The Good of Giving UpEgzanp

The Hunger Strike

At its heart, a hunger strike is a power play. It’s one of the last cards you can throw down as a prisoner, political dissident, or slave. The point is to fast in order to force the hand of the higher-ups to satisfy your demands. It’s a high-stakes move. Once you go on hunger strike and a few others join you, the game changes, or at least that’s the intention.

Hunger strikes are about power, not love. And that’s how some of our forefathers related to God. They acknowledged His influence and tried to manipulate Him. So they went without food, put on sackcloth and ashes, and waited for God to meet their demands. But God does not play games with us. He is not enticed by our bribes, impressed with our asceticism, or cowed by our manipulations.

The sad, angry people in the hunger strike are all screaming in unison:

Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it? (Isa. 58:3)

And,

It is vain to serve God. What is the profit of our keeping his charge or of walking as in mourning before the Lord of hosts? (Mal. 3:14) 

When we meet God’s commands in hope that He will meet our demands, we think we are high-functioning, pious people. We are showing God how serious we are. “I’m fasting so God will bring revival to this city,” “so my son will return to the Lord,” “to show God I’m ready to meet my spouse,” or, “so God will take this temptation away.”

By all appearances, we look spiritual, so earnest. But like our ancestors, eventually we will fall and be bitterly disappointed. The elder brother in Jesus’ parable about the Prodigal Son said to his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15:29, emphasis added). His faithfulness to his father wasn’t motivated by love, but by swag. “I served you for your goats! Where are my goats, Dad?” This is cold reciprocity laid bare. The fictional elder brother was miserable and gloomy, like the real-life Pharisees he personified.

The hunger strike scene pictures a miserable circus. Religious people jump through pointless hoops. They whip their own flesh to the point of bleeding. Everyone tries to out-suffer others in order to merit God’s intervention. This is the spiritual sickness behind the medieval practice of indulgences. Yet, there are Christians of every stripe and era in this panel, including us Protestants. All of us are capable of self-obsession that knows nothing of the original vision for Lent or Christian discipleship.

Martin Luther and his fellow Reformers were right to protest the way Lent was practiced in their day. It had become a hunger strike par excellence. Lent had become a clearinghouse for religious corruption and control.

Take a good look at this version of a hunger strike. This is in our ancestry, and it is only by God’s mercy that we ourselves are not painted in it. Heaven forbid that our Lenten practices turn us into  judgmental, arrogant cranks. We are wise to remember Paul’s admonition to the church in Galatia:

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. . . . Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? . . . Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith—just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”? (3:1–3, 5–6) 

We are not justified by fasting, prayer, and generosity. Nor are we justified by expository preaching, social justice, or reciting the Sinner’s Prayer correctly. We are justified by grace through faith. Thanks be to God! There is a place for Lent and its disciplines, so long as we don’t see them as means for a hunger strike.