Slippery Fish
I’m often asked how I reconcile my concept of ethical vegetarianism with the fact that the Protestant canon describes Jesus actually eating fish (albeit only once). Let me throw out some thoughts and see where it leads …
It seems to me that the implication behind the question is that Jesus was fully God therefore the scriptural depiction of Jesus eating fish means that God eats fish and if God does it, it’s certainly ok for me to do it. If you go with the reasoning that ‘God does it therefore I can do it’ … well, that’s just a mess … most of the death and destruction in the Bible is attributed to God. I don’t think the idea that ‘God did it’ translates in any meaningful way into a blanket assertion that ‘therefore it’s ok for me to do it’. Depending on how you interpret the cross you might also be in a position to say that God killed Jesus therefore it would be ok for me to kill Jesus.
What about the other side … Jesus as God incarnate was fully human. What about the fully human aspects of Jesus am I supposed to follow? If we’re taking the physical fact of Jesus eating fish as our example, by what reasoning do we stop at that one physical, worldly act? Jesus ate fish therefore it’s ok for me to eat fish …. Jesus walked on water … it’s ok for me to step out of a boat and … and what – walk on water? Surely identifying ourselves as Jesus followers does not mean we are merely extracting and following an historical biography – wearing what Jesus wore, speaking the language Jesus spoke, wearing my hair the way Jesus wore it. The historical Jesus was supposedly an unmarried man – how do I extract meaning from that as a married woman? There’s obviously more to it than that. The quest for the Jesus of history is valuable, but I think it’s misplaced to limit our understanding of what it means to follow Christ to what can be harvested from that line of inquiry.
So to answer the question … I don’t reconcile it. It’s not something that needs reconciling to me. Personally, I think the one time we actually have a description of Jesus eating fish, if you read it non-metaphorically, it’s in the context of proving he’s resurrected in the flesh. I think the point was about the reality, the physicality of the resurrection … not about ethical vegetarianism. I’ll close with some comments from Richard Young in response to the so-called dilemma of a Jesus who ate fish.
… divine activity among humans invariably involves accommodation to human life and customs. Said another way, divine activity in a disordered world saturated with evil and violence must inevitably be less than ideal. The way things are is the context for God to evoke change. God participates in human history through a process of accommodation, a process in which God allows human freedom and then works through that freedom and the customs which it spawns (such as wars, sacrifice, and meat eating) to achieve the divine goal. The God who cannot look upon evil (Hab 1:13) became incarnate in Christ and mingled with tax collectors and sinners.
… Jesus came to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45) and to call sinners to repentance before a holy God (Luke 5:32). He did not come to legislate vegetarianism, animal rights, health reform, or end slavery. ~“Is God a Vegetarian?”, p 10-11.
