Hungry for God: Biblical Reflections on FoodSample

Food is Good (Gen. 1: 26-31) I wonder what comes to your mind when you think of food? Do you picture a table laid with delicious food, like at Christmas? Or maybe tempting cakes that you know you should resist? Or do you see food as a fuel that simply has to be eaten in order to get on with everything else you need to do? Is food a pleasure to be savoured or a daily routine to be undertaken? How we view the food we eat – what we see it as being – impacts our whole attitude towards it, whether we approach it with nurture and care, or thoughtlessly and neglectfully. Our reading today gives us our foundational theological principle for how we should view food as Christians: it is part of God’s creation, which he pronounced as being very… very… GOOD! More than that, food is actually a gift. It is something that God has given to us: a concept that we will explore more tomorrow. For today we simply want to establish the understanding that food is a part of a very good, created world. This is vital for us to grasp because for too long we have held a strange dualism that has only given significance to activities that are seen as ‘spiritual’. Something as mundane as food could never be a subject that Christians should be interested in! But Genesis 1 teaches us that this is wrong. God is interested in everything that he has created and how we eat is every bit as important to him as any other area of our lives. Reflection: what are the implications for you that God is interested in the food you eat?