Jesus Ate

JESUS ATE

Begin by taking a few breaths and paying attention to the air moving in and out of your lungs and mouth. Notice where you feel tension or discomfort in your body. To the extent you are able, try to relax, let the chair you are sitting in fully support your body, and release the tension as you breathe deeply.

a prayer to open

Here I am, Lord, in my tired, aging, hurting, wondrous body.

Open my heart to you now. You are my High Priest who knows.

Then Jesus went out to the lakeshore again and taught the crowds that were coming to him. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at his tax collector’s booth. “Follow me and be my disciple,” Jesus said to him. So Levi got up and followed him.

Later, Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. (There were many people of this kind among Jesus’ followers.) But when the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with such scum?”

When Jesus heard this, he told them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.”

Of great controversy during Jesus’ life were the kinds of people with whom he ate. Consider, though, that he ate. He drank wine, shared conversation over fresh fish and vegetables. Maybe food got stuck in his teeth, he burped, and his stomach squealed as it digested his food.

• What comes to mind as you think about the fact that Jesus ate and drank and his body processed foods just as ours do?
• Reflect on the reality that God came to be with us in a body and took in food and digested it in a typical human way. What does this truth reveal to you about his love? What does it reveal about Jesus’ ability to identify with you?
• How might your view of your body—and all its weird sounds and responses to food or lack of it—be influenced as you consider that Jesus’ body worked just the same way?

Jesus Christ—

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace;

the one through whom and for whom all things were made; and

the one in whom I live and move and have my being—

you became flesh and made your dwelling among us.

And nothing—neither death nor life, angels nor demons, the present nor the future; not any powers, height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation—can separate me from the love of our God, which is in you, Jesus Christ my Lord.