Written by Dr. Nathan Brasfield
“Did Jesus eat fish?”
“Should we eat fish ourselves?”
This question about whether or not we should do something based on Jesus’s behavior reminds me that I grew up during the W.W.J.D. craze in the United States, which stands for “What would Jesus do?” I had the typical ‘90s-style oversized t-shirt with W.W.J.D. on the front, a board game, probably a necklace, a coffee mug, and, of course, the nylon bracelets that came in as many colors as one could dream. I remember having two of these bracelets (though I definitely could have had more) — a standard black one with block lettering and a sort of deluxe black one with fancy swooping green lettering in various hues that had a clasp in the shape of a fish instead of the standard rectangle shape.
Looking back, all I see in the W.W.J.D. fad is a strange (and very profitable) manifestation of capitalistic cultural Christianity combined with fashion, which is a dangerous combination. But, maybe I was just too young to see at the time that the question behind the once ubiquitous acronym, “What would Jesus do?” was posing a very good question.
Rather often, I see Christians justify their stances on contested topics by making past-tense claims about Jesus. Those claims involve saying things like “Jesus was a refugee,” “Jesus was poor,” “Jesus was not American,” “Jesus never said anything against gay marriage,” and so on.
Not to say that the details about the life of Jesus as they are given to us in the Gospels are irrelevant to Christian ethics, but, Christian ethics so often suffers from a failure of imagination. Saying, “Jesus did/did not do x” is an example. We must refrain from settling moral issues by merely making appeals to history or exegesis. Instead, we must give our hearts and minds to the real and complicated situations we face in this world. After all, we have a model for moral imagination in the way that Jesus lived and taught. He is portrayed in the Gospels teaching through figurative language and through parables that call for the listener to thoughtfully respond to a given situation.
So, the truer, more appropriate question of Christian discipleship that we should ask as we follow in the way of Jesus is not “What did Jesus do?,” but rather “What would Jesus do?” just as the bracelets say. The lesson we can learn from these Christian fashion accessories of a bygone era, therefore, is that the more compelling question for us is not “Did Jesus, as a first-century Palestinian, eat fish, and should we?” Rather, it is, “Would Jesus eat fish as a twenty-first-century customer at a grocery store with plenty of other accessible, affordable, and nutritious options — and, should we?”
In answering the second question — What would Jesus do? — it is still helpful to consider the first question — What did Jesus do? — even if the answer to the first question does not define what we should do today.
In response to the first question about what Jesus did do, I’m not aware of a historical case to conclude that Jesus did not eat fish. Fish was typical food for the area around the Sea of Galilee where Jesus grew up and developed his movement. Also, no Christian sources about the life of Jesus indicate that he refused to eat fish.
Additionally, several texts seem to indicate that Jesus was a participant in the local fishing economy. At least once in all four Gospels Jesus miraculously multiplies a small supply of bread and fish to feed thousands (Matthew 14:13-21, 15:31-39; Mark 6:31-44, 8:1-9; Luke 9:12-17; John 6:1-14). In two different stories — Luke 5:4-11 and Matthew 17:17-24 — Jesus instructs the disciples to go fishing. When the disciples follow Jesus’s instructions, Jesus works miracles. These miracles teach a lesson that seems to affirm fishing and have nothing to do with giving it up. Elsewhere, Jesus seems to acknowledge that asking for and receiving fish is perfectly acceptable (Matthew 7:10; Luke 11:11). Indeed, in John 21:1-14, Jesus is pictured preparing a breakfast of fish and bread for the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee following his resurrection. That text implies rather simply that Jesus ate some of this breakfast himself.
Jesus almost certainly ate fish in first-century Palestine, but his experience differs significantly from eating the fish available at typical twenty-first-century grocery stores and restaurants. In contrast to the small-scale fishing that would have been practiced on the Sea of Galilee, today’s farmed and wild-caught fish industries are ecologically destructive and abusive toward animals, both human and non-human.
What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do if everything unjust about the seafood industry were true of his food system? Or, what would he do if he were still showing up on the shores of our lakes and oceans to share breakfast with his disciples today?
Based on everything we know about the character of Jesus in the Gospels, it would scarcely make sense for Jesus to prepare a meal for his disciples that would involve seafood from today’s restaurants and grocery stores.
I suspect that the peace- and justice-loving Jesus of the Gospels would eat fish today with those who need to eat it because they are hungry. And I suspect this same Jesus would not eat the fish available today if he could just as easily avoid it. The theological and moral imagination that Jesus inspires in me brings me to this moment, in the context of our current food system, and leads me to make a call about how I can be peaceful and just now in my food choices. The historical or textual reality about what Jesus did, or does in the Gospel stories, remains grounded in another context in the past long ago. But this, the W.W.J.D. question, is about now.
Facing the now question of what we are called to as Christians participating in today’s industrial food system, I am confronted with the various facets of the “now-ness” of our food system that — if the consistent character of Jesus in the New Testament indicates anything — Jesus would also have confronted, as surely as he ate fish in a time when doing so was not merely enjoyable or preferable but necessary. These facets of “the now time,” which are urgent realities, (e.g., Romans 8:18) are formed of intersectional issues. Such issues are bound up together and mutually expressive of each other, such as racial and economic oppression, ecological pillaging, greed, and the abuse of creaturely bodies — human and non-human.
Jesus almost certainly ate fish, but he would almost certainly not eat fish if doing so meant feeding one’s inclination toward “hubris, hedonism, envy, arrogance, acquisitiveness, self-aggrandizement, hostility, or violence.” If today, the choice is between eating fish from an industry virtually built upon a foundation of these vices or choosing not to, we must ask ourselves what the “faithful obedience toward God and meek, compassionate, self-emptying service” of Jesus means to us and what our behavior has to do with the behavior of Jesus after all.