Looking Back: How Holy Soup Saved Easter

Written by Eryn Austin-Bergen

On Holy Saturday, I made soup.

If it were a normal year, my husband and I would have spent the day labouring to prep an Easter feast for our friends and neighbours. Roast lamb, root vegetables, green salads, fresh bread, Italian cream cake, and lots and lots of red wine. We’d fill plastic Easter eggs with colourful candies to make a backyard hunt for all our guests’ children. I’d clean the house from top to bottom and make sure everything was in its place. Then, in the late evening, we’d head off to an Easter vigil that we’d leave early just to make it into bed before 1AM.

But this year, all I did was make soup. Why? You guessed it – COVID-19.

Holy Saturday marked Day 16 of our 31-day lock down and no one was going anywhere…or coming here. There would be no late-night vigil, no sunrise service, no raucous and magnificent feast to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus – our highest, holiest, and most joyful day of the year. Instead, we would remember quietly at home – just me, my husband, and daughter.

Boy did that soup save my Easter weekend!

Even before the lockdown, businesses began scaling back and schools began to close. Anxiously watching our city shut down, I felt uneasy about how all this would impact those on the margins. And on March 26 when everything came to grinding halt, I really began to worry. What would families do who don’t have the resources to stock up on a food? How would day-labourers buy food for their kids and keep the lights on at home? All those restaurant waiters, roadbuilders, taxi drivers, and cleaners – what would they do?

Distressed, my husband and I began reaching out to see how – or if – we could help during this crisis where the best thing to do seemed to be stay away.

I posted a note on our apartment’s Facebook group saying we could pick up groceries and medicine for neighbours particularly vulnerable to the virus. I contacted our church’s food ministry to find out how meals were being accessed by hungry church members. We texted our city’s community garden coordinator to offer to tend the garden and delivering vegetables where needed. We asked our friend who’s a doctor if any clinics needed unskilled volunteers and we emailed our pastor to find out how we might be able to serve.

But no one needed us. Not one. They all said to just stay home and sit tight.

I was deeply disappointed…and frustrated! While I know that ‘stopping the spread’ is critical to protecting the vulnerable, I also know that there are struggling, hurting, hungry people out there who need Christ to show up in this situation. I wanted to be his hands and feet.

Two weeks of silence went by. And then came the call for soup. It came on Good Friday.

Our church was called upon to provide Easter dinner to 120 homeless members of our city. With no home to be locked down in and government emergency housing full, two NGOs in our city found a school where the homeless could shelter in place.

I immediately committed to 10 litres of soup and started planning my recipes. I stood in the kitchen most of Saturday, and it was wonderful. Finally, we could do something useful! The delivery turned out to be less than smooth – there was a mix-up about whether to bring the soup hot or cold and to which venue we should to deliver it. In the end, a number of the donated soups got mixed together in the same pot! So much for my recipes.

But the people ate. They ate firsts and seconds and had their fill. They were nourished with healthy (and hopefully still tasty) food for at least one night. It wasn’t roast lamb, it wasn’t my friends gathered around my table, but it was a feast prepared with love and served to Jesus.

I think the COVID-19 pandemic is causing many of us to re-evaluate our priorities, our habits, our rituals, our faith. In Galatians 2 Paul reflects on the time when he and Jesus’ apostles went their separate ways – Paul to witness to the Gentiles and the apostles to witness to the Jews. Their parting was amicable, but the apostles did insist on one thing. “All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along (Galatians 2:10 NIV).”

The “one thing” wasn’t circumcision, or worshiping a certain way, or not eating pork, or observing specific holy days. It was remembering the poor.

I missed our annual Easter traditions this year – I missed them a lot. But being in lockdown made me realize it isn’t the church services or the feasts that Jesus asks us to remember. It’s the poor. And through no effort of my own, I was given the gift of being able to do that on Easter Sunday. That really humbled me. It wasn’t my food, or decorations, or clean house, or Easter egg hunt that was needed. It was a quiet staying at home and cooking soup. And in that kitchen, I met the resurrected Jesus a whole new way.