Sunday, Day 36: Vinegar

Vinegar is truly magical. It can make milk into buttermilk for any recipe. It’s the best possible, and simplest, salad dressing—especially the good kind. It’s an ingredient in almost every recipe in Greek cookbooks, the magic bitter-and-sweet, perfect-accent touch. Vinegar also, of course, preserves fresh vegetables and olives, keeping them safe to eat long after they’re picked from the plant. It is the most important ingredient in the dyeing of Easter eggs as well.

It was also what the people who ridiculed Jesus during his crucifixion gave him when he said he was thirsty—sponge dipped in vinegar, meant as some kind of cruel joke.

In larger quantities, it can burn the tongue.

I discovered the best vinegar I’d ever had in the U.S. in a random store in a random mall in an otherwise fairly uninteresting midsized city two hours from here. The man working the store lured me in by asking if I knew anything about olive oil. Turns out, I do. And the olive oil was good, too—but I hadn’t tasted balsamic as sweet and pure as the kind they have in that store. I bought some, and savored it for a few months—and now that it’s gone, it’s hard to go back to the ordinary, grocery-store kind, though I have.

“We didn’t always have shoes, but we always ate well,” one of my aunts told me once, and I must have inherited these priorities—I’d much, much, much rather spend money on good food than nice clothing or shoes.

“I really don’t get why giving Jesus vinegar was so insulting,” I said to one of my Sunday School teachers, but she wasn’t the type to welcome questions, and just gave me a dirty look. If I hadn’t been a little afraid of her, I would have persisted, saying vinegar was probably the tastiest and most versatile liquid in existence.

But if you are thirsty, it is not what you crave, and it will not quench your thirst.  

How had I not understood this? I had never been desperate for water. I’d never lived in a place where water was scarce. As a child, and even now, I had no way to relate to the kind of thirst Jesus must have experienced on the cross.

We drink a little vinegar on Good Friday, or eat lentil soup with vinegar, to remember Jesus’ suffering. And some people fast from vinegar and olives during the no-fasting-allowed 40 days of Easter—mainly because they were staples for the 40 days of Lent, and we’re supposed to be tired of them.  But I could never fast from vinegar or olives—I simply love them both too much.

There are times when we say what we most mean, when our words just stick, and sometimes our mouths burn with the truth of what we’ve managed to understand and speak out loud. At the risk of sounding as if I’m underestimating Jesus’ suffering, I wonder if the vinegar worked that way in Jesus’ mouth—even though he couldn’t say much more, it was, perhaps, proof his words had mattered, proof he was suffering because he’d said what was right. Maybe, even in the midst of his suffering, he tasted its familiar sweet-and-bitter, comforting taste.

In her poem “Different Ways to Pray,” Naomi Shihab Nye writes,

There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms--
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.