I've been losing weight recently, and so a lot of the discussion from Jesus about bread, never being hungry again, it resonates particularly hard. For you see, here in 21st Century North America, we have a quite different issue from that of the people of Jesus' time and place. They lived each day working very hard to get enough food to survive the day. There was no convenience store, there were no convenience foods, there was no industry set up to make sure that corn was plentifully produced and went into everything, there was just food. And most of what food was, was bread. Every day you would bake it, and it wasn't as though you could just toss the ingredients into a breadmaker and walk away. You would have to build and tend a fire, grind the wheat into flour, knead and fashion the dough, and bake it on hot coals until it was done. The reason that bread was so vital (and still is today) was that it was cheap, the ingredients could be stored essentially indefinitely, and it was versatile enough and filling enough to go with everything.
But now, we have a problem not with eating too little, but with eating too much. Our world is awash in cheap food, laden with salt, sugar and fat, and then at the other end of it, purported ways to extract yourself from the effects of that cheap food. And it brings us to a problem, which is that food, all food, is not created equal. If you're trying to lose weight, one of the first things to wrap your head around is that a calorie is a calorie. It doesn't matter where it comes from as far as weight loss goes, if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight, and if you do the opposite, you will lose it. And the source of those calories doesn't matter. Your body neither knows nor cares if you eat a bucket of celery or two tablespoons of peanut butter, it will process that energy the same way.
 |
| These are all 200 calories |
What does this mean? It means that the system of calories is inherently unfair. You can tell it's unfair from the word go, because two slices of wonderbread (63 grams) are a lot less filling than 50 grams of raw lentils, even though they're the same calorically. In other words, part of your job as a human who eats food is to eat the right things. That is, choose food that is filling and satisfying.
Ah, yes. Satiety. It's a bugbear, and is the reason that low carb diets work. Not that I'm on one. The basic tenet states that high fat high protein foods have a higher satiety rating, and will keep you satisfied for longer than simple carbs which are rapidly broken down. In other words, the more simple carbs you have, in theory, the quicker you'll be hungry again. Why do I mention all this? Because this information is important towards understanding what Jesus is talking about when he talks about satisfaction. Eternal satisfaction.
When Jesus speaks of himself as the bread of life, the promise that he makes is that if you eat of this bread, you will never be hungry again. You will be fully and completely satisfied. And the people who heard this were excited, as food acquisition and preparation were enormous time hogs, demanding a lot of people, and making their lives a bit of a drudge. What Jesus was promising (in semi-parable form) was that they would experience, for perhaps the first time in their entire lives, satisfaction. They would be filled and satisfied, and they wouldn't go hungry anymore. Their lives would no longer be a succession of moments in which they desperately seek after the next meal, but rather, that they would be filled, satisfied, and comforted, freed from the need to be on that rollercoaster of filled then empty.
For us, though, it's a little bit different. Very few of us here in this great nation have been what anyone could call genuinely hungry. Oh, sure, we get a little bit peckish, but food is never too far away, it's as close as the phone, the pantry, the fridge, and if you get desperate, you could eat fruit. It's not hard to get food, in fact in many cases it's too easy. And so we as North Americans tend to overindulge in empty calories, which wind up making us feel worse. It's the mirror of the issue faced by the New Testament listeners to Jesus' words, that they were seeking after food and it occupied all their time. In our case, we seek food, but find that what we eat is dangerously unsatisfying for us. We consume, and are still hungry at the end of it.
When Jesus talks about never being hungry again, his words echo what we hear in Isaiah chapter 55, where it asks us why we spend our money on that which does not satisfy, and our effort on that which does not fill us. We are essentially, for the most part, consuming spiritual junk food. The same epidemic of food choices that lead to us all being stuffed yet still hungry physically is the parallel to how we are spiritually, filling up on that which does not satisfy, and leaving ourselves constantly famished. We are ravenous, starving hungry, and yet always filling up. Why is that? Why is it in an age in which we have all sorts of spiritual outlets, in which self help and associated issues are at an all time high, an age in which we have access to all the spiritual learnings since the dawn of time, are we still hungry? Because we are filling up on the wrong stuff. As usual, St. Augustine of Hippo says it best when he says 'You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.'
All that other stuff we fill up on doesn't do the job. It will make us bloated, sure, as it tend to do. As the scriptures say, knowledge puffs up, and lots of us are very puffy these days spiritually. We are full, but still seeking, taken but still looking. Our hearts are so prone to wanderlust, and we find that everything we are consuming, everything we are taking in, leaves us unsatisfied, wanting more all the time. We seek more, and though we take more in, we are unfulfilled.
What Jesus promises, though, is satisfaction. Imagine, if you will, a world in which you are satisfied. You are no longer hungry or thirsty. You neither marry nor are given in marriage. Every tear is wiped away from your eyes, there is no more want, you are free from that treadmill that has been governing your life from the moment that you were born, wresting yourself from sleep with your infant cries of hunger. Imagine a world in which you are no longer a slave to those needs, but can do what you want. That notion of satisfaction is what Jesus promises, giving to us in semi-parable form, an image of paradise. One in which we are free from those needs, one in which the questions we ask have answers, and one in which our wandering souls, prone to seek after things that do not satisfy, will be made whole and satiated.
PJ.
No comments:
Post a Comment