MAKING FASTING A RELIGIOUS SACRIFICE

FRIDAY AFTER ASH WEDNESDAY

Isa 58:1-9; Ps 51:3-6,18-19; Mt 9:14-15

THE USEFULNESS OF FASTING

We focussed yesterday on the importance of prayer and its priority among the three activities the Church invites us to carry out this Lenten season. Given various forms of prayers, we identified reading and meditation on the word of God as the key to being in God’s presence, where there is fullness of redemption for us. The Church invites us to reflect on our practice of fasting, which is an ancient religious practice, as a means of advancing our course to God. Because fasting, by its very nature, is never an end but a means to something we intend to have, it can be well-ordered or easily disordered. It is disordered when the religious and spiritual end of pleasing or reaching God, is replaced with any other self-glorifying motive. The Lord denounced the fasting of the people of Israel on this basis. “Look, you do business on your fast days, you oppress all your workmen; look, you quarrel and squabble when you fast and strike the poor man with your fist. Fasting like yours today will never make your voice heard on high. Is that the sort of fast that pleases me, a truly penitential day for men? Hanging your head like a reed, lying down on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call fasting, a day acceptable to the Lord?” Yahweh rejects our fast and other penitential practices when they are devoid of the desire to do the will of God, which is the core of repentance, prayer, and spiritual worship.

Fasting and other forms of self-mortification must be done in the spirit of self-sacrifice to God, to be religious and spiritual activities. These practices must express our willingness to do the will of the Father. We do the penitential practices to gain admittance to his presence and to be pleasing to him. Our desire to please God, and to carry out his will, is what makes us a sacrifice to God and pleasing to him. The works of charity Yahweh recommends to his people are to help order their fast and penitential practices to the proper end and not to exclude them. The charitable works rank higher than self-mortifications because their object is the good of our neighbours, who give praise God on their account. “Is not this the sort of fast that pleases me—it is the Lord who speaks—to break unjust fetters and undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke, to share your bread with the hungry, and shelter the homeless poor, to clothe the man you see to be naked and not turn from your kin?” Though these charitable works rank higher than acts of self-mortification, they are still means to the end of prayer, which is to be with God.

The possibility of disordering these charitable works prompted our Lord to admonish us to hide what our right hand is doing from our left hand; we are to do them in secret and to do the will of the Father and please him alone. We stand in danger of losing their merits when we do them without the intention of carrying out the will of the Father. The desire to do the will of the Father is the essential religious attitude that transforms us into angels of God. Our Lord expresses this teaching in the answer he gave to the disciples of John in the gospel. They asked him: “‘Why is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not?’ Jesus replied, ‘Surely the bridegroom’s attendants would never think of mourning as long as the bridegroom is still with them? But the time will come for the bridegroom to be taken away from them, and then they will fast.” The attending of the disciples to Jesus Christ, the Messiah, is the will of the Father for them and all of us. In the presence of Jesus Christ, there is fullness of redemption. Jesus called his disciples attendants to the bridegroom because they had not received the Holy Spirit that would transform them into the bride of the Lord. We need to fast and do penance whenever we discover we have lost the presence of the bridegroom by attachment to worldly things. So, it is not the activity but our conformity with the will of the Father that gives value to our religious acts.

Let us pray: Show gracious favour, O Lord, we pray, to the works of penance we have begun, that we may have strength to accomplish with sincerity the bodily observances we undertake. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.