The Fast

The people were fasting, and they were aggrieved that God took no notice. Wherefore have we fasted, they said, and thou seest not? Wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge? They had done the outward thing, gone without food, bowed the head, put on the sackcloth, and they felt cheated that heaven had not answered. And God’s reply is one of the most searching passages in all the prophets, for he tells them plainly that their fast, for all its hunger, was not the fast he had chosen, and that he had not been ignoring it so much as refusing it.

Behold, he says, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours; ye fast for strife and debate. Their fasting had left their hearts untouched. They abstained from food and went on with their quarrelling, their harshness, their oppression of those under them, and they thought the empty stomach would purchase what the unchanged heart had forfeited. It was fasting as a transaction, a hunger offered to bribe a God they had no intention of obeying, and God will not be bribed. The form without the substance is not a lesser fast. It is no fast at all, and God sees straight through it.

THE FAST GOD CHOOSES

And then God tells them what he actually wants. Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke. The fast God chooses turns outward in mercy. It deals bread to the hungry, brings the poor that are cast out into the house, covers the naked, and does not hide from its own flesh and blood. The true fast is not a private affliction that leaves the world untouched, but a self-denial that frees the hands to lift the burdens of others. God is not fed by our hunger. He is honored by the mercy that our hunger ought to make room for.

This does not mean the abstaining is nothing, for the Lord assumed his own people would fast and taught them how. But it means the abstaining is only the outward shell of a fast whose kernel is the turning of the whole self from its own comfort toward God and toward mercy. To go without food while the heart stays hard and the hand stays closed is to keep the shell and throw away the kernel, and to wonder, like these people, why the empty shell wins nothing from God.

FASTING FROM MORE THAN FOOD

For the deepest fast is not from food at all, but from the self and its sins. God speaks of loosing the bands of wickedness and breaking every yoke, and there are inward bands and inward yokes as well as outward ones, the appetites that master us, the anger we will not release, the tongue we will not bridle, the self- will that rules us like a tyrant. The truest fasting looses these. It denies not merely the stomach its bread but the self its indulgence, the temper its outburst, the pride its satisfaction. A man may fast from food and never once fast from his besetting sin, and it is the second fast, harder by far, that God has chosen.

And this fast is to be kept in secret, before God and not before men. When ye fast, the Lord said, be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance, for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Anoint thine head, and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret. The whole worth of the fast lies in its being offered to God alone, hidden from every eye but his, for a fast performed to be seen has already received its only reward, the seeing, and has nothing left to receive from heaven.

REND THE HEART

The prophet Joel gathered the whole matter into one great command. Rend your heart, he said, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God. The tearing of the garment was the outward sign of grief; God asks for the inward reality it was meant to signify, the torn heart, the broken and contrite spirit. Thou desirest not sacrifice, the psalmist learned, else would I give it; thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. This is the fast within the fast, the rending of the heart, without which all the outward affliction is only torn cloth and empty hunger.

And to the true fast God attaches promises that make the empty one look poor indeed. Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, he says, and thine health shall spring forth speedily. Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am. The LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. The very answer they complained they were not getting, the light, the guidance, the satisfied soul, is promised to the fast God chooses, and withheld from the fast he refuses.

THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE FAST

There is a tenderness in the Lord’s own teaching on fasting that we must not miss, for it turns the whole discipline from a grim duty into an ache of love. When the disciples of John came asking why his own disciples did not fast, he answered with a question. Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, he asked, as long as the bridegroom is with them? While he was among them, bodily present, their friend and their joy, fasting would have been as strange as mourning at a wedding. But then he added the word that explains all Christian fasting. The days will come, he said, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.

So fasting, at its deepest, is the ache of the absent Bridegroom. It is the body’s way of saying what the heart feels, that the One we love is not yet here in the fullness we long for, that we live between his going and his return, and that we would rather hunger for him than be filled without him. The empty stomach becomes a form of longing, a prayer of desire made with the flesh, a way of refusing to be too comfortable in a world from which the Bridegroom is, for now, withdrawn. To fast is to say, with the body, that we are not yet home, and will not pretend we are.

This lifts fasting above mere self-discipline, above the training of the will or the mastery of the appetites, real and good as those things are. At its heart it is love aching for the beloved, the bride refusing the full table because the Bridegroom’s chair is empty, choosing hunger for him over satisfaction without him. The truest fast is not grim self-punishment but yearning, the soul’s way of keeping its longing for Christ awake and sharp, of not letting the comforts of the present dull its desire for his return.

And so the fast leans forward, toward the day when fasting shall be no more, when the Bridegroom comes again and the long betrothal ends in the marriage supper of the Lamb, and there is no more hungering, for the desire of every heart is present at last. Every true fast is a rehearsal of that longing and a reaching toward that day. We fast now because he is not yet here in fullness; we shall feast then because he is. The hunger is for a season only, and the season is bounded by his coming.

So examine your fasting, and all your outward disciplines, by this word. Do you keep the shell and lose the kernel, afflicting the body while the heart stays hard and the hand stays closed? Then rend the heart, and not the garments. Let your fasting loose the inward bands of wickedness, the sins that master you, and open the hand to the burdens of others, and be kept secretly before your Father and not for the eyes of men. This is the fast that God has chosen, and to this fast, and not to the empty one, he has promised his light and his answer and his unfailing spring. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, he asks, that ye break every yoke?