Lent: a time to fast and reflect

Continued from last week. Although we commonly consider giving up something for Lent, like foregoing sweets or sodas, or doing without our favorite steaks or desserts for a few weeks, it may be hard for us in today’s consumption-oriented lifestyle to understand fasting. Why would one intentionally do without food day after day when we don’t have to do so? When plenty of food is available to assuage our bodily hungers, why not just eat it?

Jesus, in his wilderness retreat, showed us that spiritual values are important enough to warrant times of self-denial, times to set aside our hunger, times to focus on higher purposes, and time for training and equipping our commitments, decisions, directions and the resolves of our inner wills. Whereas in our lives of plenty we have great tendencies to focus on satisfying our cravings, obtaining our wants quickly and painlessly, avoiding doing without and avoiding waiting for our gratifications, Jesus taught and shows us that getting things is not what life is about, and that the genuinely fulfilling life often calls for self-denial and for meaningfully caring about others.

Jesus’s experience in the wilderness reminds us also that tough decisions and crucial stresses do not always come to us when we feel strong and thoroughly ready for them. Sometimes they afflict us when we are down, when we are vulner- able to discouragements, and when our will to choose the positive directions for life has become fragile and wavering. When Satan presented Jesus with temptations to use miraculous powers to avoid hunger, or to gain acclaim and attention by spectacular feats like jumping off the pinnacle of the temple, or to gain power and fame by serving the devil’s purposes and compromising his loyalty to the will of the heavenly Father, Jesus drew his responses from the scriptures: Man does not live by bread alone. You shall not tempt the Lord your God. You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve. Jesus was also helped by the angels’ ministries from above. Through the scriptures, through spiritual ministries from above, and through the indwelling of the Spirit, we, like Jesus, find the help which meets the need when our way takes us through the barrenness and roughness of the wilderness.