"THE DIVINE SPONSORED SLIM-IN"

A sermon preached at St.Luke’s, Queen’s Park Brighton on the 1st Sunday in Lent 2020 

So Jesus went into the desert and, among other things, became ravenously hungry for the very good reason that He didn’t eat anything. Why didn’t He?

Well, fasting was certainly a strong element in the Jewish religious tradition in which He’d been brought up but there must be more to it than that.

Perhaps it was necessary in order for Him to do His job properly that He should feel what it was like to undergo every type of human experience.

That’s what I once heard an aspiring young film director fresh out of film school claim he needed to do before he could make a meaningful film.

That’s pretty trivial. Jesus starving in the desert is deadly serious.

We’re talking about the Son of God no less, whose mission on earth was to be our divine redeemer, to reconcile us to God, to bring about the atonement between God and man.

And there was no way He could do that without identifying completely with us, without being fully human.

Well it is certainly a very human sensation to feel hunger but you and I would normally react by making sure we have something to eat fairly quickly. It is quite a different thing to deliberately starve yourself.

Why on earth would we do that? Why is that part of the human experience to be embraced by the incarnate God?

Several reasons in fact.

Firstly of course, and tragically, millions of people in the world today (this very morning) go hungry because they have no food.

That means they starve involuntarily, through no fault of their own. But they don’t have  to.

The  shocking fact is that these people go hungry not because there is no food but because, although there is plenty of food in the world,  they have no access to it thanks to the selfish greed or, at best, the negligent incompetence of the rich nations.

It is right to be reminded of the plight of the so-called “third world” but think about what also happens within our own country.

In Britain, in Brighton indeed, there is a significant underclass sleeping rough on the streets who go hungry simply because, through a chapter of misadventures for some of which they may or may not be themselves to blame, they do not have the money to buy the food.

They don’t wish to starve. But apart from the homeless and the down-and-outs,  it is fair to say that any fasting on these shores is by choice. A variety of choices, in fact.

In this superficial, image-conscious society, many subject themselves to faddy diets out of vanity.

Admittedly, the net result is more pleasing to the eye than clinical obesity from a surfeit of double cheeseburgers. But, you know, in the end the rich, mirror-gazing society hostess who likes to see herself “starved to perfection” (in Tom Wolfe’s memorable phrase from “The bonfire of the vanities”) is just as pathetic a victim of low self-esteem as if she still guzzled cream cakes.

But there can be more morally serious reasons for fasting in the prosperous West.

Sometimes political prisoners (I will never forget the I.R.A man Bobby Sands) go on hunger strike and are prepared to starve themselves to death out of dogged belief in the furtherance of their cause.

And sometimes the religiously inclined deliberately go hungry in order to get closer to Jesus’s own vision and experience, just as He has got closer to us by sharing our bodily needs. 

Many Western Christians can and do fast in a gesture of solidarity with those starving by necessity and default in the third world, in order to signal to the World Trade Organisation or the international banks that some individuals respect and take seriously the poverty which oppresses their distant neighbours  in Christ.

Similarly, people are often sponsored to lose weight by fasting in order to raise money for charitable causes.

I fondly remember an erstwhile priestly colleague, who at his stoutest was capable of balancing a baby baptism candidate on his stomach. He later undertook a sponsored slim-in at his next parish and even bravely allowed the Church Times to put the spotlight on his progress each week.

But apart from such spectacular feats, there remains the possibility that some of us (not me, I fear – asceticism and austerity were never my strong point) might be planning a more modest version of the Lenten tradition of fasting. A gentle regime of eating fish on Fridays, skipping the odd meal on other days, cutting out chocolate etc is fine as long as pride doesn’t creep into it.

But a word of warning to anyone geeing themselves up to be more masochistically enthusiastic about it:

Serious fasting has significant psychological implications.

Physical privation is a long-proven medical cause of mental stimulus. Possibly even spiritual stimulus.

But excessive fasting can unlock all sorts of desires (the good, the bad and the ugly) normally kept dormant by the stomach being comfortably full.

So there is a risk that the light-headed feeling induced by lack of food could lead in the wrong spiritual direction. It might bring cravings for, and fantasies of - let’s say - earthly fame, power and possessions. Like the knack of turning stones into bread. Or looking at a panoramic view and dreaming of owning all the land. Or throwing yourself off a tower to prove that God won’t let you hit the ground.

AHA! Yes,. now we’re back to the text of the gospel.  You see, those were the hallucinations experienced by Our Lord, brought about by food deprivation.

I’m not suggesting He wasn’t tempted by the devil. Of course not.

I’m saying that is how the devil tempted Him - not literally dragging Him from one vista to the next but putting these visions into His head as He lay bodily weakened.

And so we come full circle.

We see at last the true and the best possible reason why Our Lord went into the desert to undergo the human experience of starving Himself:

HE KNEW THAT EXTREME FASTING WOULD UNLOCK VISIONS AND TEMPTATIONS AND HE UNDERTOOK TO ENDURE THESE TO SHOW US THE RIGHT AND THE WRONG WAY.

The hunger for God and the hunger for false gods are both liable to be unlocked by the changes in the metabolism which are induced by fasting.

But we know that such experiences need no longer hold any terrors for the human race. Their dangers have been exposed.

Jesus the man has already been there, done that, got the proverbial T shirt.

I suppose we could actually say, without blasphemy, that His Heavenly Father sponsored Him to do it for the very worthy cause of you and me.

And ever since those gruelling forty days and nights, with His example before us, by faith and by prayer we now know we can follow Him anywhere. Not only into the desert of temptation but up on to the cross of suffering and through death to the glory of resurrection.