Holy Angels Anglican Church
Homily for the Second Sunday in Lent
(February 25, 2024)
St. Matthew 4:1-11
Faith & Fasting
Given by: The Rev. Fr. Vincent J. Varnas
From today’s Gospel reading, we see how the Canaanite woman expresses her faith in Jesus by saying: “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; ...” (Matt. 15:22). And, similar to what we learned on Quinquagesima Sunday from the story of the Blind Bartimaeus, this Canaanite woman also recognizes Jesus as the Messiah. Accordingly, she demonstrates her faith.
During this Lenten season, we are obliged to fast. I won’t go over those details again, today, as I covered them in last Sunday’s homily.
However, many of us have at one time or another wondered about the connection between fasting and faith. And that is the topic for today’s homily.
Jesus tells the Canaanite woman: “It is not meet [i.e., fitting] to take the children’s [i.e., Israel’s] bread and cast it to the dogs”. Disarmingly, the woman replies in apparent agreement: “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table” (Matt. 15:27), as if healing the Canaanite woman’s daughter of vexation by a devil were just a crumb from the table of the Israelites.
You can see where I am headed with this.
The “children’s bread” represents Christ’s primary mission on earth to heal the rift between God and His people, the Israelites, and that was prefigured throughout the Old Testament with the promise of a Messiah. Thusly, Jesus came first to fulfill the promise of the prophets found in the Old Testament.
Although Jesus is setting His priorities, by her penetrating words, the Canaanite woman effectively prefigures His broader mission to bring salvation to all people on earth by atonement for their sins.
By temporarily withholding this “bread of life” from the Gentiles, Jesus is effectively declaring a spiritual fast, as we are obliged to wait in line, as it were, for healing. Yet, faith trumps fasting, and so Jesus heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter and exorcises the devil that has possessed her. “And her daughter was made whole from that very hour” (Matt. 15:28).
Faith and fasting, they go together like a hand in a glove. Fasting is like our cold hands on a winter’s day, we are seeking a need within ourselves. Consequently, the “glove of faith” brings the warmth of God’s presence to those spiritually cold hands.
And that is the purpose of fasting; not to inflict pain or suffering upon oneself for its own sake, but rather to enable us better to reach-out with the gloved hands of faith and touch the face of God!
Thusly, faith is strengthened by fasting. And when we fast, we bring ourselves closer to God.
During this Lenten season we are obliged to fast and abstain as a penitential gift to Jesus, Our Savior, and to help us better to understand why it was necessary for Jesus to have made atonement for our sins.
Fasting is about humility, vulnerability, and weakness.
St. Paul remarks: “[Jesus’] ... strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Cor. 12:9-10). St. Paul might have added to that list of infirmities: the physical weakness that comes from fasting, for there is both weakness and strength in fasting. And with weakness comes humility. And with humility comes the strength of our faith in God.
Faith is belief in God and His love and mercy and trusting in His wisdom and providence. Thusly, our wisdom grows as we embrace awe and reverence for the power of God’s glory. And this is what we call, “fear of the Lord”.
Putting together both faith and fasting, we see clearly that the weaker and more vulnerable we become by fasting, the humbler we also become. And the humbler we become, the easier it is for us to find that faith which God is constantly offering us as His freely-given and unmerited gift of love.
But we need God’s help by His graces in receiving faith and in effectively using the road-map of fasting to find our faith in Him, for our faith is the means for finding God’s presence in our lives.
From the Book of Psalms, we hear: “I put on sackcloth and humbled my soul with fasting; ...” (Ps. 35:13).
Sackcloth is made of goat’s hair and was often made into a shirt and worn by penitent sinners who believed in self-fladulation as a means of suffering for God because a hairshirt is VERY scratchy and irritable to the skin. “Self-fladulation” is self-punishment. Recall that St. John the Baptist wore a camel’s hair shirt and went into the wilderness or desert, crying out to sinners: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Matt, 3: 3-4), thus calling for repentance.
With repentance we are not only acknowledging and confessing our sins before God, but also recognizing and expressing our weaknesses and becoming humble in the sight of God. Then can God’s graces of strength to resist sin freely enter into us. “For when I am weak, then am I strong”!
Most of us do not wear hair shirts on bare skin during this penitential season of Lent, yet we do repent of our sins, not by the self-fladulation of wearing sackcloth, but by withholding some of the material pleasures of life in order to make ourselves more receptive to God’s presence among us.
Historically, self-fladulation was a practice in the 13th and 14th centuries, as a means of penance made in atonement for sins and for seeking God’s mercy to be given during the Bubonic Plague.
In Europe, flagellants would process through the town’s streets whipping themselves on their bare backs as an offering of sacrifice to God in order to obtain His blessings for the eradication of the Plague among the people of that town or village. And by the 14th century the penitential act of self-fladulation found its way to England. However, “[its] ... stay in England was apparently short, and, few recruits having been made, they [the fladulents] returned whence they had come. [and] in 1349 [the Church condemned the practice]”
Sacred Scripture condemns the practice of self-fladulation. Here’s what St. Paul says about any such acts: “What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore, glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Cor. 6:19-20). It seems we have forgotten that admonishment in these present days, as some of us see no evil in transgender surgery, illicit drugs, assisted suicide and abortion, just to name a few abominations condemned by God.
So, sackcloth is out, but ashes are left for us to wear on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday to commemorate the beginning of the Lenten Season. It is more for our prayerful relationship with God, humbly acknowledging that, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”, than it is for others to see. Thusly, we bear those ashes in humility; not to impress others with the depth of our faith, but only to convey to others that God is truly among us and that we were created by Him from dust and that all of us are mortal.
“God is God, and I am not!!” Humility in the presence of God is a virtue that everyone should and must make a part of our lives, lest we become prideful, as did Adam and Eve!
So, we are left with fasting as a means for penitential preparation for Holy Week and Easter. And by our faith, we can embrace fasting as a blessing from God that helps to build-up our right relationship with Him in all that we do.
Fasting is one of the works that is a sign of faith and not a means for acquiring faith or working one’s way to Heaven!
Yet, we build our faith by fasting as we open ourselves to His will and offer penance to Him for our sins. But we are not expected to fast until it hurts!
From my Mt. Angel Seminary experience, I learned that our relationship with God the Father is as children and their parents. Indeed, the term “Abba”, “Father” or just “Daddy” was communicated to us as an apt description of our familial relationship to God.
God loves us and expects our reciprocal love in return. Now, love by its nature is giving of self. And that is exactly what Jesus did in His suffering crucifixion for the atonement of our sins. The term “agape” is often used to describe that form of love, as opposed to simple affection. And while all that is true, I think our love of God must include affection in order to have meaning and purpose in developing and maintaining that right relationship with God that He expects from us when we are told to be holy as He is holy. Otherwise, we are reduced to obeying coldly His commandments and holding Him at arms’ length as if He were a draconian monarch whose love for us is doled-out in minuscule portions only to those who “kowtow” to His whims and fancies. That may be the illusion of some overly zealous religious fanatics but is far from the reality of the real God in Heaven.
Thusly, when we fast, we should never do harm or injury to ourselves. Rather, we create an empty place in our worldly lives, that produces a needful desire to be filled and we fill it with God and the warmth of those affectionate feelings toward and about Him that brings Him closer to us as “Abba” our “Daddy”.
Earlier, I said that fasting is about vulnerability. Thusly, opening ourselves through fasting makes us vulnerable and is an act of faith.
We become vulnerable to God’s will for us. We become vulnerable to offering Him our unqualified love and obedience. We become vulnerable to embracing fasting as a blessing for us and as a gift to God. We become vulnerable to strengthening our faith. “For when I am weak, then am I strong”!