he is the prize Jesus has won for himself. He is Jesus’ Premier League winning win at Anfield. Jesus wants to spend eternity with Cody Gakpo more than 60,000 feral scousers want to win the League. He wants to spend eternity with me and with you and with that person you find deeply annoying.  

It’s really easy for this all to sound saccharine and trite. “Ooh I went to a football match and it was like a big party in heaven, isn’t that nice?” But there is some truth to the glibness here. Football is better together because humans are made for togetherness. And this is seen no clearer than in Jesus’ desire to win togetherness with us, through his faithful and obedient life of sacrifice. 

As Cody Gakpo would say: I belong to Jesus. Or, as the Kop sang on repeat: Liverpool! Hallelujah, Hallelujah! 

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief