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A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

We Will Feast

we will feast

In his sermon this past Sunday, Pastor Justin illuminated some of the ways in which we are so tempted to “declare” our fast - by posting on social media or telling everyone around that we are fasting from food, or alcohol, or social media. Quite in contrast to this description of how many people embark on fasting in a public manner, I am one who rarely proclaims my fast. My intentions for fasting are never broadcast, and I am always as innocuous as possible in my fasting. And the reason that I do so, I would have liked to think, is because of Jesus’ admonition against public fasting in Matthew 6: “But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret.”

Now, before you stop reading, thinking that this is a reflection on how much holier I am than you, I want you to hear that I am attempting to describe how my heart is, in fact, exceedingly malformed and misshapen in regards to this discipline of fasting. For lent this year, I decided to give up alcohol. I decided this quietly and resolved to do so as innocuously as possible; my wife didn’t know about my fast until halfway through lent. But as I reflect on my reason for my silence, it is not because I am following Jesus’ command, but rather because I wanted to be able to leave off my fast at any time with no accountability. Moreover, I had exceedingly little motivation for abstaining from alcohol for the growth of my relationship with God, but rather was thinking that my belly was growing a bit big and restricting alcohol would go a long way in that direction! I’m sure there are a litany of other despicable justifications for my I chose that fast and to do so in silence. 

In this week’s passage from Isaiah 58, we saw how malformed the Israelites’ hearts were as well; though they fasted sought God daily, their fasts were fruitless and unattended by God. And God decries the motivations of their hearts in their actions: “Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure, and oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicked fist.” The image is clearly painted of how we can have the most “righteous” of actions, if our hearts are sinfully motivated, there is no gain or good to come of our actions. So too, in my quiet, innocuous fast, when I am motivated primarily by a desire to not be seen as a failure, when I am primarily motivated to try to look better, how foolish am I to expect to draw nearer to our Lord. 

When I consider my dislike for the discipline of fasting, I think it in large part because it exposes how utterly dependent I am upon food and how weak and frail my body truly is - I hate it when I realize how weak my body truly is! Similarly, I have recently realized how dependent I am upon getting 8 hours of sleep. Eight full hours of sleep! What a waste! The scientific literature suggests that each body has a different requisite amount of sleep for optimal function, averaging between about 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep, with some people only needing 6 hours while others requiring 9 or more hours of sleep. It is no end of frustrating to me that I must spend a third of my time asleep and unproductive if my other two thirds of time is to be effective! 

In a similar vein, a couple hours into a fast, I am already despising my body for its weakness and frailty, consumed in thought with how I can refill my belly. Dallas Willard, in The Spirit of the Disciplines, reflecting on the aversion to fasting, writes: “[Fasting] may bring to mind how we are using food pleasure to assuage the discomforts caused in our bodies by faithless and unwise living and attitudes—lack of self-worth, meaningless work, purposeless existence, or lack of rest or exercise.” As Willard says and as Pastor Justin illustrated with the Israelites in Isaiah 58, fasting reveals where our hearts really are; it reveals the ways in which we move and are motivated by the comfort and satisfaction of our bodies. 

The famed Scottish minister, George MacDonald, offered the sage advice, “You don’t have soul. You are a soul; you have a body.” This, I think, is the root of the difficulty with fasting: we have forgotten the primacy of our soul, and think that the satisfaction and sustenance of our bodies is primary while the maintenance and growth of our soul is secondary or tertiary. In our disenchanted world, where the spiritual realm is imaginary and purely abstract, our hearts have become malformed to seek first the nourishment of my body and after then all else will fall into place. But in fasting, we are called to a place of utter dependence upon God, where we forgo our physical nourishment to drive ourselves into humility and submission and a recognition of our weakness and dependence upon God, through which we can throw ourselves upon His good grace.

Paul, in his admonition to the Corinthians to remember the resurrection of Christ as the pinnacle of the Gospel, also enjoins upon us to remember the primacy of the soul: “I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to  pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Paul is calling us to remember that the kingdom of God is forever, that the work we put into justice and goodness and sanctification and edification, that work will endure while our weak and frail bodies will pass away to be replaced with immortal bodies, freed from the limitations and weaknesses that we endure now! And so, in light of that, we fast. We take opportunities to abstain from food for the purpose of reorienting our hearts and our minds to the work of God and to seeking first His kingdom, knowing that in the age to come, we will feast!

~Josh Spare