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Philoptochos Spiritual Enrichment Series |
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Fasting |
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| Prayer Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. |
Vitamin
Verse And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know; that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy. 8:3) |
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| Inspiration Today people fast (or abstain) for all kinds of reasons, including political reasons. It is important, therefore, to discern the uniquely Christian content of fasting. Its meaning is found in the interdependence of two Bible events. The first event is the "breaking of the fast" by Adam in Paradise. The account of him eating the forbidden fruit reveals to us the origin of sin and death. The second event is the coming of Christ, the New Adam, who begins His ministry by fasting. Adam was tempted and he succumbed to temptation; Christ was tempted and He overcame that temptation. The results of Adam's failure are expulsion from Paradise and death. The fruits of Christ's victory are the destruction of death and our return to Paradise. In this perspective, fasting is revealed to us as something decisive and ultimate in its importance. It is not a mere "obligation," or custom; it is connected with the very mystery of life and death, of salvation and damnation. The world and food were created as means of communion with God, and only if they are accepted for God's sake were to give life. Food, in itself, has no life and cannot give life. Only God has Life and is Life. Thus to eat, to be alive, to know God and be in communion with Him were one and the same thing. The unfathomable tragedy of Adam is that he ate for its own sake. More than that, he ate "apart" from God in order to be independent of Him. He believed that food had life in itself and could make him like God. To put it very simply: he believed in food, whereas the only object of belief and of dependence is God and God alone. And so sin and death came into the world. For Holy Scripture and Christian Tradition, this life "by bread alone" is identified with mortal life, because death is the principle always at work in it. Christ is the New Adam. He comes to repair the damage inflicted on life by Adam, to restore man to true life, and thus He also begins with fasting. "When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, He became hungry." Hunger is that state in which we realize that our life is dependent on something else. It is no accident that at Christ's time of hunger, Satan comes to tempt Him just as he had to done to Adam. He came to two hungry men and said: eat, for your hunger is the proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is food. Christ rejected that temptation and said: man shall not live by bread alone but by God. In so doing, He restored that relationship between food, life, and God which Adam broke, and which we still break every day. Ultimately, to fast means only one thing: to be hungry-to go to the limit of that human condition which depends entirely on food and, being hungry, to discover that this dependency is not the whole truth about man, that hunger itself is first of all a spiritual state and that it is in its last reality hunger for God. We should fast for God's sake, asking Him for help and also making our fast God-centered. It is here that we discover also that fasting, as a physical effort is totally meaningless without its spiritual counterpart: "…by fasting and prayer." This means that without the corresponding spiritual effort, without feeding ourselves with the Divine Reality we indeed would not pass the many temptations that come with fasting. The entire Lenten worship is a constant reminder of the difficulties, the obstacles and the temptations that await those who think that they may depend on their will power and not on God. Adapted from: Great Lent, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, St. Vladimir Seminary Press |
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