Jesus once told his disciples, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34). As someone who loves food, I wanted to find his metaphor appealing. But I found myself choking on it; it just sounded way too religious to me. So, it’s understandable if it sounds that way to you. But I’ve since learned that the burden of having to be way too religious never came from Jesus. And … the more you know about “his food,” the more appealing it becomes.

So take a look at the backstory to Jesus’ statement, the bigger story that puts it in context, and finally, why Jesus’ favorite food is better than anything you’ve ever tasted.

Jesus’ Food: The Backstory

Jesus and his disciples are on their way from Judea to their home base in Galilee. They stop in Samaria, whose inhabitants have a centuries-old bone to pick with Jewish people, and vice versa. Jesus’ disciples leave him resting at a well while they go into town to get some food. They return to find Jesus finishing up a conversation with a woman.

The disciples are amazed. Not only is their rabbi talking to a Samaritan, but he’s talking to a woman he doesn’t know—and one who, it seems, has been marginalized even among her peers.¹ More traditional rabbis of that day would have avoided her based on race, gender, and social standing. But while the disciples are amazed, they don’t ask him about her. Instead, they start passing out the food, saying, “Rabbi, eat!”

Jesus responds, “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (John 4:32)

By now, the woman is racing back to the village. Her conversation with Jesus has affected her so deeply that she wants everyone to come and see him. Still, the disciples don’t ask Jesus about her. Instead, they wonder among themselves whether someone else came by to deliver Jesus a good, kosher meal. That’s when Jesus tells his disciples about the most kosher² food of all: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34). When Jesus says “the one who sent me,” he’s talking about God.³

Jesus never ran out of “food” to satisfy his appetite for doing God’s will and his work. He was filling up on that food as he connected with the woman, whose story you can read for yourself (John 4:5–26). To summarize, Jesus was tired and hungry, but he saw an opportunity to talk to someone who had been looking for love in all the wrong places. He showed her that she was known, she mattered, and that her mistakes didn’t have to be the last word in her story. And he revealed to her that he was the Messiah.

So, when the disciples return with the food, Jesus apparently felt spiritually energized and full. Was he down for a little DoorDash? Probably. But Jesus wanted his disciples to understand how fulfilling it was for him to do God’s will and God’s work. Ultimately, he wanted them to experience both the hunger and the satisfaction that he felt. He also understood that this kind of hunger didn’t come naturally to them—any more than it does to us today.

Jesus’ Food: The Bigger Story

It’s tempting to dismiss “God’s will” and “God’s work” as irrelevant, trite religious phrases, or as an endless burden. But there is a third option, one that can help us embrace and even hunger for God’s will and his work, like Jesus did.

First, what does the phrase “God’s will” actually mean? God’s will is simply what God wants, and if you want to know what he wants, you look at what he commands. When Jesus was asked which of God’s commandments was the most important, he referred to the Jewish Bible,⁴ saying that the first commandment is to love the Lord with all your heart. And the second, vitally connected to the first, is to love your neighbor as yourself.  The entire Law was summed up in those two, he said.⁵ That’s not a recipe for being religious; it’s a recipe for a relationship with God and other people.

What about God’s work? We first see his work mentioned in the book of Genesis. On the Sabbath, God rested from his work of creation. That creation included human beings who were made to love God, each other, and the beautiful world God had gifted to us.

Genesis 3 shows how we turned away from God’s will by eating forbidden fruit. We’ve pretty much been preoccupied with satisfying our own will ever since. Like a terminal spiritual illness, trusting what we want instead of what God wants kills the relationship he wanted us to have with him, one another, and the world he entrusted to us.

God’s will has never changed. He still wants us to love him and to love each other. His work has been to restore our ability to do that, and to restore his creation. That has been God’s promise from the beginning—a promise on which the ultimate hope of the Jewish people was built.

Jesus’ Food: Why It’s Better Than Ice Cream

Remember the saying, “You are what you eat”? Apply it to Jesus’ favorite “food” of doing God’s will and God’s work. Jesus personifies wholehearted love for God and for people. He personifies God’s work of tikkun olam, repairing the world. If you want to know what God’s will and God’s work look like, they don’t look like religion; they look like relationship. They look like Jesus.

Jesus showed us the beauty of God’s will and God’s work. But he also did what we could not do. On the cross, he swallowed the ultimate consequence of our failure to choose God’s will over our own. But he had not been guilty of that failure, and he rose from the dead. Our failures don’t have to be the last word in our stories. When we embrace what Jesus did for us, we repent, he atones for our sins, and we step into the best story of all. Knowing we’re forgiven and loved by God frees us to love him back, and to share his love with others.

Jesus didn’t see God’s will and God’s work as endless religious boxes to be checked, but as life-giving, relationship-building realities. And because of him, we can, too.

For reflection:

What favorite person or thing do you think about all (or most) of the time? How does that affect who you are?

1 The fact that she was drawing water in the heat of the day when other women would have gotten theirs in the cool of the morning indicates that she probably was not comfortable with them, nor they with her.

2 Since “kosher” means clean or acceptable in the sight of God, being fed and energized by doing God’s will and God’s work is about as kosher as you can get.

3 John 8:42.

4 Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.

5 Matthew 22:37–40.