The Jesus Diet (Part 2): Reclaiming the Sound of Silence

Then Jesus declared, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”.

Mark 2:27

Imagine waking up to near silence. There are no chimes, apps, TV sounds. No ever-present electric buzz, but maybe the faint cluck of a hen or whisper of wind gently flapping whatever happens to be drying outside. There is no traffic. No background music. No mechanical anything. In the same way our taste buds recover after coming off a saccharin diet designed to endlessly smack our mouths, permitting us to once again enjoy the subtle tastes of fresh vegetables, this near silence allows a new set of sounds to emerge. The bleating of sheep. Laughter of children. The sound of our own breath.

I know you just took a deep breath; I did. Let’s keep using our imagination. There are no cars. There’s no electricity. No email. No podcasts. No watches. All of life is designed around basic human needs. People live close together rather than in isolated McMansions. Distances are based on how far people’s feet can take them. There are no parking lots.

Everything is slow. Gloriously slow. The earth’s natural cycles determine when when we go to sleep and when we wake up. There is no concern about “blue light” at 1:00am. When darkness begins fall, your time is up! Those same cycles determine when we plant and when we harvest. Some times of the year EVERYONE is out in the fields, regardless of their trade. The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Other times, there is relatively little to do except rest and connect. People are rarely in a rush. Company is welcome.

Virtually everyone works hard with their hands and feet. Like the Amish (who purportedly walk 16,000 steps a day and whose obesity rate is a scant 3%), essentially everyone not affected by a viral illness is thin and fit. There are no “lifestyle diseases”, just nasty bugs that go around culling the weak and the elderly. Most people walk constantly and together. There is a strong oral tradition. Conversation and ideas flood people’s minds and I imagine that much of that dialogue happened while walking places.

All food is “unrefined” and fresh because it simply won’t keep. Meals are slow and collective. There are no artificial sweeteners. No additives. No industrial oils. Everything is organic and free range. Fasting happens every week. Food indulgence is relatively rare, only occurring at weddings and religious festivals. Unless you are the king or in the small upper echelon of society, food is simple.

This is the everyday backdrop of Jesus’ life.

Now, I am not saying that those days represented some kind of utopian ideal. Nor am I advocating a return to a luddite mode of existence. I like my car and my laptop and the internet and anesthetic and antiperspirant and glasses. I am merely pointing out that the world Jesus walked in was optimized for our bodies. It was the opposite of obesogenic. Thinogenic?

Some people want a “Jesus Diet” to follow. They desire to codify the Scriptures in order to develop a diet plan for people to follow like a new form of food-legalism. They commit the exegetical sin of mixing up “description” with “prescription”. I promise not to do that. I have no desire to suggest that the best diet is one of only things we know Jesus ate. That misses the point.

What I do want to suggest is that we as a society are really good at anticipating the benefits of a new technology without considering its dangers or disadvantages. Think about the lightbulb. Pretty great invention, right? It lets us stay up as late as we want. Doesn’t create any fumes. No longer are we subject to God’s inconvenient daily rhythms. But now employers can make us work late. Now instead of winding down in the evenings we get all jazzed up. Our God-given circadian rhythms have become askew. We live in perpetual twilight. Some even blame the resulting lack of healthy sleep for the obesity epidemic. There is a downside to the lightbulb.

Or consider email, which is now considered “old tech”. It used to be that you could only correspond with so many people by mail. Catching up only happened at family reunions or by snail-mail. The work of communicating had to be done by a more labour intensive means. When email arrived, we sincerely thought that we would save ourselves hours per week in time. But what happened? We used the time savings to squeeze out higher expectations and productivity.

I humbly submit that we have been fattened, among other things, but our own ingenuity. Everything is ultra-refined. Our tastebuds have been spoiled by food engineered to send “bliss” signals to our brains. Our overwhelming wealth and prosperity has led to a crisis of lifestyle. Our baseline is so very high now, we need to overdose in order to feel the hit.

I remember when worked a labour-intensive job and had thick callouses on my hands. When my first son was born I remember reaching out to touch his cheek with my fingers and I actually couldn’t feel him. I saw my digits making contact with his face, but his skin was so soft that no sensation made it through to my fingertips. I believe that many of our palates are in the same state. Our tongues are dull to the subtle flavours of simple foods.

Maybe we need to take one step back to move two steps forward. Maybe we need a sabbath. Perhaps we should think about how we have been enslaved by our lightbulbs, our email inboxes, and our hyper-convenient, hyper-palatable diets, rather than being served by them. Man was not made for the sabbath. Rather, the sabbath was made for man. God-willing, when we turn down the clamour, the silence will be music to our ears.