TELEVISION nowadays is full of cookery programmes. Some sell nostalgia: an illusion of safe domesticity, surrounded by the warmth and smells of freshly baked bread, like our mother might have made - even if, actually, she never did. Some, on the other hand, offer luxury, and permissible self-indulgence. Pour in the cream, beat in the eggs, spoil yourself; this food is as much about self-worth as it is about eating.

These programmes know that food stands for so many things, and works on so many symbolic levels. A meal can be a ritual, as when the courtiers and commoners come to watch the King eat; it can be hospitality, extending the boundaries of family to welcome others in; it can be power, underlining the difference between those who have and those who have not; it can be identity: "we" eat this food in this way at these times, while "they" do not; food can be "good" or "bad", in physical, mental, and spiritual terms.

Most faiths have rituals and ceremonies associated with food, times of feasting and of fasting, and Christianity is no exception, with Lent followed by Easter, Advent followed by Christmas, fast and feast balancing each other. And, at the heart of it all, the bread and wine that tell our story and make us who we are. 

THERE are a surprising number of meals and stories about meals in Jesus's ministry. He is accused of being "a glutton and a drunkard" (Matthew 11.19), and of encouraging his disciples to break Sabbath laws to satisfy their hunger. He fills wine jars with eye-watering amounts of good wine (John 2.6-7); he feeds five thousand people because he feels sorry for them (Mark 8.2). Most of his meals are symbolically transgressive in some way: he tells Martha that a woman's place does not have to be in the kitchen (Luke 10.42); he makes the dinner table a place of welcome for outsiders such as Zacchaeus (Luke 19.5); he tells stories of ludicrously unlikely people who have more important things to do than to go to royal weddings (Matthew 22), and disturbing stories of a God who does not know the correct order of precedence at a dinner table (Luke 14.10). He tells the story of an over-fond father who rewards his profligate son with a feast, and of a grudging older brother who resents his father's generosity (Luke 15).

Gradually, the picture builds up, and the food symbols begin to shape our imaginations, as we start to picture the subversive hospitality of God. We can just about cope with this, even if we cannot entirely like it, unsure as we are of whether we are the deserving or the underserving, or how we tell the difference. And this uncertainty begins to pave the way for the ultimate symbol that Jesus gives us: a meal that is both life and death.

As Jesus sits at table for the last meal with his friends, he uses all the powerful strands of the scriptures, his own teaching and practice, and draws them together around his death. This meal that Jesus shares with the disciples remembers the mighty liberating act of the God who rescued his people from slavery in Egypt, and, as they remember, they re-constitute their own identity: this meal, this story - this is who we are.

So, when Jesus's followers tell this story and share this meal, our story tells us who we are, and what it cost to make us the people of God. God still acts in power to liberate us from slavery, and this is what power looks like.

That last meal that Jesus shared - the meal that leads to, and commemorates, death - is what makes all the subsequent meals possible. The risen Jesus shares bread and wine with the disciples at Emmaus; he shares fish on the shore with Peter the betrayer; day by day, and Sunday by Sunday, he invites us to the table which is both our death and our life. As we eat, the people who think they can judge better than God, the people who condemned Jesus to death, begin to die. We are those people. As we eat, the people who live only by the hand and provision of God begin to live. We are those people.

Come to the table. There is room for all, if you don't mind who you sit with. Come to the table, where the food will kill you, and make you whole.

Dr Jane Williams is Assistant Dean of St Mellitus College.