A Meditation
for the Season of Lent

Fr Geofrey Kirk | Lent 2003

The Gospel of Mark 2: 18-22

There is something smug about proverbs. They are after all, used against us by people convinced that they are wiser than ourselves.

A stitch in time saves nine, says the seasoned housewife to the young unmarried mother; Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves, says the prosperous man to the spendthrift. Waste not want not, says the landowner to the peasant.

The Old Testament has a rich vein of what is called wisdom literature: The Book of Proverbs itself, Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus. Jesus, I suppose must have been brought up with that rich proverbial literature in household and school and synagogue. As a good Jew he would learn the proverbs, some of them by heart, and have absorbed the heart of them , the proverb of all proverbs: that 'the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom ; all that do so make themselves wise'.

Small wonder then that Jesus's own teachings are full of proverbial sayings. 'He who is not against us is for us'; 'the first shall be last and the last first'; 'many are called, few are chosen'. But there is about Jesus's proverbs some thing new, taut and strange.

Take the proverbs in today's gospel. 'No one sews unshruken cloth on an old cloak'; 'No one puts new wine into old wineskins'.

The sayings themselves were probably old hat - common places of the market place in Capernaum. It is the context into which Jesus puts them which renews and refreshes them.

The basic dispute in today's gospel is about fasting. It is addressed to the Pharisees who criticised Jesus and his disciples: it is also addressed to us as we prepare for our own Lenten fast.

The question they ask is: why do your disciples not fast? The question which Jesus answers is quite a different one: what is fasting for? And he answers, by-the-by, an even more fundamental question: what is religion, what is faith for?

The heart of Faith, the still centre of the religious life, says Jesus, is a relationship with him, the love affair of bridegroom and bride. His disciples do not fast because they are in the intimate presence of the bridegroom himself, their lives, to use imagery from one of his parables, is caught up in the wedding banquet. Heaven and earth, God and humanity have wedded each other in him. The disciples are the wedding guests, witnesses to the consummation of all creation.

But all love is bitter as well as sweet.

The love affair between divinity and humanity is no exception. The bridegroom will be called to show his love by laying down his life for his bride. Then the bride and wedding guests will tear their wedding garments and weep and fast for him. Only his rising from the dead can staunch their tears; only the eucharist can prolong the wedding feast into eternity.

True religion then, is to love Jesus and to love others for his sake. But that love will prove demanding. Fasting is not a mere religious duty, it is an expression of relationship. The husband loved his wife to the point of giving his life for her. He put his body in the way of the bullets intended for her; he walked into the gas chamber in her place.

For her part, life has been utterly changed by all that. To be the object of such self-sacrifice is to be simultaneously aware of one's own worth and of one's own unworthiness. She has to do something - however inadequate - to show that she is humbled to receive such love and obligated by it. He died for her; and so her whole life is the living memorial of him.

But of course, in this cosmic love story the Cross cannot and does not, have the final word. The bride mourns and rejoices at the same time - mourns the death and rejoices at the resurrection. The Christian calendar, the cycle of feasts which takes us from one year to the next comes to its climax, as did the life of Jesus himself in the Pascha, the celebration of both. In the Sacred Triduum, the Holy Three Days of the Easter festival, we mourn to renew our rejoicing. We fast so that we can feast. We break our fast with the bread of life, in the eucharistic banquet which is the wedding feast of the Lamb, eternal, continuous.

To-day's gospel asks you to take fasting seriously: really to do some serious self-denying this Lent. But not for any trivial purpose.

Slimming is the modern version of fasting. It is all about image and the realisation of the ideal self. The ladies who attend the Wednesday slimming club in my Parish Hall, nurture their obsession on copies of OK! and Hello! and other magazines with exclamation marks in their titles. They are reaching after a glamour which is sadly beyond their reach. (They don't even appear to get much thinner either as a matter of fact).

Our fasting should not be focussed on the image of ourselves. It is our response to His passion; an expression of love for the lover of our souls.

The fasting of the Pharisees who questioned Jesus was quite a different matter. Poor Pharisees, they get a bad press in the New Testament. Mathew Mark and Luke, in particular, have it in for them big time,. But we should not despise them. They fasted out of solidarity with the people of God, and in obedience to his Law. That is not enough says Jesus - just listen to what he has to say in the gospel on Ash Wednesday. But would that more modern day Anglicans could rise even to the level of mere Pharisaism. But, of course that too can become self-regarding. 'They like,' says Jesus caustically, 'to be seen of men to fast.'

But if our fasting is an act of love, it will be different. It will be deep, internal, private, like a shared reminiscence. It will be as intense as grief, and as spontaneous as laughter. It will be centred upon the Easter expectation to meet him again face to face, and never to be separated from him.

These proverbs of Jesus then, with which we began, are anything but smug. Nor are they old hat. They are not the out-pourings of some antediluvian wisdom which is, in the cant phrase, 'irrelevant to the modern age'. They do not reprove ; they challenge. They are as topsy-turvy as the librettos of WS Gilbert. If you put them into action, then what you get is not what you expect; and thank God, not what you deserve.

The Easter for which Lent is the solemn preparation is not the commemoration of an event - as though the empty tomb were a fact of history, like the battle of Waterloo or the accession of Queen Victoria. That is the mistake of the Pharisee, who makes religion into an artefact. The resurrection of Jesus is THE event, which breaks open the bulwarks of eternity. Easter Day is not the Sabbath, a part of the repetitive cycle of days and years in a world which is running down like a tired clock; it is the eighth day which breaks the cycle. It is the day on which the God who made the world on the first day, remakes it more perfect than it was at the beginning. 'Behold!', says the Jesus of Revelation to John in his island prison. 'I set all men free! I make all things New!'

We are to fast, says Jesus in our gospel today, so that we can be renewed in the great hope of our calling; so that bridegroom and bride can be reunited at the end of the pantomime, so that the new wine can be poured into new skins by the Lord of the Banquet who, you will remember, kept his good wine until last. And then, if you will pardon my French, there were firkins of it.