The Fasting Practiceনমুনা

Day 4: To Stand With the Poor

Over the last three sessions, we’ve explored the power of fasting for personal transformation; now, we’re ready to shift from the internal to the external — the power of fasting for social transformation.

This is one aspect of fasting that may be new to you; you may not think of fasting as a vehicle for the biblical vision of justice, but in the imagination of the biblical writers, it is.

Isaiah 58 is one of the most essential passages on fasting in all of Scripture. In context, God is speaking through the prophet Isaiah to the people of Israel, who were intended to be a “kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6), a channel of God’s rule and reign to the wider world, but were falling woefully short. The people are asking Isaiah: We are fasting, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Why is God not hearing our prayer?

God replies that fasting is not only to offer ourselves to God, and to grow in holiness, and to amplify our prayers; there’s more to it. The motivation for the type of fasting God wants is to: fight injustice, free people from oppression, share your food with the hungry, provide shelter to refugees, immigrants, and those with no home; to clothe the naked and to meet the practical needs of people all around you.

If you practice this kind of fasting, listen to what will happen: “Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.”

This is a whole other dimension to fasting than the previous three sessions; one that has less to do with us and more to do with others, in particular, the poor.

You see, in the biblical imagination, almsgiving is just as tied to fasting as prayer. In the same way that it’s hard to imagine fasting without praying — it’s theoretically possible, but it’s kind of missing the whole point — to the biblical mind, it’s just as illogical to practice fasting without generosity, service, and justice.

This type of fasting is a way to do three things:

First, to stand in solidarity with the hungry. Regularly going without food by choice, can put us emotionally in touch with the millions of people around the world and in our own countries who regularly go without food not by choice.

Second, it’s to share what we have. What we give up in money spent on food can be turned into generosity to the poor; and what we give up in time spent on food — shopping, cooking, eating, cleaning up — can be spent in service of the poor. There’s a long-standing tradition in the Catholic church of fasting on Fridays and serving that day in a food pantry or soup kitchen or local nonprofit. This is one way to not just “talk” about justice, but to do justice.

Finally, it can enable us to stand against evil. Fasting can be a loving, non-violent way to protest systemic injustice. It’s a way for the powerful to voluntarily align with the powerless, as Jesus himself did for us.

Now we come to the end of our reading plan. We’ve done our best over the last four days to lay out a vision of fasting as one of the most powerful and essential of all the practices of Jesus. And our hope is not just that you practice fasting a few times, but that you integrate fasting into your Rule of Life, or your overall lifestyle, as most followers of Jesus have done until recent history.

The story of Scripture begins with a fast — the church fathers all point out the first command in Scripture, in Genesis 3, is to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But Scripture ends with a feast, in Rev. 21-22, where all God’s people, from every tribe, tongue, and nation, gather around the table with Jesus himself. No more fasting, no more hunger, no more solidarity with the poor because there are no more poor. When we feast, we act out an advance sign of our glorious future. And when we fast, we pray with our bodies for Jesus to drag his future into the present; we pray, in the words of the early church, “Maranatha; Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”

So, may you feast, and may you fast, and may we together hasten Jesus’ return to make all things new.