Fasting and Feasting as Aspects of the Law and Gospel

Some of the most poignant records that survive about the captivity of Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer (before they were burned at the stake) concern the food they were given. Their gaolers, in the custom of the time, were private contractors in Oxford. Accordingly, they billed for all the food they served to these rather eminent prisoners in great detail. 

One of the striking aspects that emerges is the very careful way Latimer, Ridley and Archbishop Cranmer observed (and were allowed to observe) the liturgical seasons in regard to fasting,  and most especially how carefully they observed Lent.

It is an interesting and distinctive feature of Anglicanism, and one which sets it apart from most of the Christian traditions influenced by the Reformation (aside from many Lutherans) that the Church of England has always observed Lent. It did so before, through and after the Reformation, and so therefore have Anglicans around the world too.

Queen Elizabeth I, and her more deeply Protestant brother Edward VI, both observed Lent carefully and urged their subjects to do likewise. All of this might seem in tension with the classic Reformation emphasis upon salvation as accomplished through faith alone which stressed that it is therefore not at all something that could ever be “earned” by good works and mortification.

In the words of “An Homily of Good Works: And First of Fasting” in the Second Book of Homilies commended by the original Books of Common Prayer: 

“it is of the free grace and mercy of God, by the mediation of the blood of his Son Jesus Christ, without merit or deserving on our part, that our sins are forgiven us, that we are reconciled and brought again into his favour, and are made heirs of his heavenly kingdom…. Good works then bring not forth grace, but are brought forth by grace…”

Yet the Sermon goes on to argue nonetheless that: 

“St. Paul… teacheth that we must do good works for divers respects: first, to shew ourselves obedient children unto our heavenly Father, who hath ordained them, that we should walk in them; secondly, for that they are good declarations and testimonies of our justification; thirdly, that others, seeing our good works, may the rather by them be stirred up and excited to glorify our Father which is in heaven… ”

But there were other Anglican defenders of Lent who offered a yet richer justification. Of these, Richard Hooker is particularly notable, for he argued that the warrant for feasting and fasting is that they teach us rightly to express the two central affections of Christian life, namely joy and grief. 

As he puts it, the church, as “the most absolute and perfect schoole of all vertue” teaches us in feasting how rightly to orient our joy toward God so as to make our “rejoicing to be in him whose mere undeserved mercie is the author of all happiness.” While, by contrast, through fasting, we have an opportunity to practice a holy grief which is nonetheless combined with trust in God’s mercy. For “our selves we condemn as the only causes of our own miserie, and do all acknowledge him [God] no lesse inclineable then able to save.” Thus, can we learn to grieve rightly in recognizing that human sinfulness is the ultimate cause of all our various griefs and to throw ourselves on God’s wholly gratuitous, undeserved mercy towards us.

There is a yet further way to explore all this, that being through the contrasting concepts of law and Gospel.  

On the one hand, law is a matter of God’s commands: namely the way that God enjoins us to live with love towards God and neighbor. Nonetheless, we know from experience that whatever these commands are, our fallen nature bides that we cannot keep them. So, being confronted with these commands and our failure to uphold them then serves to convict us of our sinfulness and our incapacity by our own efforts, ever those be acceptable to God. Nonetheless the Gospel then provides the solution, which is through God’s free grace to us in Jesus Christ. Hence, while we cannot act rightly or come to God by our own efforts, the Father not only freely creates and sustains our earthly life, but also freely saves us by sending His only begotten Son to live and die for us, and by counting as righteous all who trust in the Son, our Lord, for salvation. 

All this connects with feasting and fasting since, for Hooker, fasting trains us to see our griefs as fundamentally stemming from sinfulness, so that we realize our sin and look to God for help. Thus is it that our human experience of grief is formed, in accord with the convicting function of the law, so that we can rightly grieve as we realize exactly what the law shows us, namely, that we are indeed sinners in need of God’s help. Feasting, by contrast, enables us to see all our joys as stemming from the Gospel, for all the blessings of our lives are gifts from our gracious God related to his gift of himself in Christ Jesus. 

In sum, all our griefs relate to the sinfulness that the Law shows us – and all our joys relate to the free grace of God that the Gospel proclaims. 

But why then might and should we engage in regular, public fasting, such as during Lent? Why is it not enough to invite Christians to fast on their own when so moved as an act of humility before God? Hooker’s answer is that, by themselves, private acts of fasting are likely to be insufficient – for we do not like to grieve our sins. We do not like to connect our griefs to our sinfulness and will try hard to avoid mourning our individual wrongdoings.

Then again, Hooker seems highly prescient in seeing that there is such a thing as corporate sin too which is “common to the whole societie,” which ought therefore to be grieved together “at some time in a solemn maner.” For these reasons, Hooker believes, it is very appropriate for churches to set aside regular times of common fasting. 

Lent is thus, not about proving our holiness by feats of asceticism or punishing ourselves to earn divine favor, but rather it is about reckoning with and grieving the reality of our individual and corporate sins and taking stock of the ways that our failure to love God and neighbor have diminished and harmed our lives – and about acknowledging that, although we are incapable of rescuing ourselves from the mess we have made, God both can and will save us if we will but believe and allow him to do so.

This we can help ourselves to see through mortification and fasting, on the one hand, which is to say in multiple senses before Easter – while upon realizing the accessibility of salvation through Christ, we have every reason to celebrate a great Feast upon the occasion of Easter and the season of rejoicing that follows.

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector