Jesus Was Not a Vegetarian
Maybe a flexitarian then?
When Jesus appeared to his disciples after death, they couldn’t believe he was real. They thought it must be some kind of spirit they were seeing. Jesus urged them to look at his hands and feet, which had been pierced as the Roman soldiers nailed him to the cross:
“Touch me, and see,” he said, “for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
They still couldn’t believe as their heads were giddy with joy, so he was forced to show further proof that it was really him, not just a spirit. He asked:
“Do you have anything to eat?”
They gave him some fish, and he ate it.
So there we have it. Jesus was not a vegetarian. He ate fish to prove to his disciples that he was not a spirit.
So much for some Christians’ hope to baptise vegetarianism in the name of Jesus. We can all relax and continue eating meat like we’re used to.
Or should we?
Jesus was constantly talking to people about the coming Kingdom of God. He believed that one day, the world would run fully in accord with God’s intentions, not as the sorry state of affairs it is today.
His vision was deeply shaped by the Jewish scriptures, which spoke about a beautiful regenerated earth, in which there is no longer war, sickness, not even death. And it looks like in that world, people and animals are vegetarian.
Wait, what?
The Jewish scriptures suggest that in a paradisiacal world, people eat fruit and nuts, animals eat plants, wolves live with lambs, leopards lie with goats, cows and bears graze together, lions eat straw like oxen, and children play with snakes. (The scriptures are not completely univocal though).
Those same scriptures on the other hand are clear about the fact that we do not (yet) live in that ideal world and that today it is in principle permitted to eat meat. And we saw that indeed Jesus did.
So again, can we then simply go on eating meat as we are used to?
Well, it’s complicated. First of all, the world today is not what it was in Jesus time. Back then, even only a few decades ago, meat was still a luxury product that was not often consumed. Today though, most Westerners consume meat every day. This changes a lot:
- While meat in essence is not unhealthy, a lot of the meat we eat is very much so. A typical Western intake of red meat (pork, beef, lamb, or game) and processed meat (cured, smoked, salted or fermented) increases our chances of premature death by 29%.
- Since we now eat such massive amounts of meat, the meat industry had to scale up massively too, and today it contributes 15% of the greenhouse gasses that are changing our world and threatening millions of lives.
- And since the meat industry is operating at such massive scales, the treatment of animals today is unworthy of the Kingdom vision where cows and bears graze together idyllically. Rather, cows and other animals are crammed and shoved together, and mutilated to comply to our wishes.
While we clearly can’t frame vegetarianism as a command from Jesus, we should take care not to fall for the other extreme, where we take Jesus’ occasional eating of fish as a justification for our modern, apparently quite harmful diet.
Jesus believed humanity had been given the task to care for this world. If that is so, how can we take up that responsibility and bring some of the negative practices described above more into alignment with Jesus’ vision of a good world?
The solution is simple: by reducing our meat consumption, we improve our own health and reduce the demand that fuels the meat industry that is so destructive for animals and our world.
While vegetarianism will definitely take us the furthest in this respect (not considering veganism), simply cutting back our meat intake is already a great step in the right direction. Preferring unprocessed fish and chicken over processed beef and pork for example, and eating one or two (more) days a week meat-less is a good way to start.
We saw that Jesus was not a vegetarian. By today’s standards though, he would definitely be called a flexitarian: a person that eats mostly plant-based foods but sometimes does eat meat. Let’s allow him to show us the way towards a more Kingdom like diet.
