Friday Afternoon

Friday Afternoon
Genesis 1: 27-30

My wife and I have friends who used to keep an animal or two, and when we stayed with them for the weekend we were introduced to a calf called Jeremy. It was at Sunday lunch that we met him. They brought Jeremy up, had him slaughtered and cut up, and put him in their freezer. This happened thirty years ago, but I still remember his name. It seemed horrible that we were eating him. Genesis rather suggests that there is indeed something barbaric about one creature eating another. In the West we are usually shielded from the fact that we eat creatures that were once full of life like us; we buy our meat in packages from the supermarket, sanitized. This also shields us from the barbaric nature of the practices whereby animals are reared and killed for us...

It doesn’t fit with the logic of our being made in God’s image. When Genesis told us about the creation of plants and trees on day three, it mentioned only the trees that bear fruit. There was no mention of beech trees and redwoods. Here, the reason becomes clear. Genesis was concerned about plants and trees as sources of food. God now gives the plants and the fruit trees to humanity to eat and also gives to the rest of the animal world all the other plants, the ones human beings don’t eat. The shocking implication is that both humanity and the rest of the animate world were designed to be vegetarian. It is only after humanity has become disobedient to God that it eats meat; in the time of Noah, God then agrees to this (Genesis 9:1–3). But at the time of creation, the thought of humanity eating meat was not in God’s mind. So much for the idea that humanity is free to do what it likes with the world, to treat it as belonging to us, available for our exploitation. We were not even free to eat the animals we were put in charge of. So people who do not eat meat are witnessing to an aspect of God’s actual creation intent, whether they realize it or not...

Taken from Genesis for Everyone Part 1 by John Goldingay