A blog post from 2017.
Perhaps you are wondering why I have asked such an outrageous question as the title of this blog post. For those of you who have never met me and don’t know what I look like, let me assure you that I qualify as a fat person myself and this is not a post intended to degrade larger people. So why have I asked this question? Well, there are days when I look down at my wobbly middle and despise my belly fat and wish for a nice thin body. I had one of those days recently, a day when I felt nothing but shame about my body.
Body-shame is rampant in Australia, and no doubt the rest of the western world. Everywhere I turn culture is telling me to be ashamed of my body. An ad on Facebook is telling me to buy “the skinny jeans pill” that can make me shrink incredibly fast. A TV show follows people overseas for plastic surgery, which they think they need in order to feel good about themselves. Magazines tell us how to get a better, hotter body in just 2 weeks. The Biggest Loser displays the body-shame of overweight people for public enjoyment. Makeover programs show us how to become what we are not now, since what we are now is not acceptable. An endless string of diets, diet pills and fads bombard us continually. Advertisers show clothing draped on super-thin women and the rest of us can never live up to the impossible dream. It is not surprising, then, that I am often unhappy with the body I have.
I don’t want to suggest that gaining enormous amounts of weight does not come with health risks and other physical issues. But that is not what I am concerned with here. Rather I am concerned with the deeply ingrained cultural belief that fat people are less worthy of respect than thin people. Political correctness has forced most people to refrain from making negative or derogatory remarks about race, culture, gender or sexual orientation. But it is still acceptable to make fun of people and deride them because of weight. The media often portrays overweight people as ugly, lonely, stupid or unlovable.
Even worse than the fact that our culture devalues people who are overweight is the internalising of the idea that fat people are unworthy. If fat people are unworthy of being loved then I must be unacceptable, unworthy and unlovable. Fat people, that is, me, should not exist. My body is not good. It needs to be starved and carved up in order to produce a body that is acceptable and lovable. At least this is the perverse logic which my head sometimes insists on spewing out to me.
Does God love fat people then? Could God love fat people if they are so unworthy of love? Even asking this kind of question betrays a brainwashing that stems from a culture obsessed with bodily perfection, a perfection that can never be attained. The Bible never asks this kind of question. In fact the Bible has a very positive view of bodies as they are in reality.
You and I can never escape being in a body. I am my body and my body is me. Should this fact be the cause of shame? The truth about bodies is that God created them good. When he made human beings he declared that “it was very good” (Gen 1:31). Human bodies are very good and cannot be otherwise. Our bodies, however they look, are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14). More than this, the Son of God “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). When Jesus rose from the dead he did so in a body. He is eternally the embodied Son of God. The body of the eternal Son of God, Saviour of our bodies, is forever good. Since the goodness of my body began in creation and is grounded in the resurrected body of Jesus, my body can never be other than good.
“What about gluttony?” you say, “Isn’t that a sin?” No doubt excessive eating and living for eating are not good things. However, consider that in our culture it is acceptable to overindulge in almost anything except eating food. Even then it is acceptable, if not encouraged, to seek out fine dining and fine wines. Our cultural obsession with finding new food pleasures is just as much a sin as eating too many donuts. In addition, our culture values thinness so much that it has given birth to a raft of eating disorders. This too is a sin. Sins abound in relation to food and its consumption or avoidance. Therefore, being sinners is not the specific issue here, but rather the shame that attaches itself to particular body types.
So does God love fat people? God’s love for his people is not based on weight. If we believe that God loves only those with the right BMI then we have not taken this belief from the Bible, but absorbed it from the culture around us. The love of God for me and my body, belly fat included, does not depend on the success of a diet. If we take the grace of God in Christ seriously, then we must conclude that God’s love is not measured by the smallness of a waistline.
In the end this really comes down to how I choose to see myself. Do I accept the cultural meaning attached to my belly fat or do I accept what God has said about me in Christ? If I accept what culture has to say then I suppose I must be substandard as a human being since I am not thin. If on the other hand I accept what God has done in Christ, then my belly fat is irrelevant. Let me paraphrase Gal 3:5. “Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you are thin or because you believed the gospel?” In Christ I am loved, my body cannot be other than good, and I am a worthwhile human being. None of this depends on the size of my waistline. Glory to God.