Every Sunday millions of Americans file into churches all across the country and look up at the svelte, tortured physique of Jesus on the cross and are shamed by the fact they fail to live up to His ideal Body Mass Index (BMI).
While we can’t say with any certainty exactly how thin and chiseled Jesus was, we know that he walked a lot, and he worked as a carpenter during a time before circular saws, so that must have been a physically demanding job. But perhaps the greatest textual evidence we have of Jesus’s gossamer figure is that he once walked on water, so he must have been on the waifish side for a savior.
Americans, by contrast, have been drifting further and further away from Jesus’s good example. A recent study puts the average Body Mass Index of Americans at just below 30. For a little context, a healthy BMI lies between 18.5 and 25 while 30 is the cutoff separating the merely overweight from the obese. When it comes to lifestyle choices, the average American eats more like the Roman politicians who condemned Jesus, rather than Jesus himself.
It’s understandable, of course. Jesus is a demanding role model. According to his biographers, he once fed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two small fish. A reduced calorie meal of that sort is a rare occurrence in American homes; only the most dedicated followers of Christ could be satisfied by such paltry serving sizes. Even if the bread loaves in Christ’s time were on the large side, the fact that His guests left satisfied is nothing short of miraculous – at least by American standards.
Christians aren’t ones to shy away from guilt, but it might do churches a bit of good to employ a more portly Jesus on the cross moving forward.