What is Food?

Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work. (John 4:34)

I am afraid that we too often spiritualize away many things causing them to lose the important effect they should have in our lives. And why do I imply that we discount them by doing this? Because for many of us the spiritual side of our life is really a peripheral part of our daily or weekly routine, not the central factor. This often is just as true ironically for people considered very religious as well as those who display little interest in such topics.

Consider, if it is possible to be that honest, how much we really care about the impact that our religion has on our daily life and relationships. A great deal of what we think of as religion really is much more cultural preference than it is truly spiritual in the real sense of the word. Most religion is based almost exclusively on the external trappings of forms and routines that we do that satisfy our sense of obligation somehow. And often these periods of attention given to placating religious obligations are actually done many times more to offset the other parts of our life spent indulging in various other less “religious” activities that we do, and all of this in some sort of balancing act that seems to reside in our subconsciousness.

Many of us are actually afraid to get too serious about our spiritual being and allow it to invade and dominate every other aspect of our existence because we feel we might become unbalanced or that others might begin to view us as moving into fanaticism. There are many other reasons as well, like the fear of losing our “freedom” to indulge in things that we simply are not comfortable letting go of yet. I honestly think all of us are still heavily under the influence of the addictive properties ingested by our first parents when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

When Jesus came to this earth to reveal to us the real truth about God and about reality, He refused to allow any of those misguided notions about life to affect the way He lived and thought and related to those around Him. He refrained from ever ingesting anything that smacked of fruit from the forbidden tree and constantly guarded and maintained His vital connection with His Father in heaven to keep only a pure diet from the Tree of Life to feed His soul. For Jesus, the things that were allowed into His mind and heart were the crucial choices that He had to keep watch over so that nothing would interfere with the purpose of bringing full salvation to lost sinners for which He came.

This all sounds like so much religious jargon unless it is really absorbed beyond the intellectual part of our thinking. To really begin to appreciate these words of Jesus it is so necessary to have a sense of the extreme importance of valuing the kind of nourishment that Jesus valued instead of viewing life so much from the physical and literal and external perspective as we are used to doing. We have to somehow begin to synchronize, to come into sympathy with how heaven perceives reality to some degree before we can begin to really appreciate the much deeper significance of these words that Jesus spoke to His disciples.

I was curious this morning if there might be some deeper meanings behind some of these words that might be found in the original Greek instead of just the surface meaning seen in this translation. And after looking up some of the words I found that another translation seems, in my opinion anyway, to convey more closely what might be a better understanding of this verse.

Jesus said, My food is to do the pleasure of him who sent me and to make his work complete. (John 4:34 BBE)

This way of reading the verse really adds some dimensions to it that I didn't notice before. The word translated will in the first rendition means more than just a decision when read in the Greek. It includes the idea of what God really desires, that His emotions are involved and its not just some decisions that He has intellectually determined without any passion involved. It conveys the idea of God's desires that have a great deal of importance for both Him and for Jesus to bring about on this earth.

The other word highlighted here also adds significant insights into how Jesus and His Father were coordinating their efforts while He was on earth. It almost seems to imply that the Father started something and sent Jesus to this earth to help Him finish up the job, whatever that job was. This takes us past just thinking that Jesus simply was obeying orders or living in harmony with a set of rules or just following set instructions. Jesus shared fully in the emotionally charged desires of God to draw all back into harmony with God and His character, both on earth and in heaven as well. They evidently started this process long ago and continue to pursue this passionately and will continue to do so until all of the tension created by Lucifer's false charges against God in heaven are fully resolved.

This passion was so prominent in Jesus' psyche that to Him it was like food. And to understand this better we really need to step back and consider carefully how we relate to food generally.

We eat food for a number of significant reasons. We eat to nourish our body, provide fuel for our cells and energy to keep us alive. But if that were the only motivation that we had to eat our lives would be radically different than they are right now. We would have no care about how food tasted or in what social circumstances we ate or many other things associated with food. So although nourishment is a very important factor in eating it is accompanied by many other strong motivating factors that cannot be ignored.

To a great degree we also eat to satisfy hungers that transcend our basic need for nutrition. We were created with taste buds and with sensory abilities involving odors and the feel of the texture of food in our mouths that have a great deal to do with how sensually satisfying our eating experience may be. Many of these things go unnoticed by many of us because they have become so subconscious. But they are still extremely important to us even though we seldom think about them intentionally until they might be missing or might be offensive to us. I have noticed that when children are small that they do not enjoy mixing various flavors altogether at once like others do after they get older.

The preferences that we have in our culinary life are largely shaped by the culture and people we grew up around and the choices that we have made in diet ourselves over the years. Our tastes often transform over the years due to various factors like availability of certain foods and other beliefs that we may have about what is good or what is bad for us. Certain key experiences related with food can strongly affect our opinions about eating, both consciously and subconsciously for many years.

Then there is the social dimensions of eating and of food preferences. Somehow this seems to be a strong effect on us that is almost mysterious in some ways. Eating with or without other people sharing the experience with us can have a dramatic effect on both our appetite and the level of satisfaction we derive from it. This is another thing that God seems to have built right into our makeup that is difficult to ignore, but it is much more commonly respected and understood in Mideastern cultures more than it is typically in America. Some European cultures also have more of a strong emphasis on the social dimensions of eating that can have a dramatic effect on how people approach this subject.

But why do I spend so much time trying to unpack these various aspects of eating and food? I do so because if Jesus talked about food that the disciples were having a difficult time understanding what He meant, then He must have been talking about something that was at least as much as, if not much more, important to Him than physical food that they were trying to offer Him. But it was not only more important to Him; it must have had a very similar and parallel way of affecting Him as regular food. So if I can understand better how we relate to food it might prove very useful to find clues as to why Jesus felt so strongly about something else that affected Him like food but was different from our typical way of thinking about food.

Even more importantly, if I am to follow Jesus' example and come to have the same kind of hunger and satisfaction that He had with whatever it was that He called His food, then I need to have a better idea of may be missing in my consciousness that apparently was very central to His. If I don't clearly perceive my own need for the kind of food that Jesus was talking about then it will be very likely that I may find myself starving to death while possibly not even knowing it is happening.

Whatever it was that He called food, it was so important and so desired by Jesus that it seemed to far surpass His normal human desires for physical food even when His body was likely very hungry. If I look at my own experience I find it much more difficult to see clearly times where I can perceive in my own experience something like Jesus described here. This tells me that I must be out of tune with the reality that Jesus lived in all the time. If His hunger and satisfaction for that hunger was so intensely focused on His Father's pleasure and finishing up what His Father had started that physical hunger paled into insignificance, why do I not have a similar experience more often? It must mean that my priorities are in dire need of rearrangement, that I need to perceive reality very differently than from the perspective I am accustomed to having.

But I cannot make myself live in the sense of reality that Jesus had. I have to depend on Him to retrain my thinking and feeling and perceiving to come into line with His way of viewing things before I can better resonate with these words of Jesus about His food. I want that to happen in my life and I invite Him to do that in me. I trust in God's desires to align me with His way of thinking to the point that we will be much more in sync than I now experience with Him.