Abstract
The weak eat only vegetables
Of the many temptations to which I have succumbed in this life, I have to say that vegetarianism is not one. And so I was a little amused to find myself, while tucking into a full English breakfast in Canterbury, looking up and realising that I was enjoying this particular meaty treat below a huge banner that said “Kent Vegan Festival”.
So I did the only thing one can do in these situations and sent a picture of the breakfast, and the banner juxtaposed to one of my vegetarian friends. I thought I might get a sardonic reply: : “get lost Max.”. But instead, somewhat to my surprise, she replied “Oh I’m speaking at that – would you like to come along”. And so it was that I found myself a week later circulating around stalls selling cream-free cream cakes, vegetable burgers and organic knickers whilst listening to a very intense love poem at an open mic poetry slot which only revealed in the last few lines that the passion was addressed not to another human but to a cat.
Now, of course, it would be very English to mock the earnestness of people at the Vegan festival, but actually something like a Vegan festival is probably the only chance we have in this modern world to get a taste of the utter conviction and passion and seriousness about what we eat that would have been shared by Paul’s contemporaries.
When we read Romans 14 it’s possible to see it as all rather quaint, a bit of a practical tidying-up exercise after a letter packed with so much dense and influential theology. But of course, it would hardly have appeared so trivial to Paul’s original readers.
The dietary laws of ancient Judaism were written in the most sacred and authoritative part of the whole of the scriptures, the torah, believed to have been written down by the hand of Moses himself. They were observed scrupulously by many Jews, as Jesus’ own teachings reveal. They marked off the Jewish people as distinctive from others, and reminded them each and every time they observed them that they were indeed the chosen people, with a special relationship with God.
And St Paul says to all this topic of crucial religious and cultural importance – “oh what you eat doesn’t really matter you know, it’s just a question of personal spiritual taste really”. Imagine the reaction you would get to saying something like that at the Vegan festival, and then make it 100 times worse.
So when Paul says,
“Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat”. He is touching one of the rawest nerves in ancient Jewish culture, blowing apart the certainties of centuries, telling people to stop making the kind of judgments and distinctions that were absolutely central to their notion of identity, and unsurprisingly inviting the kind of angry reaction that we see frequently marks his preaching ministry. So what does he think he’s got to say that’s so valuable that it outweighs all this aggro and trauma and confusion?
Well, the answer I’m afraid, is a bit of a complicated one, but it’s a profound one too, and one that has pretty radical implications for the practical living out of the faith in any kind of Christian community, and it’s all about what we might call the order of belonging. Let me try to explain what I think Paul means.
“We do not live to ourselves”, Paul says, “and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord.”
Our life, in other words, from its beginning to its ending belongs first and foremost to God, more than to our race, or our nation, or our friends, or even ourselves. Now that’s pretty obvious, you might think, but it’s actually not really how a lot of people around Paul were living. Because for almost everybody in Paul’s time, you belonged to a community before you belonged to God. If you wanted to belong to the God of Israel you first had to belong to the human community of the Jews with its rules and its patterns of life and its meetings; just as if you wanted to belong to one of the myriad of gods who swirled around the religious consciousness of the ancient world you would first try to belong to their disciples, follow their rules, copy their behaviour and try to fit in.
But for Paul, the God revealed in Jesus Christ is someone to whom everyone belongs from the very beginning. He is a God we belong to irrespective of anything we do, or anyone we associate with, or even any religion we practice. Or in terms more familiar to us: we don’t belong to God because we happen to belong to the Church; rather we belong to the Church because we are called to live out together what it means to belong to God.
Now this may seem like rather an obscure point at first but it actually makes a crucial difference for how we behave as church communities. Mainly because for so many of us in our heart of hearts, we tend to believe the very thing that Paul is attacking here.
We tend to think that we as a church community have got God sorted, and if other people want to join in that’s great. If they just turn up when we like turning up, if they just worship in the way we like worshiping, if they just behave in a way that we find it enjoyable to behave, then sure – they can belong to us, and if they belong to us then we are happy to say they belong to God as well.
But what St Paul says turns all that on its head. For Paul is saying that nobody has to “earn” belonging to God by first belonging to us. Rather, every person’s way of belonging to God will look rather different. Some will eat only vegetables, some will eat the full English, some will keep holy days, some will think every day alike, some will engage in fasting, others will feast all the time. What the Church is about for Paul is learning to bear with one another, rather than prescribing to one another what they must do, or judging them when they fail to do it. It is about finding a common way of life which causes nobody to stumble and which provides a context in which everybody can flourish in faith.
The Church, according to St Paul, is an institution that can never stand still. It is always open, eagerly waiting to assimilate the new truths that all the children of God bring.
Every single time a new person walks through that door, the centre of gravity of this Christian community shifts ever so slightly, just as the earth’s centre of gravity shifts ever so slightly towards all the people upon it. To some extent, it’s only natural, they will fit in as they learn the customs and the ways that you hold dear as a community. But because they belong to God first, they will also bring with them some new insights to enjoy, some new accommodations that you will need to make, some new changes that will come about as the inevitable consequence of receiving into your midst, so that nobody will stumble, but all will be encouraged in the living out of their faith.
It’s a big challenge, this. It’s always easier to fall back on conformity, idolatrously insisting that the price for belonging to God is to belong fully and absolutely to us. But getting this right is the difference between the Church that lives and the Church that dies. Because, like all products, the Church that comes as a ready-made self-enclosed package has a numerical and spiritual sell-by-date printed upon it.
But the Church that is genuinely open to learning from the newcomer who already belongs to God, is a living body that has its lungs open to the life-giving oxygen of Jesus Christ-made-flesh-in-one-another, to live out its life not in food or drink – in this custom or that custom – but in righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.