Colours of Love – Indigo... reflecting (Lent 1, Sunday)
Fasting
John Dunnill
If you are following our Lent theme, by coming to the Wednesday
meditations or by using the daily readings in this booklet, you’ll realise
why we have dark blue cloths (and objects) displayed this morning. We are
following a theme of colours and the things they can mean to us, “Colours
of Love” from Violet to Red. We began on Ash Wednesday with the colour
Violet, standing for repentance or returning to God; and in this week we
move into Indigo, for reflection.
The Gospel reading reminds us how Jesus, immediately after his Baptism in
the Jordan, withdrew into the wilderness for a time of reflection. What
did it mean that he had experienced an inrush of power from the Holy
Spirit and heard a divine voice pronouncing:
“You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased”?
It was a time to retreat and reflect, to seek out the path of obedience to
God’s calling. But the questions he found himself asking exposed him to as
many possibilities of disobedience and rebellion. There’s a sense in which
this reflection, and the wrestling with the evil one which it involved,
were lifelong activities for Jesus. But we meet them here expressed as a
single struggle at a turning point of his life at the start of his public
ministry. The struggle takes the form of Question and Answer: great
Questions of Life, answered, in every case, with a quotation from
scripture – in fact all from the Book of Deuteronomy, chapters 6-8 . I
think we are to picture Jesus, in his desert retreat, reading slowly and
prayerfully this great text about how to live before God.
The questions are big ones. First, an obvious question to a man who has
been fasting for forty days: what am I doing enduring this hunger? But
behind that is another question: Why is there hunger in the world? That
is, why do we need this perpetual attention to food and drink? Why can we
not be like spirits and just live? The answer Jesus finds in Deuteronomy
8: 3 puts all these things into perspective. Yes food is important, but:
“You shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the
mouth of God’.
And a second question is about power. How can we get power to live at
peace in the world, or (looking at the world’s needs) how do we get the
power to do the good that needs doing? The answer Jesus finds in
Deuteronomy 6: 13 points out that power is a useful tool but a dangerous
master. If we long for power, are we sure we can control it? or will it
control us, become our god, the thing we serve, which directs our lives?
When we look at international politics and business, don’t we see people
ruled by a lust for power, a power which sometimes takes them over? So
Jesus gains guidance from these words of scripture: “You shall worship the
Lord your God and him only shall you serve”.
The third question is: does God care? For Jesus it arose as he sat alone
in the desert, wondering about how to proceed; for us it gushes at times
out of a well of loneliness and self-pity: Does God care about me? Why is
God so silent? Does God even exist? For Jesus it was a specific question:
“Am I really God’s Beloved? What does that mean?” Here’s a scripture in
the Psalm which says God will catch me if I fall - let’s test it out,
throw myself off a pinnacle and see what God does. But the answer he also
finds in scripture (Deut 6: 16) and it is clear: “You shall not put the
Lord your God to the test”. God’s love is to be discovered by trusting God
to love, not by forcing God to do what I demand.
The mention of forty days in the desert of course reminds us of Israel’s
forty-years of wandering. All three temptations are matters which Israel
also faced during that time, and failed, just as you and I would have
failed.
Under pressure, they grumbled about food (Ex 16), they lost hope in God
and turned to idolatry (Ex 32, Numbers 25), and they put God to the Test
(Exodus 17). Israel too was called God’s son (‘Out of Egypt have I called
my son’ said the prophet (Hosea 11: 1)); but where that first son failed
to live in and with and for God, Jesus shows he can succeed.
Jesus now has the answers he needs. In the record of his ministry we see
him living by them: listening to God’s word in scripture and prayer;
worshipping God and making God and God’s purposes the centre of his life;
moving onwards into God’s future in trust, even when his calling took him
into difficult places, into the darkness and danger of the cross.
He also offers us a pattern of living by which we too can live as sons and
daughters of God: living in daily attentiveness to God through scripture
and prayer, putting God’s purposes at the centre of our lives, worshipping
God in our actions, learning to trust God in good times and in bad.
I want to focus on one particular way in which we can grow closer to Jesus
in his walk with God, a way that the Gospel text simply takes for granted
but which is largely ignored by Christians today and that is the
discipline of fasting.
Jesus, at this turning point of his life, chose to undergo an extreme
fast, forty days without food (although presumably not without water).
There is nothing supernatural or superhuman about this: the human body
cannot last without water for more than a few days, but six weeks without
food is not impossible for one who is trained in the discipline, as no
doubt Jesus was.
But for most people now ‘fasting’ suggests something heroic and/or
undesirable, and anyway something old fashioned that we don’t need to
bother about these days. Why is that?
We are aware that regular fast days are a normal part of religious
practice all over the world: The Jewish Day of Atonement; the Christian
forty days of Lent; we are even becoming familiar with the demands of the
Muslim fast of Ramadan, which involves a total fast (no food or water)
during daylight hours for a whole month.
And as well as these communal times of fasting, religious people have
always used fasting as a means of giving special attention to God, as
Jesus was doing in the desert. Jesus gave his disciples instructions about
‘what to do when you pray” And ‘what to do when you fast’. ‘Prayer and
fasting’ – don’t they go together like bacon and eggs? (Perhaps that’s the
wrong metaphor!) Together, they are how people put themselves in touch
with God, especially in a time of trouble or decision making.
But let’s face it, we do little enough of one and almost nothing of the
other. In fact, we avoid fasting like poison. There has to be something
odd about this. Here we are, enjoying unparalleled security and freedom to
live how we want, and we’re chained to our stomachs. We can’t stop eating,
or if we do it’s to improve our figure or our health. Some of us can well
do with improving our figure. But if I were to suggest that we should do
what Christians did for centuries, go without food every Wednesday and
Friday, you would probably think I’d gone cranky. What! (you would think)
How will we live? We might try living as Christians have always claimed to
live: “not by bread alone”. I don’t see Muslims dying in the streets
during the holy month of Ramadan. What’s our problem?
I think our problem is that we do enjoy such a high standard of living. We
live in a high consumption society; we are attuned to a high metabolism, a
high energy output, which we feel we need to maintain. Of course we don’t
need to do that, or not all the time. But there are powerful commercial
pressures telling us we must consume all the time – food, drink, washing
machines, mobile phones – if you’ve got one already why not have three? If
in doubt eat something!
All this is normal and natural for us, and I don’t think Christians are
much different from anyone else in this respect. Perhaps they should be.
We talk about living ‘not by bread alone’, but there is always bread in
the larder and on the table. Do we stop eating long enough to need our
next meal? Do we trust God to care for us through a day, say, without food
– or does the very thought make you reach for the biscuit barrel? Are we a
whole society of comfort-eaters? Is food our god? I wonder what we look
like to outsiders – for example to Christians in poorer countries where
people get by with a fraction of the food that we eat. Do we look like
spiritual cripples attached to a life-support machine called the
Supermarket?
The ancient discipline of fasting puts a question mark against all this.
It calls us to stand back from the cycle of consumption to make space in
our lives for God. Can we try it?
There are many possible forms and patterns. A little bit of abstinence is
a small move in that direction – when we give up chocolate or alcohol for
Lent. This is good, as long as we do it, though it won’t take cost us much
or us very far.. Or we can change our life a bit, eat less for a while. Or
we can have two meals a day rather than three. Better again is to have a
day without food, say, once a week, miss a meal or two, but drink plenty
of water and fruit juice. There’s nothing extreme in any of this, and it
can all be fitted very comfortably into our daily routines. But we can’t
do this without choosing, and without noticing. And that’s the point. We
have to ask ourselves: Yes did I need that extra meal? Do I regularly over
eat? It may help us to get some balance into our life and our diet.
If you want to be sure all this is doing some good, and not just for
yourself, you can put aside the money you save and give it to a good
cause, famine relief, for example, or development aid.
But, to begin with, it is about slowing our lives down from time to time,
learning to live ‘not by bread alone’; it is about bodily discipleship,
training our bodies to worship GOD, not the supermarket trolley.
It will have an effect. You can be sure it will reveal some of your
weaknesses. When you stop eating do you become anxious? – (ah, so you were
comfort-eating!). Do you become irritable and uncharitable? – and is that
the fault of the fasting, or is it bringing out some unpleasant sides of
yourself, things you usually keep hidden? We don’t like facing weaknesses,
but we don’t grow unless we do.
Fasting is not a form of punishment, and it’s not a heroic virtue, though
it may be a challenge. It is essentially – what Jesus was using it for in
those forty days – an aid to reflection. It helps us to become aware of
ourselves, to identify our needs and develop our strengths. It helps us
become more aware of God, where God is in our lives and where God is not;
who God is for us and what God wants to give us.
Jesus taught his disciples to pray: “Give us today our daily bread”. Well,
we know all about bread from Woolworth’s, but what is this ‘daily bread’
that God longs to give us ? Do we stop eating substitutes long enough to
find out?
Revised webmaster
Wednesday, 16 June 2004