This week it’s another Cranmer special, and another collect that helpfully avoids a pitfall in how fasting can go wrong. A good friend of mine once said this prayer contains almost the whole theology of fasting, so without further ado, let’s get to it.

O Lord, who for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights:

Give us grace to use such abstinence,

that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit,

we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness and true holiness,

to thy honour and glory,

who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God,

world without end. 

Amen.

The collect opens by saying that the Lord fasted ‘for our sake’. That’s definitely not how Lent was explained to me when I was growing up. In popular culture, and I suspect to a large degree in the Church, the main, perhaps the only link between Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness and our observance of Lent was one of imitation. He fasted forty days in the desert so we fast forty days (or at least observe some kind of abstinence) in Lent. I think it’s hard to deny that there’s a kind of imitative logic to this collect, and to Lent as we observe it. But the thing the collect highlights first and foremost is that Jesus fasted ‘for our sake’.

This is, of course, true to the meaning of the fasting and temptation of Jesus in the Gospels. Most commentators will see a link between Jesus’ fasting and temptation in the wilderness and the forty years Israel spent in the wilderness. Here, the logic is not exactly one of imitation but of recapitulation. Jesus relives in miniature the life of Israel with one crucial difference. Where Israel sinned in the wilderness, giving in time and again to temptation, Jesus, paying heed to the words of the Prophet Moses, resists. In the Gospels, then, the temptation narratives are in part about the perfect sinlessness of the Lord.

Which is why it is counted among the saving works of the Son. Jesus fasting and temptation are mentioned among the things Jesus did by which he saves us in the BCP litany. Understood in this way, I think this collect gives us a distinctively Reformed contribution to our understanding and practice of Lent. Lent is a season which is almost literally* shaped by what Reformed theology has called the active obedience of Christ. The main event we associate with Lent should be a reminder of the spotless righteousness of Christ, imputed to us by faith for our salvation.

That surely has to have some impact on how we observe Lent. I mentioned the idea of self-examination quite a few times in my Ash Wednesday post. I think that’s an important aspect of Lent and important for gaining the kind of self-awareness that can lead to deeper repentance. But it must be self-examination properly formed by the active obedience of Jesus for our sake. If you do some kind of examination of conscience as part of your Lent discipline, why not begin it by praising Jesus for his spotless righteousness, which is yours in him? Not only might it make your examen even more convicting, as you see that it is not merely an abstract moral principle you have fallen short of, but it will prevent it from becoming a route to introspective despair.

The address of the collect reminds us of the fasting Jesus undertook for our sake. Nonetheless, in the light of that fasting, the request concerns our own. “Give us grace to use such abstinence…”

Fasting, as I alluded to last week, seems to me at least to get a bit of a hard rap these days. There seem to be so many potential pitfalls to fasting (we’ll be looking at yet another one in a moment) that many Christians seem to have concluded that it’s more bother than it’s worth. Fasting is, however, a part of Biblical spirituality, and was highly regarded not only by the early Church, but also by the Reformers. The Second Book of Homilies (think model sermons) produced for the Reformation contains one “Of Good Works and first, of Fasting”.

The homily gives a number of directions for how we might rightly use fasting and abstinence. Without reproducing the whole thing here, the homily draws a distinction between the outward aspect of fasting, that is to say, abstaining from food and drink, “yea, from all delicious pleasures and delectations worldly”, and the inward aspect, sorrow for sin and turning to God in prayer. It is crucial that the outward element is an expression of and a goad to the inward element. On its own, the homily says, abstinence is worthless at best and more likely a sinful attempt to justify ourselves before God.

In the light of this teaching, the next line of the collect needs to be read carefully to avoid a damaging misconception. It’s all too easy to misread it as ‘our flesh being subdued to our spirit’. That’s a common enough way of thinking about fasting – that through denial of bodily pleasure, we are sanctified as the spiritual part of us gains more influence over the body.

There are a number of issues with that as an idea. Granted, self control is an aspect of the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and self control as regards bodily desires is a key part of that. But our problems go much deeper than just that our bodies desire too much food, comfort and sex. In Paul’s use of the term, ‘the flesh’ indicates the whole person considered as fallen, our minds, thoughts, desires and decision making, as well as our bodies.**

What the collect actually says is ‘our flesh being subdued to the Spirit’. Spirit with a capital S if you look in a prayer book. We want our flesh, our whole fallenness, to be subdued to God’s Holy Spirit. I sometimes say ‘our flesh being subdued to your Spirit’ to make this point. The idea is that as we mourn our sin and humble ourselves before God in prayer, the repentance fasting embodies and enlivens will lead to us being renewed in God’s Spirit to become increasingly spiritual people.

Finally, the collect asks that the end result will be that we obey Christ’s ‘godly motions’. It’s a bit of an odd expression, but it means that we will follow him as he moves us to godliness. It’s a reminder that fasting never ends with fasting. It is part of a wider renewal of our lives in repentance and faith. Both the homily and the readings for Ash Wednesday point us to Isaiah 58, where fasting means an end to injustice and exploitation, a renewal in almsgiving, a revival in attention to worship and, after sorrow for sin, true joy in the Lord. May we all find such a renewal this Lent!

*Time periods, it seems to me, have shape only by analogy, but I mean the form that Lent takes.

**In general, I’m a little suspicious of broad brush condemnations of “Platonism” as it is a diverse set of philosophies, some of which have proven immensely helpful to theological reflection, but the kind of ‘soul good, body bad’ dualism you find in Plato in works like the Phaedo has been extremely unhelpful to the development of Christian spirituality.