Pastor Tom Johnson, February 24, 2021
Eve and Adam were not hungry in the Garden of Eden. They could eat from any plant or tree except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent tempted them—not with hunger—but to crave what God had forbidden. Satan craved the fracture of our intimate relationship with God. And so he sweetened humanity’s fall into sin with a lie—the lie that we would not die but become like gods.
Craving food that we are not permitted to eat is a transgression of the tenth commandment—you shall not covet. Eve “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.” First she coveted or craved. Then “she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.” Just as Jesus warns that adultery does not begin with the act but the eye and heart that lusts, so stealing this fruit from God’s garden begins with the heart and stomach that crave. Like our first parents, we also crave what God has not given to us.
You will remember that when God delivered the Israelites out of 400 years of slavery, God fed them the bread from heaven. The hunger was satisfied. But their cravings were not. They longed for the meat pots and great variety of food back in Egypt when they were slaves. Their craving and lack of gratitude for what God had given them threatened to fracture their relationship and covenant with God. These Scriptures remind us that craving is not the same thing as hunger. Craving is a desire to have certain foods that taste good or make us feel good. We can confuse craving with hunger. Especially for those of us of privilege who have rarely missed a meal, craving can be easy to confuse with hunger.
True hunger is when the body has started to deplete its reserves. We can crave chocolate but we are not really hungry for chocolate. We just want our taste buds to tingle. We can crave coffee or tea but what we may really want is the caffeine. Or we crave alcohol or drugs—not because they will sustain us bodily—but we want to self-medicate. When our craving is out of control or when our craving controls us we call that addiction. This teaches us something about sin and what God wants for us in our lives. He wants us to be free from the power and seduction of the things of this world. There may not be anything wrong with many of the things we crave or desire. The danger is when the pursuit of those things begins to consume us.
One great way to discipline the cravings of the body is through fasting. We can reprogram our minds and bodies to realize that we really do not need all the things we crave. We can discover—through true hunger—a more essential and basic need. When we are truly hungry, we are not picky. We realize our need for nutrition, to rebuild cells, and give us the energy our bodies need to live. And so God wants us to cultivate a taste for his Word—as 1 Peter chapter 2 says, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
I remember not liking some of the food that my parents enjoyed. When I asked them about it they said, “When you get older, you develop a taste and a palate for different foods.” I’ve told my kids the same thing. Here Scripture is telling us—not to cultivate an adult palate—but an infant palate—to crave our mother’s milk. Just as Jesus tells us that we must become like little children to enter the Kingdom, so we must become like infants to grow in the Kingdom. The Holy Spirit works to to develop our palates for Word and Sacrament.
God wants us to come to him like infants who long for their mother’s milk. Infants intuitively know that their mother’s milk provides all that they need to sustain their bodies and grow. And so, like God’s newborns, we come to trust God knowing—like all good mothers—God gives us all that we need to grow into the people he wants us to be. God craves a relationship with each of us. Jesus craves our forgiveness and eternal life so much so that he tasted death for us. The Holy Spirit craves that we cultivate a taste for nurture and growth in his Kingdom until we all celebrate the marriage feast of the Lamb in his Kingdom that will have no end. And so we taste and see that the Lord is good.
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