Italians love their food
written by Michel Di Feliciantonio
Italians love their food. Fragrant pizza, multiple types of pasta with limitless different sauces, palatable risotto, flavorful cheeses, seasoned vegetables, delicious cold cuts and meat, and creamy gelato. Italians love eating good food, love talking about food and especially love to eat good food while talking about food. One example of our passion for food is what we call aperitivo. Usually aperitivo is enjoyed after work when it is still too early for dinner. Friends meet up to drink and eat something not as a meal but in preparation for dinner, which usually takes place somewhere else. If you were part of our church plant in Pisa, you could do that on a warm, sunny evening admiring the Leaning Tower or in one of our historical piazzas.
Food is a central element of humanity. It is embedded into us. It is not just a matter of survival, otherwise we would be eating the same food over and over again and we would not care about different ways of preparing, presenting and serving the same food. Through food and meals we demonstrate our creational and image-bearing nature. That should not surprise us. Food and meals are overarching scriptural themes. We have been created to join in a divine banquet. That is why we long for it. But we lost the invitation to that meal in Eden, and have only partly experienced it again in the desert, in the Promised Land, in the sacrificial banquets made for purification.
To restore that divine invitation, we needed Jesus. We needed to be invited to taste the body of the Lamb of God and be purified by his blood. Every time we take communion, we not only remember the past cross, we also proclaim that there will be a great divine banquet when we will finally be home, as Isaiah 25 foretells:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.
With food often comes another element: fellowship. Jesus’ ministry was marked by food, snacks, meals, and parties. Christ used those moments to get to know people, to rebuke and to exhort, to preach and to illustrate, and to change lives. At the table people not only share food, but share their lives too. As you can imagine, that is an incredible tool for ministry. Tim Chester writes that “the table fellowship of Jesus, with its ethic of grace rather than reciprocity, was creating a new countercultural society in the midst of the Empire.” The Roman Empire is gone, but we can still use Jesus’ fellowship table to advance his Kingdom in a hostile society.
As Chiesa Cristiana La Torre (The Tower Christian Church), our local church plant, we try to regularly gather around a meal, both with people from the congregation and with those who do not believe in Christ. It becomes a natural way to do discipleship and evangelism. As a matter of fact, this is how our plant project actually started: a small group of people, a living room (sometimes a bedroom), a potluck dinner, and a discussion on a Bible passage. We started with the Gospel of Mark (it took us almost 2 years to finish it), and as we journeyed through that Gospel around our food, we felt ready to officially launch the church. Since then we have organized a number of different events and activities, and yet since the COVID pandemic what people (both members of the church and not) have missed the most is the “Wednesday Bible Study”: a shared meal in a small room with a biblical discussion.
When we gather around a meal we have, as believers, the opportunity to practice hospitality, to show love, and to update each other on different aspects of life. We also have the opportunity to invite non-believers, to hear from them and talk with them, and to demonstrate what the Gospel that we preach and talk about actually looks like in real life. People join a group of imperfect Christians that try to live out a radical way of life not because they are particularly talented or special, but because of what Jesus has done in their lives.
Italians and internationals are faced with the reality that food is great, but that material food cannot be everything, that “man shall not live by bread alone.” No matter if prepared in a 3-star Michelin restaurant or a traditional Italian nonna’s home, material food is only an idol promising false satisfaction. Chiesa Cristiana La Torre exists to live out the Gospel and to teach others that Jesus, on the other hand, is able to keep what he promises and is able to feed us with “every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
May our food and our meals become more and more not only about our physical survival or delight, but tethered to the Gospel. Far too many people have yet to taste and see that the Lord is good.