Hungry for God: Biblical Reflections on FoodMuestra

Food is Future (Revelation 19:1-9)

I love the fact that the Bible pictures God’s Kingdom as being like a wedding feast (see, for example, Matt. 22). Here is no vision of an ethereal future, floating around as disembodied souls: God’s present reality in heaven that Revelation pictures in our reading today foreshadows a future that certainly involves a lot of non-earthly creatures, but is celebrated by the very physical act of eating a wonderful meal.

The future that we look forward to is intimated by the description in Micah 4 that we read previously and hinted at again two chapters on from today’s reading in Revelation 21-22. There is much about our ultimate future in God that we do not know. What we can be confident of though is that it will be a future in which all of God’s creation plays its part; it will be physical and earthy, and it will be a time when all that is wrong in this present age will be wiped out and put to rights.

As we come to the end of our week’s reflections on food it is time for us to roll up our sleeves and get physical and earthy too and look for ways to be involved with God in bringing his future to bear now in our current food systems. It is a shocking reality that 1 in every 8 people go to bed hungry every night, all over the world, and what many don’t realise is that there is enough food for everyone. We can tackle the injustices of hunger through a host of different ways - being a part of the If campaign, growing our own food; eating less meat; sending off campaign postcards; buying FairTrade; avoiding highly processed food; writing letters to government ministers and company executives; giving food to a local food bank; inviting someone different round for dinner; praying and, above, all, remembering that our food is a gift from God.

Heavenly Father, I commit myself to you and your future, to treating food with care and respect, and to working to see food for all.