2023-03-02 A Meditation on Fasting
“Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicked fist. Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a person to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord? “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?” (Is 58:4–7 ESV)
By demonstrations and teaching, the soldier is tuned into a role called discernment of spirits. The time comes when we begin to pick ourselves up a bit, and the Gospel must not be a casualty of this transition. For we walk more secure when we’ve gotten good at the parlance game, the conversation, the studied signs of allegiance, the rote words of thanksgiving. For nothing is rote: we were in the trenches and alongside Christ of Nazareth, by some spirit. There we learnt to discern His Spirit over and against the world’s spirit. There we died to self and accepted a bargain with a second life, one lived in full embrace of the dying and futility, but eeking out for this brief sojourn and season, a dutiful calling to share, to live on, to preach, to testify, to love, to couch all things in that stark light of death conquered. For our sins killed us, in some mystical sense. And that is where Grace began.
When we pick ourselves up, we are flatlined yet again, taken to the mat, by our over-confident boasts: the years of difficulty are surely behind me by now! We therefore do not pause or demure around that true Gospel (trying not to say, “Today, at least, let me laze about and not preach Christ!”). The true Gospel teaches us that any God-things in our life are occasions for wicked temptations, perhaps manifested only in relatively benign habituations, but habituations that reveal a smorgasbord of “I can do this on my own!” The frustrated cry of one convicted but not converted.
His Spirit promises to meet us in truth-telling light: see how you are stuck in ruts. See how you go on auto-pilot around Lenten disciplines like food or—let’s be honest, since “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”” (Mk 7:15)—around spiritual sins within (self-loathing or self-congratulation, impatience at our neighbors as they are on display in awkward, truth-telling light). And at the end of His trials in the wilderness, angels came and ministered to Him (Mt 4:11). We are evangelicals around the claim that change is possible. People do have a fresh outpouring of Grace when coming to Jesus for once, regarding some proclivity that—truth be told—is utterly ruinous. That they cannot grapple with. And all this, masked in simple appetite that—for a season is without sin, but then for a season represents the clutching and hoarding nature of the inner Man.
Reality has a few explanations, all valid, none contradicting each other. One explanation is we need to re-discover our sinful nature in order the better to know Christ. The other explanation is we desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus. Only He feels so far away when we are up-to-speed on our fast, yet are murmuring words of panic or dilemma, even though as far as the fast is concerned, we are acing it. Outward-inward: the inner Man is strong for the journey because of a miraculous walk on water, in full view of the temptation, but this hour having a soul quieted and a hunger mitigated: we can speak out of that urgency and that prayer for the self, that the walk would continue without interruption, no matter how much we tire or wish to yell at the God who torments us, it can seem, with insignificant peccadilloes. “I got it, man! I am now graduated to higher concerns than this!” So we walk quieted and prayerful, indeed, this being the very definition of prayer, that by some forward march we find occasion unexpectedly to testify or labor out of that sense of personal defeat-yet-victory.
The discerning soldier has a history that is all wrapped up in today’s penitence, even if penitent for random or unrelated things. I humble my soul; I draw near to a sense of self-abasement, not boasting, reminded of my flawed nature and sins past. Yet also the discerning soldier is effluent in joy that, the fast broken, one can eat a meal out with a friend without violating strictures on meat or dairy. One can put on a few pounds without feeling that manifest sense of utter failure and impossibility after a morsel of food (call it anorexia). One can really allow lived experience, of embarrassingly simple tokens, to inform one’s output this day: it is a theological puzzle, not a medical or psychological puzzle, as seen here.