What can be more
absurd than the fast, in a religion which boasts of having given the
man the freedom? How can you name yourself free, when you have to
refrain from the things you like, when you must do what you don’t
want! The fast is the abstinence not only from the food, but also
from the bodily pleasures. How not to see in this an outrage to the
noblest instinct that the man has – the freedom?
If the fast is
an obligation, than the Gospel is a masterpiece of the absurd’s
literature. Understanding this, the Protestants decided to renounce
to the fast. However, despite the number of quotations brought from
the apostle Paul or from the words of the Saviour Himself, the spur
to fasting is like a thorn in the flesh of that who at least scarcely
knows the Holy Scriptures.
All righteous
before Christ fastened. The fast was precursory to the meeting with
God or to a revelation. Moses climbed up the mountain after forty
days of non-eating and thus spoke with God. The New Testament is not
at all different, it begins with a fastener - John the Baptist. Christ
Himself had fastened before having begun to preach. Thus, we cannot
leave away the fast, departing from some biblical verses, when even
those who pronounced them were great fasteners; it seems to me it
is more decent to doubt our understanding ability of those verses.
Christ was once
asked why his disciples don’t fast (Matthew 9, 14). From this
many have understood that the disciples and the Saviour Himself were
gluttons (Matthew 11, 19). But this event, actually, discloses us
the fact that the disciples and the Saviour were all the time starving.
This can be also seen very well from the conflict that they had with
the Jews, because the disciples ate some ears on Saturday. The disciples
were so busy with the preaching that they used to forget to eat and
the fact that they picked ears, shows how hungry they were and that
they were wont to eat here and there. The Saviour however did not
eat with them, the reproach being only for the disciples; He was the
model of fasting.
The fact that
the disciples used to eat little, is emerging from the scene of multiplying
the bread, where we find out that they had only five loaves of bread
and two fish. Although they were far away from the locality, in an
impossibility to buy food, they are ready to give this little to the
crowd (without knowing that it will be multiplied), which reveal us
that they were accustomed with the hunger more than the ordinary men.
Hence, the Saviour and the disciples fastened, but they did not count
the days as the Pharisees did. To their question though, Christ, tell
them “Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while he
is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken
from them; in those days they will fast” (Luke 5 , 34-35). “Those”
days when the bridegroom was taken away, are Wednesday, the day of
betrayal and Friday, the day of crucifixion. In the year 50, the apostles
convoked a synod in Jerusalem, where they established for the believers
the fast in these days.
Thus, the Protestants
have understood well that the fast is not an obligation. The forced
fast, has no motivation as any gratuitous and meaningless thing. This
is not, however, a reason to blame the fast. The fast should be understood
in all its nobility, as it is the supreme manifestation of the human
freedom. In such a way the first Christians understood the fast, a
meaning that is lost nowadays. “To eat – writes St. Efrem
Sirius in the IV century- belongs to the laws of the nature, but to
fast belongs to the freedom”. Who can boast that he is eating
only because “he wants
this”? No, you eat because you cannot not to eat, your will
results from the natural instinct, not from the freedom. Of course
there is neither an evil in this, nor a sin, but there is also no
virtue. The virtue is only the fruit of the freedom. “Any labour
which is not from a perfect freedom – farther Sofronie Saharov
(+ 1993) was saying - can not have an eternal value”. The fasting
is the man’s free choice of a nobler life, which has something
in it from the realities of eternal life, where there is no excrement
anymore.
„Timpul”,
28 January 2003
